Bio:JZ Murdock

From ISFDB
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This is an ISFDB biography page for JZ Murdock. It is intended to contain a relatively brief, neutrally-written, biographical sketch of JZ Murdock. Bibliographic comments and notes about the work of JZ Murdock should be placed on Author:JZ Murdock.

Please observe our policy and guidelines on biographies when editing this page.

For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.


JZ Murdock is a writer and screenwriter living in the USA's Pacific Northwest in Washington State. He has a degree in Psychology from Western Washington University. Web site: jzmurdock. Books are listed on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords and elsewhere.

His Horror comedy screenplay, "Gray and Lover: The HearthTales" is currently being marketed. He also has plans to work on two epic Martial Arts projects, hopefully pulling "Take Sensei", actor Steven Seagal into the project.

In 1990 he sold his first short story of "social horror" titled, "In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear" (the title being an homage to Isaac Asimov) to Haunts Horror Quarterly. Murdock later worked for two years with a film production company in the late 1990's as an "in-house writer". Finally in 2009, he decided to go back into writing seriously and he has made great strides in that endeavor, finishing several screenplays and books.

In 2010 he was contacted by author TL Mitchell (now of Knight Romance Publishing) about adapting her a paranormal romance novel, Dark of kNight to screen; which he did. Ensuing connections lead to his short Horror story "Gumdrop City" being published in "The Undead Nation Anthology" by Zilyon Publishing. Then "Rhonny Reaper's Creature Features Anthology" (Zilyon Publishing) accepted his short Horror story, "The Conqueror Worm", a short story the publisher said was "one of the best short stories I have ever read".

Murdock worked for many years through the 1990s as a Sr. Technical Writer for a special, high level development team at US West Technologies. He later worked elsewhere around the Pacific Northwest as a Network, Systems and Platform Administrator. Technical writing just got to be too boring but it was a fertile pursuit to learn a variety of necessary skills in the area of writing; a suggestion he got from Isaac Asimov in his first autobiography, "In Memory, Yet Green".

At Western Washington University, Murdock studied fiction and screenwriting as a minor, in the end receiving a B.A. in Psychology, in the Awareness and Reasoning division, focusing on Phenomenology and mental processes and systems. Having been selected for a special year long team scriptwriting and screenwriting class, he wrote his first screenplay titled, "Ahriman". It is about a Prince/Prophet from a desert planet who is extracted accidentally by Earth scientists and ends up helping fend off his own warrior like people from invading. Over the ten or so rewrites this screenplay has seen, it has grown to 181 pages. Whether it will be a miniseries or spread over three films, one of these days he is going to complete work on that project. But for now, it's shelved. Everyone has to have a long enduring pet project like that.

Books: "Anthology of Evil" (April 2012). "Death of Heaven" (May 2012)
Screenplays: "Dark of kNight", "Sealed in Lies", "Ahriman", "HearthTales".
Short stories: "In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear" (Haunts Horror Quarterly 1992), "The Conqueror Worm" (Rhonny Reaper's Creature Features Anthology 2010), "Gumdrop City" (The Undead Nation Anthology 2010).

Author's personal web siteJZMurdock.com Blog Web Site: Murdockinations.com
And he's only getting started.... <a target=_new href="https://plus.google.com/107030649773049511695/about?rel=author">+JZ Murdock</a> on Google+