Episode 95A – JD core – Magnified and Sanctified

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Overview

Dave is a grandfather and lives in Ohio. He loves mushroom hunting. He also does his own covers as he’s studied graphic arts plus working on becoming a school bus driver. If nothing else, it’s a lot of great research for his books.

His book, Magnified and Sanctified, uses Jewish religion even though he isn’t Jewish. The title is taken from a Jewish prayer and the story is inspired from the Jewish religion even though it’s a zombie novel.

Website

dave@thrillsandmystery.com

His Book

Magnified and Sanctified – JD Core

Favorites

Rex Stout – Nero Wolf

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to episode 95 of discovered wordsmiths today, I have David cor he goes by J D Corp. He’s written an extremely interesting book. It takes its title and some inspiration [00:01:00] from the Jewish religion and the Kadash Kadesh prayer for the dead. And it’s a zombie story. So it’s like a some Gollum’s in the Jewish culture.

But it’s an interesting discussion. Dave is a grandfather, so he’s not starting off right after school. He’s got a lot of great things he’s done in his life that he contributes to the stories. And he talks about some of those inspirations and some of the things that got them to write the story and it really fine.

He also has done a podcast. So we have a lot in common, a lot of good things to talk about. So if you enjoy interesting books, this is one of those that definitely falls in that category zombies that are inspired by the Jewish religion. So I’ll let Dave tell you more about it here. Today on discovered wordsmith.

I have Dave who goes by J D chord. Is that correct? J D or J David core on the writing? Yeah. Okay, great. Dave welcome to the podcast. How are you? Thank you very much [00:02:00] for having me right before Thanksgiving for us. Okay Dave, give everybody a little bit of background about you. Some things you’d like to do where you live, that type of thing besides your writing.

Okay. I live in Southeastern Ohio, which is like the least the most sparsely populated part of the state, basically. I I enjoy. Mushroom hunting. I’m a bit, I’m an avid mushroom hunter and that actually plays into my story. And I I write I’m a I was a graphic. I went to school for graphic arts.

Like I do my own covers and everything like that. And oh, great. That, that’s how I got background in that right now I’m studying to be a bus driver school bus. Okay. Because everybody needs a little bit extra income, and that they’re having, and they’re short, everywhere is short now.

So there was I’m a grandfather and I have four grandchildren that are by blood and a bunch of other grandchildren that are through marriage or Oregon, my girlfriend’s kids and et cetera. They’re all kind of all kinds of family. Gosh, [00:03:00] it gives me a nice, great I live up by KSU about eight miles out of KSU.

So yeah. I have a brother that lives up there and one’s worth. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Enjoying the nice freezing cold weather. It’s been cold. Tell us a little bit why you wanted to start writing. A lot of times people are just out of school or something, but you’re not, you’ve got grandkids.

So why do you want to write? I’ve been, my dad was an avid reader. He always had books in the house and he always talked about wanting to write a book and he never did. And when I was in high school I started writing a novel, just playing around with it, which we’ll never see the light of day.

That’s what we call a trunk novel. It’s never going to see the light of day, but but I got hooked with it on there, and I wanted to go to journalism school or not journalism school, but creative writing school. And there was no. But there was no money in it. So I didn’t do that, but instead I went to art school, which there’s no [00:04:00] money in that either.

And then just through the years I would write I would write for the newspaper or I would write for magazines or whatever. Just write a little story here and there and put them out and try and get them published. Got a through things published, just never really able to shake the bug.

So finally a few years ago when. Self publishing became so much more respectable and easy to do. I started up self publishing some mystery novels that I had written and from there just. Nice. Nice. And what’s the book that we’re talking about? The book that we’re talking about today is called magnified and sanctified which is a great title.

It’s from the mortars Kodesh Jewish prayer that they say when somebody has died at their funeral magnified and sanctified be as great name as though full line. And the book, the premise of the book is about every in the Jewish religion, the idea of the.

Taking God’s name in vain is and I’m not Jewish by the way.[00:05:00] But I have Jewish friends. And so the idea that taking God’s name in vain gets to the point where a lot of Jewish people who are like more Orthodox won’t even write the word God, they write G dash D. And so you can’t, you just don’t speak of God.

