• Meta

    Thank You

    Thank you for taking the time to read my blog. I appreciate it, truly.

    I apologize, however, for requiring registration in order to leave a comment. I know it’s a hassle. I really do. I would open things up if I could, but from the first day I set up this blog, I started getting spam comments, spam pingbacks, and spam user registrations. I’m still getting spam user registrations to the tune of five or ten per new blog post. The point of it just escapes me. They’re all using emails from 163.com, mail15.com, and hotmail.com.

    If you have any useful suggestions on how to stem the tide without making it impossible for real people to comment, I’d be grateful to hear them.

  • Writing

    Viable Paradise XVI

    Viable Paradise
    Viable Paradise

    I’ve been trying for most of a week to put something into words. But my adjectives and my adverbs keep getting weirded up with my verbs and my nouns, and there’s pronouns and conjunctions and gerunds underfoot, and maybe a split infinitive or two. I get bogged down trying to tell the facts and ignoring the essence of the event. So, instead I’m going to turn off my narrativ . . . ity (as well as, apparently, my vocabularitude) and you get this.

    I’m talking, of course, about the experience of Viable Paradise (click on the picture). Whatever I thought it was going to be, it was simultaneously that and something else entirely.

    • Everyone there had some form of Impostor Syndrome.
    • Even the instructors.
    • Rule 1: No one dies.
    • Rule 2: Blood must remain in its original container.
    • Plot tomatoes.
    • The value of the hidden, detailed room in the model house.
    • How to force a person to pick the card I want him to pick.
    • Psychology is a very useful tool.
    • Telling details.
    • Richard II has a buttload of lines.
    • POV fixes everything.
    • I see what you did, there!
    • As you do.
    • Totes adorbz.
    • Jellyfish (at least some of them) are Fireflies of the Sea (or Lightning Bugs of the sea, if you’d rather).
    • The sky is chock full of stars.
    • Just because you spend a bunch of time building the world doesn’t mean your reader has to (or wants to) see it all. If you know it’s there, it’ll come through in the work.
    • I make a better Mafioso than a Thing.
    • Just being in the same room with The Scurvy Cure will apparently cure scurvy forever.
    • Unless you’re a Scurvy Brat.
    • Bob Dylan would be totes hilarious in Richard II.
    • MacAllister Stone made me like kale and collards.
    • I can write a 3400 word story in a few hours.
    • To spec.
    • Including a silly detail that makes no sense.
    • Just after the point where I yell at myself that I’m stupid and can’t do this, I buckle down and just do it.
    • Methodist Munchkin-Land.
    • I found my tribe.
    • And they have some rather odd rituals.
    • Each paragraph, each sentence — each word — should do at least two, if not as many as four or five different things.
    • Do not pet the black and white kitties.
    • Wood stairs are slick in the rain. (Hope you’re doing better, Alex.)
    • Tell the reader exactly what she needs to know when she needs to know it.
    • No more, no less.
    • No sooner, no later.
    • E-books are not going to kill off traditional publishing.
    • Money flows toward the writer.
    • Urban fantasy as a genre is a lot older than I thought it was.
    • The reader is at least as smart as you are.
    • Let the reader figure things out without over-explaining it. It makes them happy.
    • Just use ‘said.’
    • A game of chess is like a story.
    • When someone says, “I want to completely reduce a body to ashes. How big would a room have to be for me to stay in the room with the fire and not get burned or suffocate?” a group of writers won’t blink before asking for detail and suggesting answers and ways to burn the body faster and more efficiently.
    • Did you know there was a Dalek in Richard II?
    • And a Minnesotan or two? Oh, yah, you betcha!
    • And Gollum. Or maybe Peter Lorre. As Gollum.
    • And a southern belle from Looziana, y’all.
    • Bart makes kick-ass fudge.
    • Fudge with marshmallows and pretzels.
    • Yes, it really is good.
    • My girlfriend is a pagan.
    • Who could ask for more?
    • At the altar she’s a heathen, [Thanks, Marc!]
    • In the bedroom she’s just fine.
    • S00per s33krit Steve Brust story reading at midnight.
    • And the discussion that followed.
    • Don’t judge a book by its movie.
    • Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL!
    • …the unspeakable horror of the literary life.
    • Always go to the original source material whenever possible.
    • Every writer who has ever said, “I write,” has then heard this: “I have a great idea for a story, but no time to write it. How ’bout I give you the idea, you write it, and then we’ll split the money?”
    • Never call yourself a ‘wannabe writer.’ A ‘wannabe’ is someone who doesn’t write, but sits around thinking about writing. A writer is someone who writes. All of us at VP are writers.

