Over on Twitter, just a couple days before I finished RAISE THE GIPPER! and put it up, the phrases "Zombie Reagan" and "Reagan Zombie" and the hashtag #zombieReagan underwent a population explosion -- from virtually none with just a few occasional flareups through April 16, to hundreds last Friday and thousands now.
Now, I wish I could claim credit for that, but there are two bits of harsh reality that say it's just a significant coincidence:
1) The historical bit: nobody but me and a dozen friends or so had any idea I was working a novel with a zombie Ronald Reagan in it,
2) the statistical semiotic bit: a quick map of the people following the discussions shows that they're in a large number of small, non-interacting networks.
For the record, I got the idea from people who wanted it propagated on
21 Feb, accepted the deal on 25 Feb, and began work on 3 March.
Apparently it's just time for Ronald Reagan to return from the grave, no
matter how rancid the resurrection, as a continuing joke about the obvious fact that the 'pubs really want Reagan back. Genres and themes in jokes do tend to cluster, both in traditional/oral and modern/internet communication, and my rather largish joke in the form of a 71,000 word ebook has happened to arrive in the middle of a cluster of similar stuff.
This leads to a slightly awkward but basically good situation. I've just opened the strawberry ice cream store right when everyone is talking about strawberry ice cream, which makes me look like a fly by night exploitive strawberry ice cream dealer, i.e. an opportunist. On the other hand, whatever may be done to my image for purity, there's no denying this is an opportunity.
So at the link above, you can find my announcement; read the free sample here. And as of this morning it's available on Amazon.You may all now, to the tune of "Howdy Doody time" if you are an old enough geezer or geezette, begin singing "It's Zombie Reagan time ..." ... get him before he rots! (any further). Your friends are all talking about zombie Reagan and you can be the life of the party.