The book though has the premises that. Everybody, not just God, but everybody has a secret name. And, but the secret name, isn’t really a secret name. It’s a sound that if you hear it, you are you can be controlled like Rumpelstiltskin or beetle juice where Dr. Bombay you have to, you’re under the control thing, but the control is a loss of agency or Zomba fication.

So it doesn’t mean the whole. Okay. So you, you borrowed from the Jewish religion and you wrote a zombie novel. Where does that come from? That is not a mashup. I would immediately not even Jewish you’re Jewish, right? Yeah. The the idea for the book, I had watched a few. Zombie movies. I was never really the person who was like really interested in [00:06:00] zombies.

And then I saw a few really good zombie movies that had a different twist on things. And I started watching walking dead also around the same time. But the movies that I enjoyed were I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of. Yeah, it’s a really good, it’s a really good movie. And then less on farm or the Revenant, which is a movie that’s available on Netflix, I believe.

And on the other one was the girl with all the. Okay. So in, in all of those books, it was zombie ism, but it wasn’t what it wasn’t George Romero’s zombie. So it wasn’t you’re dead. And then you’re this virus or whatever overtakes you, which, by the way Romero like when he did it, it was.

Because that wasn’t what zombies were prior to Romero doing it. So it’s always, it’s an evolving idea. It was all of these are and where they come from as an evolving idea. So I had seen those movies and I thought I would like to do a zombie movie or a zombie book rather. As long as the story.

And I had also always wanted to do something like memento. I don’t [00:07:00] know if you’re familiar with the movie memento, but the stories told. And that’s what I wanted to do with the store. I ended up not being able to do that again. You’re talking about memento and writing backwards and the problems you ran into doing that.

So I did an outline where I started with the last time. I started with the last chapter. And then I moved backwards from the chapter just before and then the chat, what would happen just before? What would happen just before? And it just it was too much was being given away. As you’ve already backwards, you are learning too much about what happened before, because of that.

So it was like, there was no point in reading at the beginning because, so I rearranged it so that it was the second to last chapter is the very first. So then you find out how they got to there by going forward. And then in the last chapter, you find out what happens after what you were in the first chapter.

But there was a structural issue. And actually, I don’t know if j Tanner, he’s a fellow writer. He looked over my outline and he’s the one that clued me into why it [00:08:00] wasn’t working. I knew it was, I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I, I was like, this can be worked around. He says, no, you can’t.

Yeah, it was a nice spot. You wanted to do it. I understand that. I’ve done that myself. So what I do, I took this idea that I had for zombies. And then I took this idea that I had further the Momento thing, and I tried to do. Put them together and it didn’t work out, but it did work out as a good Giambi story.

There’s B story, I think actually works out pretty well. As far as like the idea of how the zombie ism came about and why, everything is what led to what? Nice. So what a major one to write this particular book. With the zombies and all that. Okay. Like a lot of people are asking me it was it the virus?

Was it the epidemic? Was it the pandemic? Because we’re living through this thing, that’s almost like us on the plank. And and it wasn’t, and it wasn’t the bath salt, Cedar we’re not in Florida. All it was I just had an [00:09:00] idea for for this idea about people being controlled by a sound was what was the idea.

And then I could have written it as a like a a story assigned a science-fiction complete, just playing science fiction novel. But the idea of telling it as opposed to POC was more, which most of the stories are. Post-apocalyptic that just read that, just Know felt better to me.

I dunno. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the woods but that sounds a bit like gun X-Files episode almost. That’s it. Okay. Yeah, it does. It just sounds like it could be an ex-felon. So what would you say is out there? What other books or movies or whatever would you say is similar to this? There, the whole, the walking dead, the premise of the whole premise of the walking dead.

And maybe the first season was very similar to this after that, when I started, like we’re doing in the community and everything it’s, and there’s none of that in this, but but if, as you’re saying that the Th the world war Z. There’s a little bit you could imagine a little bit world war Z in it [00:10:00] because it starts to spread over the world and they’re trying to it doesn’t actually follow it.

Doesn’t follow. The story doesn’t follow directly the the government, what the government, what the governments do are trying to do or wants to do. That’s not really followed in the story, but the Idea that that’s happening behind the scenes is in there. So it’s really just eroded, just follows two different.

Two different survivor groups. One is actually a single person who’s trapped in a state park. And the other one is a father and daughter who were trying to make their way towards the ocean because the government has promised that there are offshore sanctuaries. And so you have to go to yeah, because you have to get to that.