    Regrets

    • I did not go on even one of Jim Macdonald’s three-mile hikes. The extra 90 minutes of sleep seemed more important at the time.
    • I didn’t spend near enough time with the other students. I barely got to talk with some of them at all. :(
    • Or the instructors. They made some good music at night (guitars, a banjo, a bongo, a harmonica, many voices), but I was too busy trying to get sleep to go enjoy it first-hand.
    • Or the staff. They bent over backwards to make sure we had everything we needed whenever we needed it.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that the experience is a bit of a jumble and it’ll take a while to process it all. I wish I were still up there, hanging out with those 36 amazing people into the wee hours, discussing writing and whatever else came to mind.

  • Meta,  Writing

    The Pulitzer Scam

    Note: I don’t make it a habit to rant, here, but I felt the need to vent about this.

    This is something I wasn’t aware of until some friends of mine pointed it out last night. A writer of their acquaintance whom I shall call "Jack" sent out an email to the Atlanta Writers Club with the following title:

    Jack Writer Has a New Pulitzer Nominated Book

    Jack is published through what I will call a small press, but an argument could be made for calling it a vanity press. I’ve met the owner of this publishing house, and although he seems like a nice, earnest person, there was something about his answers to basic business-of-writing questions that told us he’s not really all that knowledgeable about things like contracts and rights. Which a publisher should be, if he expects to stay in business long.

    The email provided a link to the book’s PR site (part of the service provided by his publisher). The page contains a number of blurbs (a.k.a. "puffs") written in that breathless style seemingly reserved for such purposes. "An instant classic!" "A tour-de-force!" "I wasn’t able to put it down!" "Jack’s story grabs you by the throat and won’t let go until the final page!" Etc. You know the type. The purpose of a blurb or puff is to influence you to buy the book. Authors (or their publishers) generally get well-known authors in their genre to provide quotes. According to Marilyn Henderson on AbsoluteWrite,

    When an author gives another writer a blurb, it implies an endorsement or recommendation of the novel. Her fans may buy your book on the strength of her liking it enough to let her name be on it. It also implies her fans will like your book, so you must choose the author you ask carefully.

    If her stories do not include on-stage murder, violence or profanity, for example, her fans don’t expect any in a book she recommends. They assume a novel she "endorses" will be similar to hers. If it isn’t, her publisher may get angry letters, and she may lose fans and sales.

    Just as you must know the audience you write for, you must know the audience of the authors you ask for blurbs.

    Recognizing none of these authors’ names, I looked a few of them up and discovered that they, too, are either self-published authors or published by small, niche-market publishers. One of them was billed as a critic for a prominent online newspaper which I will decline to mention. I looked him up, and sure enough, he’s a critic. A film and TV critic. Who publishes his reviews on his own site. And then this newspaper links to them.1 He has several books . . . also published by a small, niche publisher.

    My point is that these book blurbs were all written by people in the same basic position as Jack: an author whose small publisher is probably pushing them to scratch a back in the interest of reciprocity. I have no proof of this; I’m supposing.

    Now, let me be absolutely, crystal clear: none of that is an issue. I don’t have a problem with self publishing. I don’t have a problem with small publishers. I don’t have a problem with niche markets. I don’t have a problem with people getting their work in front of people by any reasonable means necessary. Except for one thing.

    Pulitzer Nominated.

    Surely that can’t be right. Can it? The Pulitzer is a major award. It seems unlikely that a book by an unknown writer would be nominated for such a prestigious honor.

    So my friends looked into this a bit.

    Turns out, anyone can enter the Pulitzer Prize competition. You pay $50 and send off a few copies and it’s "submitted." Officially entered in the contest for the Pulitzer. Notice that "submitted" is not the same as "nominated." That is a very fine distinction.

    Read more here (Huffington Post article by Steve Lehto). A salient quote from that article:

    The Pulitzer Prize organization has juries which select finalists in various categories and then the Pulitzer Prize Board picks the winners from those finalists. According to their own website, the only people who should say they are "nominated" for a Pulitzer Prize are the finalists who have been selected by the juries for consideration by the Pulitzer Prize Board.

    Jack himself may not have had any say in this. The publisher may very well have paid the $50 and be urging him to hype the "Pulitzer Nominated" nonsense. And having met him, I can’t say that I would put it past him. That very earnestness I noted above may blind him to the negative impact something like this could have on both Jack’s and his own reputation.

