Stephen Drivick's Blog, page 8

The Living

This is my twelfth entry in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for April. Today we look at the letter L – the Living.

I used to be one of you.

Now I walk endlessly from place to place that I no longer recognize unable to die and rest. I walk with a hunger like a giant hole in my body. A hole I cannot fill. I must feed. Hunt and feed.

I look down at my old clothes and shoes, tattered by months of exposure. Blood, my blood, dried into the fibers till it makes an ugly swishing sound when I walk. Clothes and shoes that I bought to be stylish, but that no longer matters.

I used to remember my family and friends. They have all faded to shadows. I can see the face, but the names are gone. Soon the faces will disappear.

I am so cold. So very cold.

I need to rest. I live a nightmare, and I can't wake up. I can only walk, hunt, and feed. Inside, I beg to be released. Someone let me rest.

I used to be one of you. I was once part of the living.

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Thought I'd try a little flash fiction for "L".

Kindle

This is my eleventh entry in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for April. Today we look at the letter K-Kindle.

I have always been an avid reader. It started with the little book fairs that schools used to have. I would always pick up a book or two.

All that reading created a problem. Books take up a lot of space, and I couldn't afford a library addition to the house. Having a garage sale every six months to unload books wasn't appealing either.

Enter the Kindle Fire. All the books you could ever want stored on a little seven-inch plastic rectangle. I could carry an entire library under my arm. I felt like Burgess Meredith from that Twilight Zone episode where he finds all the books after a nuclear war – and I didn't have to worry about an extra pair of glasses. The font size could be enlarged with a few swipes of my finger.

But wait, that wasn't all. There were magazines, movies, television shows to download. I could surf the web, check my email, play games, and view photos. I could even use it as a little second monitor for my computer. My Kindle Fire was the point of entry into a media empire.

I know some people still like the physical book, including me. In my opinion, the e-book will never replace the page. But an entire library in the palm of your hands? Pretty cool for a $200 device.:)

John

This is my tenth entry in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for April. Today we look at the letter J-John.

Tears welled up in my eyes, but I stopped them cold. You can't get too sentimental about the old days when things were normal. You get sentimental, you go soft, and then you give up. Then little girl zombies come in the night and eat your guts out.

These are the thoughts of my other main character, John, from Sometimes We Ran. At this point in his life, it is eight months after a zombie apocalypse has nearly wiped out humanity.

Like Claire, I had a clear picture of John in my mind as well. He was going to be middle-aged, strong, armed, and crafty. Running from the living and the dead had turned him into a survival machine with a good shooting hand. He has kept his wits about him as the world around him has fallen apart.

John would have a past. He would be a regular guy (engineer) who married late in life to a beautiful woman. He would lose his wife to the apocalypse, and carry the guilt of losing her on the road. When we meet him in Sometimes We Ran, he is at the end of his rope. John's travels on the road are becoming a death march. Meeting Claire helps him go on. They strike up a friendship.

A few people have asked me if there is some of me in John. We're both middle-aged and regular guys. I would like to think so. I think writers always put a little of themselves in their characters. In an emergency situation, I hope I could be as focused as John.

Ideas

This is my ninth entry in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for April. Today we look at the letter I-Ideas.

Some people have asked me where I got the idea for Sometimes We Ran. The short answer is that I had it all along. :)

You've probably heard this all before, but ideas often stick in your head like a catchy song. A few years ago, an rough story about a man leaving a sheltered community to check out the world popped up in my head. He would be the survivor of a great cataclysm – a nuclear war or something devastating like that. He left the community and its safety because he was curious. He wanted to see what was going on in the destroyed United States. Of course no one really understood his quest. It was personal.

Along the way, he would fight cannibals, bandits, and other assorted end of the world bad guys. He would save families and whole communities as he traveled across the land. It would be a great adventure.

At some point in his journey, he was going to meet someone. A young girl, starving and ill-prepared for life on the road. They would strike up a friendship, and continue on the adventure together.

In my head, it sounded like a great story. The only problem was I didn't know what to do about it. Writing never occurred to me. I did scribble a few paragraphs here and there, but couldn't put anything together.

But the story stayed in my head. Nuclear war was eliminated when I read about super volcanoes and how they can cause mass extinctions. The story almost came out, but didn't quite make it to the page. I almost did a “super flu” kind of thing, but couldn't pull it off. The story went back into hibernation.

Then, during a “Walking Dead” marathon, it came to the surface. Zombies were the trick. I grabbed a sheet of paper, and scribbled a few notes. John, Claire, and the world they lived in came into focus. I started writing Sometimes We Ran that night. It was only going to be a short story, but it kept going.

So, don't let your ideas sleep. It took me a few years to get mine out of my head. I wish I had done it sooner. If you have an idea, no matter how crazy it is, write it down. Want to write about demons and vampire lawyers conducting an apocalyptic war at night? Do it.

You might get a book out of it.

Humanity

This is my eighth entry in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for April. Today we look at the letter H-Humanity.