You have to get to the ocean and they’re trying to make a deal with. Which sounds a little bit like CarMax the road, if you’ve ever been, oh, you know what? I started to watch the movie version of that, but I couldn’t get

everybody. Yeah. But I see what you mean. I see what you mean. And I hear, I would actually [00:11:00] probably enjoy reading it. I think I might have to try reading that one because it’s different because. I don’t know if there’s any punctuation and everything’s in lowercase. So yeah, it’s weird in that regard.

It looks like he wrote a book. Okay.

This is a true or a. Independently published, not traditional, right. It’s independently published. I’ve, I have published traditionally before, but I don’t care for traditional publishing for myself. There’s nothing wrong with it as far as a way to do it. If you can get a traditional publishing deal and you’re happy with the fact that they’re going to control everything from that point on then that’s fine, but I can’t, it’s my baby.

And I want to be in, I do my own covers, like I said, so I know I want to get through. I understand. That’s the same thoughts I’ve had. So what did you publish before traditionally? I was, I worked for a humor magazine for awhile, so I published through a magazine. I worked for a newsletter company, so I published through them.

I [00:12:00] also wrote a science fiction novel, which was one of the first things that I ever it was like my second novel. My first novel is that Trump. It’s never going to see the light of day, but the second novel was a science fiction novel. And the premise of that novel was what if, and it came from a cartoon, it came from a far side cartoon, a life in hell cartoon, if you remember life in with, okay.

So it came from an old life in hell cartoon, where there was multiple panels and one of the panels, it was like things kids say, and it was winter when cars wrecked, they feel pain and stuff like that, this book questions kids would ask them. One of the questions was what if everybody knows a robot.

So I wrote that in the whole.

Of course, then you got the opposite. What if you’re the robot and don’t know it, right? Exactly. Both scifi. Good stories. So what type of feedback have you been getting from people on this book? Because I know if I. I Jewish title taken from, if I have the knowledge of that. [00:13:00] And then it’s a zombie book, I’d be a little like, what the heck is this?

So what are people saying? But he has actually commented on the title being like I used the, I used a prayer. I put the prayer where the line is from in an epigraph at the beginning of the book. So anybody who’s read it has seen the epigraph and nobody’s commented on it. Nobody they’re just, huh?

There’s an originally, I’ll tell you a little story. Originally. The title that I wanted was different. The original title that I wanted. Aligned from Ursula personal Kayla Quinn. And one of her stories she had this line, she said the name is the thing. And I thought that was a great title. The name is the thing.

And so I was going to. Make that the title and have an epigraph, but not the public domain yet. So I had to write to her estate and they said, sure, you can use it for X amount of dollars. That’s what I said. I’ll just change the title.

I didn’t know that close for. It sounds a lot like [00:14:00] Roth, fusses name of the wind. Oh, okay. His first big book. Oh yeah. This is what she wrote. Wasn’t a title. It was just a line from, it was a quote. It wasn’t a quote. Nice. Okay. If you had a choice, Dave, would you rather see your book as a TV show or a movie?

I think it would work really well as a Netflix limited series. Yeah. That seems to be really popular nowadays. It isn’t that crazy. Cause when we were younger TV movies, socked, and you only had. TV shows that were a whole season. You didn’t have these, you had mini series, which were only two or three nights, so totally different world that people want to have their stuff in streaming TV shows essentially.

Yeah. W the way I have the story broken down in chapters actually originally I released it as I wrote it in vellum and. Okay. Which in case anybody listening, isn’t aware of that as a new thing, that Amazon [00:15:00] is doing that I know you talked about with one of your people recently in your interviews, but it’s serialized fiction.

Yeah. The old Charles Dickens way, that’s all Dickens released. It’s not Christmas, Carol. So that’s why I did release it and serialized. Alrighty. And as I relisted that way, I realized that each of these, because you have to write when you’re releasing serialized, you have to write.

Chapters like each chapter. And sometimes you have to write the next chapter in such a way that if you were just reading it as a novel, you wouldn’t have to have this background again, but you do when you’re writing it serialized. So when I knew I was going to release it as a novel, so I didn’t want to go too heavy into that because I didn’t want to have to edit it all back out.