    So the morals of this story are these:

    1. Do not ever do this. It is at best a cheap marketing ploy. It is at worst a bold-faced lie. And if you’re caught at it by your peers, you’re going to have a hard time regaining whatever trust this costs you.
    2. If you hear of an author claiming his book is "Pulitzer Nominated," check the Pulitzer site before you believe it.

    1. My problem is the implied lie. Or lie of omission, if you will. Saying he is a "critic" "for" the ElectroNews Times (or whatever) implies that he is a full-time book / literature critic working directly on the payroll, not that he is a film / TV critic on his blog, which the publication then features. It’s the difference in saying, "Here comes the president" vs. "Here comes the president of the PTA." Both are true, but one is more truthful.

  • NaNoWriMo,  Writing

    A Few Thoughts on NaNoWriMo

    NaNoWriMo
    NaNoWriMo

    These are some thoughts I had on NaNoWriMo. They were originally written as part of a lengthy reply to a friend of a friend who was curious about the whole process of NaNoWriMo and who had some concerns about writing a character based on a real person.

    It’s quite normal to agonize. Over your characters, your setting, your plot, your vocabulary, your grammar, whether semicolons are pure evil or useful, whether or not subtext exists, your skill as a writer, whether you should defrost the freezer before writing, how to clean the grout in your shower . . . procrastination takes on a whole level of evil when you have a deadline, or at least mine does. (Look up ‘waxing the cat.’ No, it’s not dirty.)

    Writing something semi-biographical is rougher still, because of discomfort in potentially harming the person’s reputation or angering their descendants. Our society is litigious to a fault, after all. But it’s merely based on a real person. You may not want to take too many liberties, but you may not have ever met the person you’re basing the character on, especially if they lived and died before you were born. Just keep their best interests in mind (assuming you like them) and remember that no one is or ever has been a paragon of virtue. Everyone has a darkness. Everyone has flaws. If you don’t portray that, the character will come across as unbelievable. Flat. A caricature.

    A lot of my very fictional characters have inside them a tiny core of someone — or a mixture of several someones — that I know. But I don’t worry about them figuring it out, because if I’ve done my job well enough, they’ll never know, even if they read it. But basing it on a real person, that might be harder to conceal, if you even want to conceal it. Let’s say it’s Frida Kahlo you’re writing about. Of course, people will know it’s her, and they’ll also know that you had to concoct stuff. But as long as you’re more or less faithful to the events and things people do know, and that’s consistent with the stuff you make up, then . . . sure, it might tick off some people, but others will read it and think, “You know, she could have thought that.”

    My take on it is this: Write the story, and do the absolute best you can. NaNoWriMo is about getting the story out of your head and onto paper / electrons. It’s not about making it perfect. It will never be perfect. Rewrites are for getting it as close as you can. If what you have after November is over still strikes you as having something you like in it, you can go through it after letting it sit for a month or two without looking at it (that is key), and decide what works and what doesn’t. And if nothing works? You still learned what doesn’t work, and you probably have a better idea what will.

    I have this Epic Fantasy story that has been knocking on the inside of my skull since I was around eleven. In different forms over the years, of course, but basically the same story. I must have written chapter one a hundred times. In pencil or pen. In a spiral-bound notebook. Because it had to be perfect or I wasn’t doing the story in my head any justice. So I’d write chapter one . . . and it would suck. And I’d hate it, and I’d rip the pages out and burn them. And then some time later, I’d write it again . . . and it would be slightly less sucky (at least to me), but not good enough. It wasn’t perfect. It. Had. To. Be. Perfect.

    This went on for more than thirty years. Then in 2008, I finally decided, “Idiot, you’ve got to get this out of your head. Just write it.” So I took all my character notes and all my plot notes and all my other stuff and I started writing on November 1, 2008.

    And by the end of that November, I had 53,515 new words that I never had before. And I got a lot of that out of my head. But I used virtually none of the copious notes I had been taking for all that time. I came up with some great new ideas. I invented new characters, thought of scenes I never realized were there, before, discovered things about my characters I never had. Because I learned something crucial:

    To write the story, you have to bind and gag the editor that lives inside your head. And lock him in a small, dark room.

    That editor will tell you that what you’re writing sucks. He’ll want you to go back and “fix” stuff. He’ll pester you to stop using the word ‘actually’ so much. So you have to beat him over the head with something hard, tie him up, stuff a gag in his mouth, and dump him in the basement and lock the door. Until you’re done.