We live in a society where most of our needs are provided to us. Turn a faucet, and clean water pours out. Flip a switch and your room fills with light. The grocery stores are filled with all types of food. Information is available to us at a moments notice on our phones. There's plenty of fuel to fill up your car, motorcycle, boat, etc. You get the idea.

But what if you took some or all of it away? It's a forgone conclusion that our ordered world would go to hell in a hurry.

Unfortunately, I have a real-world example. A few years ago, Hurricane Katina knocked out the gasoline pipelines from the Gulf of Mexico to Georgia. Pretty soon, the supplies of gasoline dried up. I had the misfortune of driving a muscle car Firebird with a V8 engine and a thirst for premium fuel. I couldn't find fuel, and when I did find fuel I had to buy in it in the midst of chaos. At some stations, I was witnessing the unraveling of society with yelling, cutting in line, and yes, physical threats. I started carrying a bat in my car! (No kidding ...I really did this). It got so bad, people followed tankers around. I started working at home till the supplies came back.

This was just from a temporary change in the gasoline supply.

I had a few simple questions when I began writing Sometimes We Ran: A Story from the Zombie Apocalypse. What would you do to ensure your survival? Would you kill someone to get their supplies? Could you keep your humanity?

Based on the example above, I wouldn't be able to answer so easily. Those people knew more gasoline was coming and yet they still acted like anti-social jerks. Even I started carrying a weapon in my car, and I consider myself pretty easy going. I was so afraid that I imagined myself caving in the skull of the first person to put their hand on my gas filler door. This does not bode well for my humanity.

Now, what if the gasoline in those underground tanks was the last gasoline in the area ...forever. Cars would be flipped, bricks would be tossed, and I sure gun play would start. Humanity lost. People would kill or injure for those last gallons, and I have no doubt they would probably kill or injure to keep it. All of us would have to consider the possibility of facing down our fellow survivors.

This is one of the great themes of Post-Apocalyptic/Zombie fiction. The real story in end of the world novels is not the apocalypse itself, but the people left behind. It's how they deal with the morality in the new world that makes an exciting tale. I just hope I never have to deal with it for real.

Guns

This is my seventh entry in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for April. Today we look at the letter G-Guns.

I have to admit to something. I have two zombie novels to my credit, and I don't know anything about guns.

I'm not totally clueless. I know how a gun works and the different types of guns – handgun, revolver, shotgun, rifle, etc. I'm talking about specifics. Things like brand names, the myriad of different calibers, and what gun is appropriate for the situation at hand. You can't get around it. If you write a novel about zombies, guns are going to show up.

I read a zombie apocalypse novel a few years ago that went to the extreme. The author was no doubt a gun enthusiast because he lovingly described in great detail every one of the main character's firearms. From the smallest back-up pistol to the largest rifle and beyond, the guns were each given a paragraph. They became characters in the novel. They almost had their own personalities.

When I started writing Sometimes We Ran, I knew I couldn't go in that direction. I didn't know enough, and research on the internet would bog me down and trigger a visit from the FBI to check my computer history.

I went a little more general. John, my main character, carries a “handgun”. He gives Claire a “small revolver”. People use “automatic rifles” or “small machine guns”. No brands or calibers are mentioned. I trust the reader to kind of fill in the gaps. When I mention “shotgun”, the readers can picture whatever shotgun they want.

So far it has worked. In fact, it was mentioned in a review as being a positive. I figure the people in my zombie apocalypse world were regular people, and didn't know much about guns. They learned fast though. They didn't want to become zombie food.

You don't have to know everything about something to write about it. You can generalize a little and still have a great story. Research helps a little, but don't get bogged down.

But don't ask me about guns. I may have written two zombie novels, but I don't know a thing.:)

Fantasy

This is my sixth entry for the April A-Z blogging challenge. Today we look at the letter F-Fantasy.

Sometimes it didn't pay to practice magic. It was too much trouble.

This was a line from a fantasy novel I attempted for National Novel Writing Month. You have to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days to “win” the contest. I gave it a try, and found out one thing.

Writing fantasy is hard.

Perhaps it was the diet of Dungeons and Dragons, or maybe it was all the Adventure Time I had on my Kindle but I thought I could write a little fantasy, sword and sorcery novel. I had an idea about a young girl, a magic-user, going through a few adventures and winning the day. It seemed like a pretty solid idea.

I tried to get cute. I added a sarcastic, Monty Pythonish angle with snarky humor and a post-apocalyptic theme. In some places it worked really well, but in other places it made me cringe a little. I didn't get it, and I wrote it for goodness sake. I could imagine the return column on my Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard flipping around like a slot machine.

So I stopped working on my fantasy story, and I didn't win National Novel Writing Month. I may revisit it one day. I read it over a few days ago, and there's a few parts that made me chuckle.

To all those who write in the Fantasy/Sword and Sorcery genre, my hat is off. You guys write some amazing stories and you make it look easy. With a little reworking of my story maybe I'll join your ranks one day.

