I'm an Active Duty Army soldier and I wrote GNASH over the course of about 2 1/2 years during a deployment to Iraq and at night after working during the day at the Pentagon. I think the long hours at the Building made me semi-crazy and that's why I decided to use that as ground zero for a zombie outbreak in the U.S. I decided early on in my writing to not go with a full-blown zombie apocalypse in this book and instead used large-scale, but still localized, outbreaks in Washington and later Indianapolis. I also decided to write a whole lot less gore than the genre typically has. As a soldier, I've seen a lot of bad things in our world that I wished that I didn't see, but that's a part of my job, and I don't want my readers to have that mental imagery stuck with them. We all know that little kids become zombies and that people die excrutiating deaths in the zombie apocalyps scenario, but I didn't want to write in-depth descriptions of that stuff for this book, I chose to go with a more subdued version of the violence.
Since I am in the military, GNASH ended up with a heavy military flavor. In fact, I've had a few people try to say we don't have certain equipment, like miniturized GPS tracking rounds that can be fired from a standard rifle, or the panoramic night vision goggles which allow a 120 degree field of view...but we do. Maybe not too many people know about them, but they are in the inventory and they're not classified by any means. If the naysayers had done their due diligence and researched the items in question, then they wouldn't have said anything.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the interview that I did for the online magazine "Zombie Apocalypse Monthly". The interview focuses on how my military service and experiences influenced my writing and takes a more in-depth look into the book and some of my influences in the genre.
Finally, here is a quick summary, from GNASH's book description listed on amazon: An ancient fundamentalist organization has chosen to lash out against its enemies by conducting several attacks simultaneously across the globe. One of the assaults unleashes a deadly virus within the Pentagon. When the virus mutates beyond anything the terrorists expected, the nation's capital is plunged into a violent zombie outbreak that threatens to infect everyone in the region. A desperate attempt to stop the potential global epidemic backfires as the infected survive a brutal pre-emptive strike and continue to wreak havoc on the human population when they reemerge from the bowels of the ruined city.