    You’ll find yourself around day eight or so thinking, “Gah! This blows. I’m just going to rewrite that last chapter because–” No! That’s your editor. Why didn’t you make those knots tighter? He got out! You have to club him again and make sure to tie him up tighter next time!

    You don’t fix that chapter. You make notes in the margin and go on as though you had fixed it and don’t worry about it. So what if for six chapters your main character is a monk in a monastery in Tibet, but starting in chapter seven, he’s a famous Las Vegas entertainer? You assume the story has taken place along your new path up to chapter seven, and you go on.

    You probably won’t encounter anything that drastic. I think my “drastic” change was that in Chapter nine, I realized one of the secondary characters needed a skill I hadn’t given her earlier, so I just assumed she’d always had it, made notes to go back and fix it, and wrote forward.

    Of those 53,515 words I wrote in 2008, probably less than half of them are useful words. But what is useful is what I learned about those characters. When I go back and revisit that story and add more plot, the characters, setting, etc. will be all the better for having had to work through stuff to make it make a bit of sense for the novel. On the other hand . . . that story is no longer knocking on my head. I’ve moved on to other ideas. Better ideas. But I learned a lot in writing that epic fantasy, and I will still come back to it at some point, and by golly it’ll be better. Because I’m a better writer, now, than I was in 2008.

    For 2009 I wrote a mystery novel (55,000+ words) and had no idea who the killer was until about halfway through. Same thing. I had to silence my editor, who kept saying, “Gary, what the hell are you doing? Who is the killer? Don’t you even know?” *PWANG* with a shovel right in the face. Basement. Knots.

    For 2010 I wrote a science fiction novel involving time travel. Got to 78,000 words on that one, then 93,000 by February. Finished it. It needs editing big-time, but this time, my inner editor went on vacation to Aruba while I was writing. He learned. It only takes one or two shovels to the face to make an editor learn his lesson. But there’s some good stuff in that novel. Stuff I really like. And some stuff I really hate.

    And yeah, no one ever has to see it but you. The only time you have to show anything is when you paste the full text into the site on the last day so it can verify your word-count. It’s not saved by their site. The count is tallied and all anyone need know is that you either did or did not make it to 50,000.

    Even if you don’t get to 50,000 words, you’re 9000 words or 15,000 words or 27,000 words closer to having a book than you were when you started. Or 250 words. Any honest attempt is better than nothing.

    If you’re worried about lawsuits resulting from basing a character on a real, historical figure . . . I’ll tell you what someone told me when I had some similar worries: When the publisher agrees to publish the novel, that’s when you worry about lawyers. Before then, tell the story and don’t worry about stuff like that. That’s not your job. You’re the writer. That worry is your editor talking. Remember what we do with internal editors? *grins evilly and hands you a shovel*

    7 Tips on NaNoWriMo: Backup often. Backup often. Backup often. Backup often. Backup often. Backup often. Oh, and backups? Do them often.

    Do you feel pepped? Has my pep talk helped? I love NaNoWriMo. Love. It. It pushes me to do things I’ve never done before, and with each November, I feel more pumped up than the last one.

  • Writing

    The End

    VP XVI
    VP XVI Class & Instructors

    Well, it’s the end of Viable Paradise. I don’t want to go home. I want to stay on Martha’s Vineyard forever with this group of people and I know that’s not realistic but I’m going to cover my eyes and ears and go LA LA LA LA LA LA and you can’t make me listen so there!

    Really, though, what a fantastic week. What a great group of people. I cannot possibly begin to thank the instructors enough. Uncle Jim (James D. Macdonald), Debra Doyle, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Sherwood Smith, Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, Steven Brust, and Scott Lynch. My head feels (pleasantly!) stuffed with all kinds of new stuff. Thank you all for pouring it in there. And tamping it down. And then cramming corks into my ears so it doesn’t all leak out.

    And the staff. OMG, the staff. Bart, Chris, Pippen, Kate (even though she had to leave early), and most especially Mac. We wouldn’t have made it without you guys. And Mac, you made me like kale and collards. My God, woman. What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? :)

    And my fellow classmates, pictured here (with some of the instructors), who made this week fun, exciting, exhausting, and illuminating, and allowed me to be a situational extrovert for a while. :)

    I’ll give some more details when it’s not after 2 AM after a night of unwinding after a long week spent thinking and talking mostly about writing with other writers and I have to get up in less than five hours to get on a ferry to begin my trek home.