But it's going to take a lot of editing. Writing fantasy is hard ...at least for me.:)

End of the World Fiction

This is my fifth entry for the April A-Z blogging challenge. Today we look at the letter E-End of the World Fiction

“I'm Stephen Drivick and I am going to destroy the world.”

When I opened my Twitter account, this was going to be the first line of my profile. Then I chickened out, thought it was a little too cute, and changed it to something else.:)

When I was in high school, (in the 80's) the End of the World was serious business. They made us watch The Day After, and taught us how nuclear bombs worked in science class. They sent home actual disaster plans that included what to do in case of nuclear war. The Cold War was at its peak. The thought that the Russians could attack any day was a real, horrifying thought.

All this preoccupation with widespread destruction led me to apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. One of the first books I picked up in high school was The War of the Worlds By H.G. Wells. It was a little antiquated, but a really good read. Wells described a terrifying invasion of other worldly monsters in 1800's England. Man was hopeless against the attacks, and it takes a few germs to bring down the invaders. I still read it today on my Kindle. The description of the Martian death call in the empty confines of a dead city still raises goosebumps on my skin.

A few years later, I picked up Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. This is the story of a fifties-style nuclear war and its effects on a rural Florida town. Again, a little antiquated but a very good read. It had a realistic view of survival, that ends with a community debating carrying out the death sentence on some bandits. Alas, Babylon had a great influence on the style of Sometimes We Ran.

And then there's The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It's a story of a father and his boy going south trying to escape an unspecified apocalypse. The book is chock full of disturbing images like cannibalism and coughing up blood, so it's not for the timid. Look past that, and it's a story of keeping your humanity in a world turned upside down. It's about surviving at all costs, and what lengths you would take to make it. No novel about the apocalypse before or since, I think, has influenced the genre more. The Road also has a permanent spot on my Kindle.

There are many other books about the End of the World that I have read. Some were pretty good, others descended into gore festivals with leather bikini clad women fighting over the last can of peaches. They've all been a pretty good romp through the genre. I don't know why people are fascinated with the End of the World. I imagine a real apocalypse would not be as much fun with all the death and all. At their heart, stories about the apocalypse and its aftermath are fun adventure tales. I think that it is the reason we all like them so much. I picked zombies to write about, and it has been kind of fun.:)

Dialogue

This is my fourth entry for the Blogging from A to Z April 2014 challenge. Today we look at the letter D-Dialogue.

I'm kind of new to this writing thing, but I find that I really like dialogue. I find it to be a nice way to move the story along and get to know your characters. They can be evil, funny, knowledgeable, snotty or all of the above. The simple interaction of two or more people can reveal a whole backstory about a person. Pretty cool.

You have to be careful. If the conversation gets long, you can lose track of who is talking. I remember during a late-night writing session, I actually lost my place while writing a long conversation and had to go back and remember who said what.:)

I guess a whole novel or short story consisting of dialogue would be a little annoying. It might make a good writing exercise. Come to think of it, a story of all dialogue might be cool. I may have to give it a try.

Claire

This is my third entry for the Blogging from A to Z April 2014 challenge. Today we look at the letter C-Claire.

In the morning light, I got a good look at my new fellow survivor. Claire really was a little thing, only standing about five feet tall or so. I bet she barely weighed a hundred pounds. I wondered how she survived the initial outbreak. She looked pretty weak. She must have survived by going from one group of survivors to another. I wondered if she had any real skills at all. I hoped she wasn't completely useless, because I really didn't want to be a babysitter.

Claire walked with a purposeful stride. She held her head up high, constantly scanning the road ahead. Once in a while, she shot a nervous glance in my direction. I guess she didn't trust me either.

Claire brushed some of her hair out of her eyes, and put it behind her ear. I thought the pink color was a little weird, but she was kind of attractive. She had a nice build; not much up top, but her back porch wasn't too bad. I suddenly wished I were twenty years younger.

This is how John first describes Claire in Sometimes We Ran. From the beginning, I had a picture of Claire in my mind. I wanted her to be an opposite of the other main character, John. He was tall and armed, while Claire would be small and have no weapons except for a sharpened piece of rebar.

I knew I wanted her to be strong. One of the problems in many zombie apocalypse novels is how female characters are treated. Often they are simply leather-clad, background dwellers that whine and moan through the end of the world.

I wanted Claire to be different. Initially, she would appear weak but would prove herself to be valuable and brave. She would kill zombies and make pancakes. Just the useful skills you needed during the apocalypse.:)

In some of the prehistoric drafts of SWR Vol. 1, Claire was younger - like early high school young. I wrote a few passages of interaction between her and John, and she came off as whiny and useless. After some soul searching, I scrapped it all and made her older. I wrote some dialog with these changes, and it worked. I put a bat in her hand and Claire was born.

In the end, I like writing for Claire. She's brave, funny, and a good sidekick. Claire is the kind of person where a friendship could span decades. She's a great character with a lot of heart. A little spitfire trying to light the darkness. Very human in a inhuman world.

But don't take her size as a sign of weakness ...she's a killer with her bat.:)