Babel Clash

No, Jesse, you’re wrong; it will not all be okay, and the odds are good that the mean ol’ series will kill me in the night.  I will take comfort from knowing that yours is likely to do the same to you.  The series is the monster under my bed and in my closet, and since you probably have both a bed and a closet, one night, when you least expect it, you’re going to realize that you have a ten volume science fiction epic eating your brain.  And then?  Then I will laugh.

I do think that any really lively idea–and yes, this includes zombies, even if the zombies themselves can’t exactly be described as “lively”–is very likely to take over your brain and make you do what it wants.  I think of catching a story as being less like contracting the zombie virus, and more like getting one of those charming parasites that can take over ants and drive them around like little armored cars.  Once it’s in there, you just have to pray that it goes somewhere else before it chews your head entirely off.
 
Yes, I am a lot of fun at the dinner table.

The “where do you get your ideas?” question is common as mud.  The problem is…so are the ideas.  Seriously!  Putting together a good story is a lot like cooking a good meal.  You start with your protein, be it zombies or werewolves or vampires or a travelogue romance.  You add a vegetable–the end of the world, a political campaign, a race around the world, a case of mistaken identity, whatever.  Maybe you should get some starch in there: a love interest, the rumor of a cure, something in the cornfield.  Season to taste, serves four to six people per hundred pages.
 
Ideas are easy.  Combining ideas in a way that seems fresh and new (even if it isn’t) and keeps you interested until you finish writing the first draft, that’s the hard part.  Combining ideas in a way that keeps someone else interested is even harder, which is why so many stories wind up going untold, even in today’s storypalooza of Internet and print media and information everywhere.

Things that have caused me to write a book:

* Jetlag
* The Counting Crows
* Fish
* This interesting blueberry bush near my friend Michael’s house
* Fluke parasitism
* Reading Kenneth Muir’s Horror Movies of the 1980s cover to cover
* A blue sweater
* So You Think You Can Dance

Things that have remained entirely true to the original idea:

* …

…so yeah, there’s that.

Ideas have never been the problem.  Finding the exact right recipe to make those ideas come alive, that’s the hard part.  Sometimes you get it wrong.  Sometimes you’re halfway through the process before you realize that it should have been turnips, not potatoes, and you have to start basically from scratch.  Most of the time, you’ll get a better meal because you did that.  When you don’t, you’ll get a learning experience.  Not as tasty, definitely necessary to your growth as a writer.

And you can’t have my thirty-six hour days, Jesse.  I sold my soul at the crossroads to get them, fair and square, and you’re going to have to get your own.  If you’re really interested, I have a number you can call, and operators are always standing by…

See, I have a little problem: I am incapable of thinking in one-book increments.  Feed actually started as my attempt to write a book that would have no sequels, largely because I envisioned it as ending in such a way that none of my cast would ever be willing to work with me again (assuming any of them lived that long–this was a lot of drafts ago, and I honestly have no idea who was originally supposed to walk away when the dust cleared).

I tend to start less with plot than I do with situation.  In this case, my starting “what if?” was “what if the zombie apocalypse came, and the human race didn’t end in a blaze of bodily fluids and bullets?”  I wanted to play with the ecology of zombies.  Plot, and character, really didn’t matter to me, because I wasn’t going to write the book.  I was just going to play with the dead things.

Then I met my protagonists, Shaun and Georgia Mason, and character started to matter to me.  Who were they?  Why were they those people?  What did they think about each other?  About the people around them?  About the zombies?  I have literally hundreds of pages of notes on things like “what does Shaun eat for breakfast” and “how does Georgia feel about the current weapon licensing system?”  This had the handy side-effect of leaving me with hundreds of pages of notes on the world and how it worked (and people who thought Feed had a lot of data in it, you really have no idea…)

I was about halfway through writing Feed when I realized that there was going to be a sequel, and what that sequel was going to be about.  I did a lot of swearing, and took a lot more notes.  I was about two-thirds of the way through when I realized it was a trilogy.  Thankfully, there isn’t a fourth book (yet), because if there were, I think my head would probably explode.  But all in all, this is a good microcosm of how I write series.

For me, a series is an organic, living thing, a story that sprouts unexpected branches and then goes trundling merrily along them, like a snowball rolling down a hill.  Stories attract stories attract stories.  Sometimes, stories have endings, and that means the series is done; the Newsflesh trilogy really is intended as a trilogy, whereas the books I write under my urban fantasy ID (Seanan McGuire) tend to be part of long, twisty, ongoing series–and even those tend to grow on me when I’m not looking.  I live in a sea of literary kudzu.

It’s rare that I get to want anything; mostly, I just follow the story where it takes me, and, when necessary, break out the hammer of logic to force everything back on track.  It’s exciting.  In that “oh God oh God oh God what am I doing where am I going is that a hill?” kind of way.  Good thing I like roller coasters, huh?

I envy people who can decide “I think I’m going to write a series today,” rather than waking up and finding themselves six books into something that promises to be twenty-seven books long.  It must be restful.  So yes, Jesse, you have my envy.

So Jesse mentioned the concept of the “why” at the end of her last blog.  I like the “why”.  I like the “why” a little bit too much, as the occasional narrative restraining order will illustrate.  I was the little kid who would keep asking “Why?” for an hour, not because I wanted to be obnoxious (although I often was), but because I really truly deeply honestly wanted to know.  Why was the sky blue?  Why do cats have whiskers?  Why can’t I unleash an unstoppable army of cyborg dinosaurs to destroy all in their path before making me unquestioned ruler of the shattered world?  Why?