    Also, I’m going to spend a lot of money on books over the next few days. :)

  • Writing

    Epilogue: Thank You

    I’d like to thank everyone who has indulged me and read these little episodes of a zombie apocalypse. I hope that those of my friends and family who did read them weren’t too freaked out before they got to the end of “Chapter 01” and realized what was going on. I also apologize for the high activity on my blog, which I know is duplicated on LiveJournal (Hi, LJ friends!) and Twitter (Hi, Twitter followers!) and FaceBook (Hi, Facebook friends!) . . . and then LiveJournal gets duplicated on Twitter (Um . . . Hi, guys?) and Facebook (Heh . . . Heh? Have I said I’m sorry?)

    I really am sorry (really) for all the duplicates (really), but this came up kind of suddenly, and . . . <puppy-dog eyes until you accept my apology> (really) <— Don’t let my face freeze like this!

    Google hasn’t seen fit to allow pre-timed posts or automatic cross-posting to Google+, yet. Boo!

    Anyway . . . I am actually at Viable Paradise this week. All the places I mentioned in my little fictional account have been true: I should have been in those places at approximately those times, just not under military control or fighting zombies. :) (OR AM I?)

    As I type this, it’s early Friday evening in my living room, and I’m about to do my final packing and get ready for bed. Around 10:37 PM, if everything goes to plan. :)

    Anyway, I enjoyed writing these little episodes. I hope you don’t pick them apart too badly. I know it’s pretty implausible, but just suspend your disbelief and try to enjoy. We can discuss critiques later. :)

    Any further posts by me will actually be about Viable Paradise and what’s going on there. Or here. Because when you read this, I’ll be there, but as I’m writing it . . . Oy. This is why time travel stories are always so hard.


    Zombie Apocalypse 2012
    Zombie Apocalypse 2012

    This post is part of Zombie Apocalypse 2012, a multi-blog fictional account of a zombie uprising. Thanks for your patience! Really!

    You may also follow the button link to read other equally fictional Zombie Apocalypse 2012 blog entries by other writers, or join in and tell your own zombie apocalypse stories!

  • Writing

    13: The End?

    I’m almost afraid to type this for fear of jinxing it, but . . . I think it’s over!

    The helicopters which have been flying over the whole area for hours started dropping something. Some sort of fog or smoke or something. We can’t see them in the dark, but we can sure hear them, and there’s a haze that settles down to the ground after they pass by. The jets may be doing something, too, for all we know. And the troop trucks have been increasing in number.

    When I was a kid in rural Alabama, we used to have these trucks that would come through the neighborhoods in the summer and spray thick smoke out to kill mosquitos. I guess it worked. Who knows? My friends and I used to play in the smoke. Insecticide. It’s a wonder any of made it out of childhood alive.

    My point in telling that is to say: I saw the troop trucks doing something similar earlier. Some sort of smoke or fog was coming out.

    This all started maybe two hours ago. Some of the zombies broke through just before that and we had to blow a bunch of them away. They seemed to lose their will, then, and wandered off, some of them bleeding or missing body parts. That’s when we noticed all the military activity.

    As I look out, now—we re-aimed some of the spotlights—all we see are corpses. Some of them occasionally twitch, but . . .

    I THINK IT MIGHT BE OVER!

    Not that any of us are going to get any sleep. We hope it’s true, but we’re not going to trust it 100% until the last body is cleaned up. That’s going to be a job and a half.

    I just wonder if they’ll ever tell us what happened. Rumors are still flying. It’s amazing. Upwards of 30% of the human race may have died of some sort of zombie plague, but people are people, and rumors travel faster than light, I think.

    Genetics experiments gone wrong. Medical research into nanomachines. A new species of virus. Biological warfare . . . It may take years before we actually know. I’m willing to bet the president—if he even made it through; there’s a rumor Joe Biden and quite a few others didn’t—knows.

    But for now, who cares? We’re all going to get together down in the restaurant in a short bit and just . . . blow off some steam. The soldiers have been going door to door, from what it sounds like. Well, when they get here, they’re going to find civilized people behaving like humans.

    We made it. We MADE it! Hot damn!


    Zombie Apocalypse 2012
    Zombie Apocalypse 2012

    This post is part of Zombie Apocalypse 2012, a multi-blog fictional account of a zombie uprising. Thanks for reading!

