Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

I spent a few weeks here and there writing a zombie story. Most of the time I had King of the Hill or the Simpsons playing while I wrote. For some reason writing while watching cartoons would make my wireless card crash frequently. I could write for hours or watch cartoons for hours as long as I do one or the other. Doing both at the same time made the card crash every 15 minutes or so.

Anyway Northern Winter was the title. ArmasTermin was using that name for a zombie story, but he abandoned the idea. I liked the idea so I took it. I've written a few other zombie stories. This was written in the first person. Usually I write in the third person. Remaining consistent to my writing style the main character is not given a name. I say main character rather than protagonist because most of my other stories are written through the point of view of the antagonist.

The characters are almost all based off of people I met on gaia. One name was just a random name before I really contemplated character names. A couple of minor characters were people I know in person. One thing I didn't especially like is a lack of character creation. The unnamed protagonist is based off of me. He's a bit of a loner who doesn't really like people but he tolerates them. He eventually even grows to like them. Another character is an energetic smartass. He jokes around quite a bit and is a little sarcastic. I didn't feel like I expressed that very well though. Most of the other characters that played a significant role didn't have a distinct personality at all. A minor character had a controlling personality but he wasn't around long enough to get into depth. I've got a couple alternate accounts on gaia that are supposed to have their own distinct personality but I don't use them much because I can't put my mind into the persona I try to use. For future stories I'll want to create characters with more distinct personalities. The personality I did the best at was the protagonist since he is based on me.

The plot was originally meant as an action story but I couldn't plan out good fight scenes that would last very long. It mostly turned into me explaining what I would do in case of a zombie invasion. My plan includes as much zombie avoidance as possible. Trying to avoid zombies makes for less action. The man vs man conflict wasn't very strong. I also had a man vs self element where the protagonist starts out a loner but eventually learns the value of friendship. There are some contradictions to that though. He talks about always being alone, but he plans to meet up with a friend in another city and later even talks about old times with that friend.

Zombie survival scenarios are a hobby of mine. I like to focus on realism. This is where Hollywood has an advantage. They can spew out a lot of fantasy garbage. Throw in some flashy special effects and the audience likes it. I try to keep realism in mind. This makes the zombie fight scenes more difficult. In the movies John Rambo can pull out an M60 machine gun and hose down a wave of zombies. Realistically fully automatic weapons are available to civilians but they're often difficult to obtain so instead I stuck to semi automatic weapons since those are available everywhere. Good luck trying to buy grenades, but a person who knows what they're doing could make their own. The protagonist has a creative imagination to improvise explosives. I originally included a crude recipe for landmines but later removed it to make sure some dumb reader didn't try it and get hurt. Not having to explain how something could be improvised makes it easier to just have them improvise something. You can even leave the "how" up to the imagination of the reader.

At the beginning of the story I paced myself. I took it one day at a time though each day didn't last very long. The first week of survival was meant to be a "waiting" period. I couldn't think of much for preparation so that week went fast. Once the waiting period was done we got down to what I figured would be the fun part of the story. The action the reader is looking for would finally start. As I mentioned before avoiding the zombies makes it difficult to write an action part. I got one day though that took up about 1/4 of the whole story though. This second stage of the story after the "waiting period" became the "travel period" where everyone would travel to a destination. Once we finally get to the destination I wasn't sure what all to add on. There were a few scenes I wanted to write but I had no idea for filler between the scenes so I wrote the final scenes and gave the story an abrupt ending.

As it is the story takes up about 25 pages in MS Word. The word count is a little over 15,000. The only editing I put in was running it through spell check. According to one friend there were some grammar errors to be fixed. Other than that I didn't really get any feedback on what to fix. If anyone is actually reading this post then I guess it's obvious I know what I want to work on. I might go back and add more to the story. If I do I'll fix whatever grammar errors are in the story.

If anyone is interested in reading it here are the links to the story.
Part 1
Part 2