Get to Know Sean Beaudoin

Welcome to Get to Know [Author], an interview series in which I ask questions that help us get to know the person behind the book. This week I’m featuring Sean Beaudoin, the author of The Infects! To learn more about The Infects, check out the book’s website! If you’re looking for a quick rundown, The Infects is about camp counselors turning into zombies, causing the campers to struggle to figure out how to survive. Knowing Sean’s writing style, I’m sure The Infects is full of dark humor.

Quickie Questions
Planner or pantser? Total seat of.
Ideal vacation spot? Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos.
Favorite place to write? Dive bar
Current jam? Tres Brujas by The Sword
Current read? “Life” by Keith Richards

Lengthier Questions
Three fun facts about yourself?
1. I once worked as a circus roustabout. Which mostly means being forced to deal with all the dirty stuff even the clowns won’t touch. A girl I was working with once fell off the tent rigging and I never saw her again. Don’t eat the food at the circus. Ever.
2. I’ve been collecting records (vinyl) since I was fifteen. I used to have about five thousand records, but then we moved and I sold a lot of them. It’s down to about a thousand now, just the ones I really love. Still, when I fire up my computer and have almost every recording I ever wanted on a terabyte hard drive, I feel like perhaps all those years I spent digging through tag sales and moldy store racks could have been more effectively utilized.
3. I’m too sexy for my shirt, too tall for my pants, and every bit as dumb as I look.

THE INFECTS is about a group of teens facing flesh-eating counselors. What’s your personal zombie apocalypse strategy?
Concrete firing posts at all doors and windows. Electrified lawn. Plastique-wired cats. Ammo hoarded on a strict scientific basis: at least three shotgun shells per pinto bean stacked in the pantry. Underground water source that bubbles up into living room. Steel roof. Head-to-toe Kevlar reinforced leather rocker outfit. No ex-girlfriends allowed through gate, no matter how much they beg. Enough batteries stocked to open a Duracell Outlet Store after humans re-take planet. The entire recorded output of Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, and the White Stripes. All friends armed with shoulder-mounted “De-Skuller 2000,” anti-Z weapon manufactured and built to my exact specifications. Candles. French poetry. Proximity to someone who knows how to remove an appendix.

You run an advice column of sorts on your blog. What advice would you give to Nero (other than, like, run)?
I would remind Nero that as he is a character of my own devising, and any and all predicaments he finds himself in are entirely my fault and likely to be not only unfair but sordid and designed for the furtherance of my amusement, he would be a stone-cold fool to take my advice in any capacity. If he insisted, I think I’d tell him it’s never wise to fall in love with a girl named after a flower.

Sean Beaudoin is the author of Going Nowhere Faster, Fade To Blue. and You Killed Wesley Payne. His latest book, an anti-zombie opus called The Infects, will be out fall 2012. Sean’s articles and short stories have been appeared in numerous publications, including the Onion, Glimmer Train, The San Francisco Chronicle, Opium Magazine, The Rumpus, The New Orleans Review, Narrative Magazine, Barrelhouse, Instant City, The Nervous Breakdown, Bayou, Another Chicago Magazine, Bat City Review, Redivider, Ballyhoo, and Spirit-the inflight magazine of Southwest Airlines. He loves to talk about himself in the third person.