So it really plays well as a serialized piece for, and it would make a really great TV series that way, because like each of the beginning parts of the chapters where I’m saying, like giving a little bit information is like in our last episode, honestly, on. [00:16:00] No. So do you have any plans for sequels, a series with this w what I’m working on right now is actually a companion piece to it.

That the way that the story is set up, any other stories that are in the same universe would have to be. So they couldn’t be like that. And then this happened, or this happened before because it starts right there at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. And it ends right there at the end of the apocalypse.

So there’s no going forward and there’s no going back. But there are things set up in the, in this story that are could be contemporary side stories, if that makes sense. Yeah. And so what I’m working on now is a a concurrent novella that I’m going to use as a reader magnet.

Okay. And a reader magnet in case for anybody listening. Doesn’t know what that is, is a story that you give away to people to try to draw them into your own. It’s going to be a couple of weeks for this goes live. So if you get it done and send it over to me, I’ll include a link to it or whatever you want for the episode.

I don’t know. There’ll be [00:17:00] done. It’ll be done that quickly, but I’m going to try to get this the holidays. It’s hard to actually find time to write. Yeah, it can be. Yeah. All so Dave, tell us again, the name of the book and where we can find it right now. It’s an UN until December 31st. It’s in pre-release.

The story is called magnified and sanctified. It, so you can get it on Amazon and pre-release, you can get it. I’ve also released it through Smashwords. In pre-release to all the other locations, but it’s going to be NKU when it comes out on the 31st, which is a Kindle unlimited. Anybody who’s a subscriber Kindle unlimited will be able to get it for the 90 day period.

And then anybody who wants to go to Amazon can buy it during that 90 day period. Then after that 90 day period, which puts it into like March, I think, yeah, it’ll be wide. It’ll be available everywhere. Barnes and noble. Everywhere, but it will be in pre-order now on all those sites.

Okay. Now we’ll include some links. Do you have a website? Yeah. My Mo my website is [00:18:00] thrills and mystery.com. We’ll make sure to get a link to that, which is a name of my old.by. Okay. And we’re going to talk about that in a moment. So everybody hears there’s a quick sneak preview, but before we get off of the author’s stuff, Dave, do you have some favorite books and authors that you could recommend?

Oh, favorite books and authors? I loved. It’s going to sound funny cause I’ve been promoting this army story, but I’m more of a thriller reader than a horror story. And I also like science fiction a lot. My favorite authors have always been like as classic ASAM off Dan brown Michael Crighton w there’s there’s Michael Crighton, especially has a lot of science fiction and thrill in his writing.

One of my favorites. I also like Elmore Leonard. More of the crime stuff than the Western stuff. Chandler rec style rec stout is a favorite. I don’t know if, for sure it was breast out. He wrote the eight year old. Okay. Yeah. I’ve recognized the name. Yeah. Yeah. Cause my mystery novel series is actually [00:19:00] what they call pastiche of of the neuro Wolf novels.

But the neuro Wolf novels were pastiche of the Sherlock Holmes novels and Sherlock Holmes was pastiche of August in Japan.

Now we’re really going back. Oh, and where you live, do you have any favorite bookstores that you get? We don’t have any bookstores here anymore. There’s a bookstore across the river in Weirton. That is they sell books, but they also sell comic books and they sell candy and they sell ice cream.

So that’s a fun place to go. But other than that, like I have to go all the way to Pittsburgh for bookstores. There’s a, there, there is a. There was a like a used bookstore in downtown Steubenville, which is the county seat of Jefferson county where I live. And it’s so there’s that, but it’s just all moth-eaten, books that my thrift store books that, you know, And so if you like [00:20:00] your used bookstores, that’s fine.

And I do like books, you use bookstores and I like a used bookstore that also has a current releases on it. And that’s not what that is. Okay. All right. Before we finish up on talking about the book and move on to some other discussion, tell everybody why they should go out and get your book or pull up their Kindle and get their it’s a, if you like zombie stories, if you like science fiction, if you like post-apocalyptic all of those things are going to be.

To please you. The, I the premise of the story, the way I told the story, I keep it small. So it’s not this grand world that you have to learn. It’s only 60,000 words. So it’s cause something you can read over a weekend. It’s a great, it would be a great summary.

That would be a great a great Doug get holiday gift. So it’s it’s the. Zombie gift.

That was wonderful. Great. Thanks, Dave. I appreciate that. Telling us about the book and hang [00:21:00] on because we’re going to talk some author stuff.