    You may also follow the button link to read other equally fictional Zombie Apocalypse 2012 blog entries by other writers, or join in and tell your own zombie apocalypse stories!

  • Writing

    12: Activity

    Taking a quick break to dash off a post during my 20 minutes for dinner. The floodlights being powered by the generator are helping. They’re keeping most of the zombies out beyond the edge of the light, but it’s unfortunately having the side effect of attracting them like moths. We shoot the ones that venture inside the ring. The rest . . . seem to be eating the ones we kill. I’m past feeling sick at this point. When you’ve seen it as much as we have . . .

    They’re massing out there in the darkness. First just a few and now there must be hundreds if not thousands. We’re not doing shifts tonight. Every hand is needed to watch and handle a weapon. Every shotgun we could find has been pressed into service. THAT I can fire. It’s point and shoot, basically, although I did have to get someone to show me how to load it. (I suck in a zombie apocalypse, what can I say? At least now I know this and can remedy the situation . . . once all this is over. Assuming we make it.)

    The anticipation is killing us. They’re just out there, growling and howling and moaning and yelling . . . and it’s like something straight out of an insane person’s vision of Hell. We smell smoke. Something’s burning, somewhere, but no one is stupid enough to leave to find out.

    The zombies seem . . . less vicious than last night. We don’t know what’s going on. The radio isn’t saying much that’s new, but we have been noticing a LOT of helicopters and fighter jets flying over. Seems like we’ve seen more troop trucks, too. They’re blasting a recording from the trucks that warns people to stay indoors and shoot to kill. No shit, Sherlock.

    Still no problems with the injured folks. Their wounds are healing normally, or as normally as a bunch of non-medical people can determine. I guess the new “normal” is “not turning into a zombie.”

    Back into the fray. We’re all cautiously optimistic, but that won’t last long unless someone, somewhere, figures out a way to stop this.


    Zombie Apocalypse 2012
    Zombie Apocalypse 2012

    This post is part of Zombie Apocalypse 2012, a multi-blog fictional account of a zombie uprising. Stay tuned for more posts!

    You may also follow the button link to read other equally fictional Zombie Apocalypse 2012 blog entries by other writers, or join in and tell your own zombie apocalypse stories!

  • Writing

    11: Preparing for the Worst

    After getting some sleep, we have all spent the entire rest of the day gearing up for tonight. The zombies are likely to attack with renewed vigor. The hotel is on a generator, and they don’t want us wasting power on things like laptops, but I had to update lest you think I’m dead or a zombie. I’m not, and I don’t intend to be.

    Barricades are in place. All the broken doors and windows are boarded up. We had to scavenge some lumber from other structures, but we got it done. I have blisters on my hands, and those blisters have blisters. Ow.

    We eventually let the wounded people out to help, but someone keeps a constant eye on them. If one of them turns on us, we’ll have no choice. Putting them down would be kind.

    Got my axe. Bring it, zombies.


    Zombie Apocalypse 2012
    Zombie Apocalypse 2012

    This post is part of Zombie Apocalypse 2012, a multi-blog fictional account of a zombie uprising. Stay tuned for more posts!

    You may also follow the button link to read other equally fictional Zombie Apocalypse 2012 blog entries by other writers, or join in and tell your own zombie apocalypse stories!

  • Writing

    10: Light of Day

    Yes! As soon as it was bright enough, the zombies retreated. We don’t know where they went–probably under buildings in basements and anywhere it’s dark. Again, you’ve probably already noticed this or heard it on the news.

    We’re still going to have shifts on watch, but time for some needed sleep. We’ll need to be good and rested for tonight. The two people who were wounded last night still seem OK, but not OK enough for us to trust them completely. Whatever is causing it must not be airborne or blood-borne, but I don’t know what that leaves. I hope the CDC figures something out.

    Finally got a text from Arkansas! My mother is fine. Her friend is well-armed and the area is extremely rural, so all is well. Texts seem to be doing better than calls, still. Hell, Twitter is still up. #zombieapoc2012 is a trending topic, even.

    Jeez. I have never been so happy to see the sun. But I’ve seen enough for right now. Sleep.


    Zombie Apocalypse 2012
    Zombie Apocalypse 2012

    This post is part of Zombie Apocalypse 2012, a multi-blog fictional account of a zombie uprising. Stay tuned for more posts!

    You may also follow the button link to read other equally fictional Zombie Apocalypse 2012 blog entries by other writers, or join in and tell your own zombie apocalypse stories!