ZONE - A New Novel

After I finished with A UNIVERSE APART in the Spring of 2018 I took a break from writing. After a while I wanted to get back to creating something, but just couldn't settle on a project. I had thought about written a sequel to A UNIVERSE APART, but the book just didn't sell well and I felt I would basically be writing a sequel no one was asking for.

Over the summer my wife and and I bought a house and that took up most of my free time for a while.

Then in late September an idea hit me and I was off to the races.

It came from a few different places, I think.

I had been inspired in part to try my hand at novels after reading READY PLAYER ONE.

As we were setting up our house, we bought a big screen TV and when I would show off the new TV I would always play the opening car race from READY PLAYER ONE.

I think that got me thinking of the Oasis in the the book, this place where you could just disappear into. I was probably having some random thoughts about it, when at the same time I was seeing all these electric rental scooters all of a sudden turning up everywhere randomly on the streets of Portland.

Then I got this idea, what if these aliens doorways just started popping up randomly on the street and if you entered one of them you got transplanted to a new existence.

I thought this fantasy world would be too much like the Oasis in READY PLAYER ONE or even the Matrix in the MATRIX. Fantasy worlds have been done and I didn't think I could break much ground there.

But then I thought, what if the book wasn't about the actually fantasy world you go to, but the decision making that people make in deciding if they would go through one of these mysterious doorways into another existence.

It couldn't be that you could go in and out of this existence. No, that would make the decision too easy to go in and be too much like READY PLAYER ONE.

In this story, once you went in one of these doors, that was it. You were gone and you weren't coming back.

From that premise I build the story of ZONE.

As I write this blog post you can read ZONE for free on my website www.RusssellCorey.com.

It is also available as a ebook download on Amazon and paperback.

If are curious what a zone would look like you can watch a YouTube video I made with some pictures of zones.