parker’s desk

So, after years of fer­ment­ing in my brain and months of bro­ken promises to ded­i­cate my time to it, I’ve finally started writ­ing my zom­bie story.  Not lit­er­ally just now, it’s slowly started to get to writ­ing with maybe a bit here, then a few weeks before another bit, etc.  Two nights in a row now, it’s been writing.

It’s really quite an inter­est­ing jour­ney for me this time around.  For my first series of sto­ries — which for cre­ative rights rea­sons I don’t wish to release until I know I can pro­tect them — the writ­ing process was fairly lin­ear and highly dri­ven.  I could knock out 30 page chap­ters in a day with­out the slight­est prob­lem, the story unfolded before my eyes as I did it and I loved every minute of it.  They of course needed edit­ing after­wards and some of it was just plain bad, but it was nearly all I knew of writ­ing a novel-length story and so I just assume that was how it would be for me.

Zom­bie, as I call it, has been quite dif­fer­ent.  Right now I’m actu­ally writ­ing indi­vid­ual scenes in a folder called “excerpts,” which are essen­tially snap­shots of scenes from the story that are fairly clear in my mind.  The char­ac­ter isn’t so much a cre­ation as it is a trans­la­tion as well, as the main char­ac­ter is almost entirely based off of myself.  That cer­tainly isn’t being done in some sort of vain effort of recog­ni­tion though, instead it is allow­ing me to put a human touch on the main char­ac­ter that I hope — by includ­ing all of my flaws and inse­cu­ri­ties into his char­ac­ter in an abnor­mally hon­est man­ner — will make him all the more real.  And if the char­ac­ter is believ­able to the read­ers, then it is my hope this facil­i­tates the reader buy­ing into the world I am creating.

The whole point of Zom­bie, you see, is mak­ing it believ­able.  To make it as bru­tally real­is­tic as I can, all the while tak­ing some jabs at very large stereo­types in films hop­ing to fur­ther sus­pend dis­be­lief.  I’ve done research before on some sci­en­tific prin­ci­ples and the­o­ries before, but now I’m hav­ing to find things out like how long a power sta­tion or water treat­ment facil­ity would actu­ally go with­out peo­ple oper­at­ing them, or how long do cer­tain pack­aged foods last?

Tonight I wrote my first actual encounter with a zom­bie between the main char­ac­ter and it.  Always fun to freak myself out a lit­tle bit while I write, but what I found most inter­est­ing is how a lot of the chal­lenge I’m hav­ing writ­ing this story is actu­ally because this story is so much more vividly clear in my mind as a film rather than a book.  Who knows, maybe some day it’ll get there.

Alright, time for bed.  G’night.

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