The Dead of September

What a delightfully ironic title, a beautiful jumping-off point! Quick, while it still seems like a good idea....

And so we enter into that final third of the year I call the Chute. Labor Day is at the top of the slide. New Year’s Day and the gray abyss of January and February are at the bottom. It’s the most happening part of the year, the one we spent the other two-thirds climbing up from. The oppressive heat of summer is easing. School is back in session, and the excitement of high school football beneath the Friday night lights—the only form of America’s best sport worth watching—is in the air. There’s also professional football and college ball if you’re into that. 

Thank God for artist Evelyn Sprouse-Rowe and her tireless attention to the glass surfaces of the San Luis Valley.

Of course, Halloween, and more Halloween, until, finally, it’s Halloween. The memes about pumpkin spice this, that, and the other began showing up on my Facebook timeline as early as three weeks ago. With some effort, you can shoehorn some autumn in between Halloween and Thanksgiving before Christmas overwhelms everything—and then abruptly leaves us alone in the gray, freezing gloom.

Ironically, Old Spice still smells lively and fresh after all these years.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s an old complaint of mine, brought up by my perception of the year having moved way too fast. We’ll lay it to rest here. No, really. This is it. 

So what’s up? Well, it was a busy month with my novel in progress, The Wrong Kind of Dead....

Big weekend in Tater Town. Our spuds were coffee’d up and ready to roll.

I’ve been trying all summer long to describe what I’ve been doing. Frankly, I feared people would freak when they learned I’d stopped forward progress at Chapter 25, page 221, to go back and rewrite Chapters 2 and 5.

What happened was I’d realized my supporting cast had no supporting background to justify any kind of emotional reaction to what I had coming next. My flashback in Chapter 5 describing How Agnes Met Elyssa and Later Went On To Meet Derek was too lightly sketched, and did nothing to promote a proper understanding of their relationships to one another. 

While Agnes is a Frankensteinian creation of pieces of six women I’ve known across the years who somehow came to life one night in my Colorado Springs basement office, Elyssa was her Manic Pixie Dream Teen Sidekick with a Dark Side. This was entertaining enough to get her through that last part of Grace Among the Dead, where she and Agnes appeared midway through to complicate the Dead Silencer’s life. But the fact remained that I somehow had a 19-year-old woman overseeing the affairs of the camp’s women, many of whom were older. Even Brother Christopher, Derek Grace’s taciturn, no-nonsense 20-year-old in charge of the camp’s young men, defers to this slender girl not yet out of her teens. How does that happen?

Elyssa Marie Godwin had to make her bones and the people around her have to know about it. Therein hangs the saga of an older sister and dutiful daughter who didn’t mind taking care of the people in her life, but wished she wasn’t taken for granted. Who was slightly more mature than her peers for what her circumstances forced her into, and took a dim view of the usual teenage tomfoolery, but was tolerant. Perhaps too tolerant. Elyssa used to put up with a lot. This was the world she lived in, these were the people of that world. What else could she do?

Then that world ended in blood and horror and Elyssa was alone. She met a woman 16 years older who still had people she was responsible for, but was alone, all the same—and doing what she could on her terms as best she could in a world always working against her. My 19-year-old semi-outsider who spent her senior year of high school online so she could take care of her injured mother, now had someone to model herself on. 

The New Weird Order is ugly and mean, but she is not taken for granted. Here, she means something to the people who mean something to her. Elyssa hates and fears the living dead to the extent she prefers Agnes and Derek to do the fighting, yet she loves where she’s at what she does in a way she never knew possible in her old life. This love makes her fierce, and earns the reverence of those around her.

My wife made this. If I were to do this over again I’d have Agnes’ hair up and her big, owlish driving glasses on. In all the stories I’ve written over the years I generally avoided even thinking about what my characters looked like. Now I have to know how tall they are, their favored manner of dress, all that jazz, even if I don’t mention it outright in the narrative

Of course, show don’t tell, and all that. So I’m breaking my rule of no chapters over 10-12 pages long five-fold by showing how Elyssa comes into her own. Before one wonders if I’m getting a little too far into The Talking Too Much Dead territory, I remind the reader that the reputation Elyssa makes for herself is during the fall of civilization at the cold dead hands of the risen dead. I have an opportunity to do two things absolutely necessary for a superior zombie post-apocalypse reading experience.

First, I’m taking the opportunity to tell a tale of the fall of civilization before the hordes of the living dead. This was what Fear the Walking Dead was supposed to be about until it went off the rails by the third or fourth episode. It’s a hard fact of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, whether it’s zombies or nukes or an alien invasion, that the most interesting parts of all that are when everything familiar begins falling apart. 

At best, it’s done slowly. You notice little things out of order. Awful things happening all around you getting ignored, then downplayed by the media. The military is moving large amounts of materiel from their bases. Some personnel disappear under new orders, others are left behind, others who had separated from the military are called back into service—for mass burial duty. Which goes wrong.

And then it’s a matter of sitting around waiting for the power to go out. You know it’s going out, and that when it goes out it’s going out for the last time. This is while you’re waiting for whomever shows first, the living dead hungry for your living flesh, or roving gangs of the living seeking that and everything else.

Secondly, I’m establishing characters with history and personality whom we will get upset for should anything happen to them. That’s all.

Imagine all this with no people. Just random dead lying under cars or squatting behind corners looking to grab your ankle and pull it into its mouth. That car coming down the road? Marauders. If you can’t escape or hold them off, be sure to save your last bullets or grenade to take you and your people out, because it will be a most prolonged and painful end for all if you’re captured.

For my part, I’m enjoying writing about women trying to make their way in world that’s become seriously, no-kidding-this-time hostile to their freedoms. This is my chance to show the pinch-faced ideologues how it’s done. As in, “with heart,” which is something such people don’t have, so they won’t understand it. It’ll just be loads of fun watching their heads explode when Agnes and Elyssa emerge as heroes all the more-or-less happy, well-adjusted people of both sexes enjoy, because these ladies aren’t doing anything to prove anything in the name of anything. They’re just getting by the best they can until they reach Abundant Life, and meet Brother Christopher and his crew, and eventually Derek Grace.

Craziest of all for me is writing in third person past tense as opposed to my usual first person present. It’s a sweet shift of gears, although I still don’t understand the problems people have with the most common (because effective) setup for action-adventure stories.

Anyway, I’m almost through this, and doing minimal edits along the way so I can get back to Chapter 25 and start the process towards everyone’s Darkest Hour. Who will survive? I can’t tell you, only that I intend it to hurt when the person that falls, falls.

It’s okay, he’s just looking for...food.