Living the Fictional Dream

Happy 4th of July, everyone! To celebrate this auspicious day, head on over to Every Day Fiction and read the story of the day, which is my story, “The Vote.”

It’s not actually a patriotic story. It doesn’t have anything to do with the holiday, at all. “The Vote” is my flash piece about the zombie apocalypse. The rest of this entry describes my inspiration and writing process. Unless you’re into spoilers, I would head on over to EDF now and read it, then come back and finish the blog entry.

I wrote the first draft of this story after I randomly watched the new version of Dawn of the Dead on TV. I stumbled upon it and got sucked in before I knew what was going on. In retrospect, that movie was not one I should have been watching. I’m OK with horror movies. I’ve never watched a lot of zombie movies, but I’m not against them per se. The things about Dawn of the Dead that affected me were the horrible things that humans will do to each other when circumstances are bad and the sheer hopelessness of the situation. (Spoiler for the movie: If it had ended after they sailed away instead of having the unhappy tag about the boat dying and the island being zombie-infested, too, I might have not been quite as disturbed afterwards.)

Anyway, Dawn of the Dead haunted me for days. Strangely enough, one of the prompts for my writing group’s prompts contest that month was to “write about something horrible.” And, thus, “The Vote” was born. Writing it helped me get the yuck of that movie out of my brain and lay DotD to rest.

The story has been through several drafts since then. The first draft was all character development, and the action an after-thought at the end. The second draft cut out a lot of the character development and focused more on Jill’s great escape (the second draft also allowed Jill to get away, when she and everyone on the semi died in the first draft). Thanks to two rounds of critiques from my intrepid writing group, I found a good balance between the two, and I’m pretty happy with the final product.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t really think Jill survives for a long and happy life. It is possible. Though it was cut from the final version, her uncle has a provisioned survival bunker. Maybe she makes it there on her rattle-trap forklift, finds other survivors, and is able to wait out the zombie apocalypse with them until the zombies run out of prey and become inanimate again. But, sadly, chances are, Jill will find another pack of zombies when she’s almost out of gas and weak from lack of food and they’ll take her down.

However, I think it’s better to leave her ultimate fate to the minds of the reader. The glimmer of hope at the end is enough to help those of us who prefer things not to be totally dismal and depressing. And readers who do prefer the “realistic” depressing ending can easily fill that in for themselves. That’s what flash fiction is all about, right? Giving just enough that the story takes on a life of its own.

If you read “The Vote” and enjoyed it, please vote on its star rating on the EDF site. The more star votes a story has, the better shot is has of making it into the top stories classification. And I always love to hear from people who liked my stories — a comment on the story at EDF or a comment here on the blog would be great.

Happy 4th of July, everyone. And don’t let the zombies put the bite on you!