Author Name: Lindsay King-Miller
Name of Publication: The Z Word
Where to find it: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739426/the-z-word-by-lindsay-king-miller/
Describe your work in 10 words or less for people who are just learning about it.
Queer found family fighting zombies and corporate politics at Pride
Can you talk a bit about your path to publication for this work?
It was a long process! My first book was sold in 2014 and published in 2016, and after that I had a seemingly endless slump in which I was desperately trying to sell a book but getting nowhere. My agent started sending out The Z Word in late 2021, and it was on submission for more than a year. I can’t remember how many rejections it collected and I don’t want to look it up! Quirk Books asked me to revise the draft significantly and resubmit it, and eventually bought the revised version. Then it went through several more major rounds of edits. It was a lot of work, and I won’t pretend I was overjoyed to do all that revising, but I’m really fortunate that I have a brilliant editor, Jess Zimmerman, who put so much time and care into making the book as good as it could possibly be.
Describe your writing process. Do you outline, plot and plan, or is your writing more organic?
I call my writing process “the chaos goblin method.” I start a story with nothing but vibes (and a carefully curated Spotify playlist) and write until I run out of steam. Then I look at what I’ve got so far and put together an outline for the rest. This is not a good method! I don’t recommend it! But it works for me.
Who was your favorite character in this work to write? Why?
I loved writing all of them, honestly–even the ones who are awful. But writing Sunshine was the most fun. I like to imagine that Sunshine is the main character of a totally different book happening at the same time, and their story just occasionally happens to overlap with Wendy’s.
Do you have a least favorite character? Anyone you ended up cutting from the story?
There’s a minor character in The Z Word who dies offscreen; I actually wrote a chapter about her death from the POV of the person who killed her, but we ended up cutting that.
Do you identify with your main character, or did you create a character that is your opposite?
I have some things in common with Wendy, but we’re also different in many ways. There are little bits of me in almost every character. I shouldn’t admit this, but I actually think the character I’m most like is Leah–I gave her some of my own faults, just turned up to eleven.
What was your favorite (or most difficult) chapter to write in this work? Why do you think that was?
The ending was the hardest, and the part that went through the most intense editing. It was challenging to figure out how to offer resolution without wrapping everything up too neatly. I also didn’t want to write a villain monologue, because as a reader they often bug me–I don’t buy that the bad guy would spell out every detail of their evil plan! So it took some creativity to offer explanations in a way that felt natural to me.
What has been the toughest criticism you have received as an author? What has been the best compliment?
Early in the editing process, my editor Jess described The Z Word as “aggressively bisexual,” and I treasured that. As for toughest criticism… I don’t know, nothing springs immediately to mind. That’s a lie; I once got a rejection on a poem that was so mean it still haunts me, but I’d like to pretend I’m tough enough to not take that kind of thing to heart.
What is your favorite line from your book?
I think it’s when Logan says “I know how to get into places that are closed,” and it turns out that what he means is throwing a rock through a window.
Is there anything you would like people to take away from your book?
There’s a lot of political commentary in The Z Word, but that all developed during the writing process. It wasn’t the reason I wrote the book in the first place. When I began, I just wanted to tell a fun, weird, gory story about a bunch of queers fighting zombies at Pride, and ultimately that’s what I hope people get out of it.
Lindsay King-Miller is the author of Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls who Dig Girls (Plume, 2016) and The Z Word (Quirk, 2024). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Baffling Magazine, The Deadlands, and numerous other publications. Her second novel This Is My Body is forthcoming from Quirk Books in 2025. She lives in Denver, CO with her partner and their two children.
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