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About the author:
JZ Murdock currently lives and writes from his home in Suquamish, Washington, nine and a half miles across the waters of the Puget Sound from Seattle. Located on several forested acres in the Pacific Northwest’s incredibly beautiful Olympic Peninsula, made famous for Twilight’s franchise’s locale of Forks, there is definitely something magical about this area that evokes creativity. He has two children, cool by almost anyone’s scale, who are recently adults and living and traveling on their own.
Over the years Murdock has seen non-fiction articles published in various periodicals on computers and the Internet. He first started writing Horror and Science Fiction short stories in college, but wrote what was his first and for many years his last, short story in tenth grade. Although he has been concentrating mostly on screenplays, he has had several short stories published recently in anthologies and has turned his attention to seeing more of his prose into the public eye.
Murdock fulfilled his contract with the US Air Force as a Parachute Rigger (and other work) and entered Western Washington University, graduating with a degree in Psychology and a Minor in Creative Writing. His Minor went into Fiction writing and led him to the Theater Arts department. There he was chosen from his first Playwriting class to a special year long, team-oriented, screen and scriptwriting class with seven other talented writers, comedians and actors; two of whom later started the Annex Theater in Seattle which is still alive and well.
Over his lifetime he has had training in a wide variety of disciplines from guitar, firearms, search and rescue, and Martial Arts where he studied Isshinryu Karate under the late, great Steve Armstrong Sensei. He began studying Aikido in college which has become his preferred Martial Art and way of life; along with the Buddha Dharma (Buddhism). He is currently on the Board of Directors for “the” non-profit, local Aikido dojo in his area.
Murdock has privately taught Fencing, Karate, Aikido. He has had amateur status for mycology, chemistry, model rocketry, archery and various other things. The main focus of his personal studies for many years was in the field of espionage. His favorite author in that area for fiction is Len Deighton; and in other areas includes Clive Barker, Loren Eiseley,
When Murdock left the military in1979 he sold his gun collection and bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 PC, the so called, “Trash80” with 16k of RAM memory. He then started college and for his Chemistry/Physics class, he wrote two programs to teach the Periodic Table using recognition and retrieval methods. He was the only student to completely learn the Periodic Table and did so by drinking beers and playing his programs every night until the test. Later during the 1980s he wrote and freely distributed the first dual-floppy disk, secured menu system for the PC in the Pacific Northwest.
Before graduating High School, he had flown and jumped from planes, climbed cliffs and spanned gorges on a rope; for training, had been dropped in the mountains alone and found his way out; become a SCUBA diver and Treasurer of his High School SCUBA club, the first in Tacoma, Washington; learned to surf in Cape May, New Jersey, and later surfed in Hawaii on several occasions, and skiing. His first time skiing, he was the only skier that day who went down a hill they called, “Terminator”. Of course, he didn’t know it was named that until he got to the bottom; amazingly, he made it down in one piece; however, he did slide backwards to a stop at the bottom, lying back on his crossed skies while his sister laughed hysterically.
Some of the jobs Murdock has had have been as a personal PC consultant, and for much of the 1990s, he was a Sr. Technical Writer; in one case on a very high level development team with US West (now Quest) Technologies. Over the years he has been a personal protection specialist having performed the job in Tacoma and Spokane, Washington, and New York City. He was the armed live-in security at an elite sixty-five stall, show-horse farm, on a dead end road (meaning some interesting moments had ensued with people with guns).
His most interesting personal protection job was protecting a “professional” dancer who was a witness to an organized crime murder. He protected her 24/7 for a week, keeping her mostly within a few yards at all times until she could leave town to fly back to her own home town in another part of the United States. Once, when a stranger pointed a rifle in his face from a few inches away and asked, “Who are you?”, his response was: “I don’t know,” followed by a curious smile. Oddly enough, he did not get shot. Please do not try this at home, as it’s all in the timing and delivery.
Works:
First published short story, “In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear”, a work of social horror.
In 2010, he had two short stories published in two Horror anthologies put out by Zilyon Publishing, with proceeds going to disease research.
He has worked with Author and Publisher TL Mitchell, having adapted the first novel of her popular paranormal romance series, “Dark of kNight” (Knight Publishing), which is currently being shopped around.
The actor Rutger Hauer once chose his short story, “Poor Lord Ritchie’s Answer to a Question He Knever Knew” in an international short story contest. Mr. Hauer said he chose his acting roles and the stories by which ones he thought had “heart”.
His own original screenplays are also being shown around, including “HearthTales”, a Horror comedy about two famous Horror writer friends, a beautiful literary assistant, a vacuous gold-digger wife, a damaged demon assassin, two Steampunk demon fighting women, a mercenary Voodoo Priest and the “true story” behind the death of Osama Bin Laden; soon to be at a theater near you-- well, one can hope.
The Undead Nation Anthology (Gumdrop City) – proceeds going to Cancer Research
Rhonny Reaper’s Creature Features Anthology (The Conqueror Worm) – proceeds going to Diabetes Research
Coming soon this February 2012 will be more short stories, as well as a book or two.
Murdock Online:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/jzmurdock
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JZMurdock
Amazon Author Central: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0040XMLNM
My blog: https://murdockinations.com
Screenplays: MovieBytes.com
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