(Atmospheric scattering, so they can figure out whether they can fit through small spaces, and because my friends won’t let me.  You should probably thank my friends.  They are all that can stand between mankind and my frequently quixotic wrath.)
 
Now, I am the first to admit that things are scary even when they’re unexplained.  If you open your closet and a live rattlesnake is rattling at you from the middle of the clean towels, you’re not going to go “Well, this snake would be frightening and venomous if only it had a motivation and a logical reason for being here.”  You’re going to go “AHHHHHHH CRAP SNAKE!” and slam the closet door.  Even if you know why the snake is there–you live in rattlesnake country, you’re in the middle of a Syfy Original Movie, I came for dinner and my bag was making ominous rattling noises–you’re still probably going to go “AHHHHHHH CRAP SNAKE!” and slam the closet door.  Knowledge does not always eliminate fear.

Knowledge can, however, be used to enhance fear.  Imagine you’re swimming in a warm tropical river, content and serene.  Now imagine I come drifting by in a nice boat, refusing to touch the water.  That would be worrisome, right?  Now imagine I proceed to explain that I’m staying out of the water because it’s full of candiru, otherwise known as “urethra fish,” and go on to detail exactly what will happen if the candiru find you.  (I would do this.  Gleefully.  Because I think things like the candiru are cool.)  You’ll go from “tranquil” to “terrified” in under a minute, all because of knowledge.

That being said, in some cases, too much knowledge can actually cancel out fear.  I grew up in black widow country.  I have black widows living under my house and on my back porch.  I know what they look like, what their bites feel like, how dangerous they are, and how to avoid them.  I know that they’re actually pretty shy, as spiders go, and that if I don’t mess with them, they’re not likely to mess with me.  I am not afraid of them, because I know too much about them.  The “why” has become the antithesis of horror, and that’s, y’know, bad news for you if you were hoping to scare me with spiders any time soon.  (It’s also bad news for the people who choose to room with me in places like, say, Australia, where the spiders are the size of dinner plates and thirst for the taste of human souls.  I think they’re adorable.  This is bad for the health of everyone around me.)

So it’s a delicate balance between knowing/not knowing, and one that has to be maintained with the utmost care.  I believe that a little bit of knowledge can go a long, long way toward enhancing the quality of terror, like a pinch of salt can go a long, long way toward enhancing the taste of chocolate chip cookies.  Without that tiny bit of bitter, the sweet isn’t nearly as strong.  Well, without that tiny pinch of comprehension, the terror isn’t going to last nearly as long.

Like G.I. Joe once said, knowing is half the battle.

The other half involves a chainsaw and a shotgun.

So Jesse–who is apparently a lot more destructive than I knew, and by the way, if you come over, Jesse, I’m hiding the C4–wants to know why mankind has not yet descended into chaos and anarchy and lots of Mad Max-style hairstyling in the Newsflesh universe.

The short answer: Because I didn’t want it to, and I’m the author, so I get to have my way.

The long answer: The collapse of civilization isn’t a guaranteed result of any given apocalypse.  Look at Independence Day.  The aliens wiped out like half the planet in a very short period of time, and you still walk away from the movie feeling like they’ll be rebuilding by the end of the year.  The Canadians burned down the White House once, and we built a new one; why not just do the same after the aliens atomize it?  Mankind is very fond of reconstruction.  We’re sort of like wasps that way.  Kick over a wasps’ nest, the wasps will just build a new one.  After stinging the ever-loving crap out of you, that is.

The total collapse of society is predicated on several elements:

1. Population loss.  You need a lot of people to die, very quickly.
2. Lack of government response.  You need the government, for whatever reason, to delay action.
3. Failure of vital systems.  You need to lose power, shipping, communications, and law enforcement, all very quickly, all without replacement systems in place.

Stephen King’s The Stand achieves the collapse of society primarily through step one: population loss, with a lovely extra dose of step two: governmental denial.  Dawn of the Dead, on the other hand, achieves the collapse of society primarily through step three: even before most of the people are dead, the power’s out, there’s chaos in the streets, and everybody’s shooting wildly at everybody else.  As a rule, you need two of these elements to totally destroy society, and all three if you want to salt the ashes.

The apocalypse in Feed (colloquially known as “the Rising”) was specifically designed to avoid hitting any of the steps above whenever possible.  First off, while we did suffer some pretty major population loss, the start of the infection was documented enough that the death rate was a lot lower than it might have otherwise been.  Secondly, thanks to the CDC and WHO, the government was involved on a global scale almost immediately, which also did a great deal to keep things intact.  Finally, the fact that it was the zombie apocalypse meant that we had a very high geek survival rate…and they, along with the speed of governmental response, kept the power on.

Breaking everything so badly it can’t be fixed takes an incredibly fast death rate and a speed of collapse that is frankly not pretty (and probably leads to multiple unpleasant nuclear reactor incidents, since zombies can’t vent the core).  Plus, I’ve done it before.  I wanted to see what it would take to put society back together with duct tape and paranoia.  And it was fun!

So why did you feel the need to break everything?  Apocalypses like that are the reason the dystopian future can’t have nice things.

So Jesse wants us to get into the funny.  That’s cool.  I can roll with the funny–and not just the sort of funny that involves erecting elaborate scarecrows around the edges of the campsite while everyone else is still sleeping (although that was pretty funny).  I’m a funny girl.  I have to be, because funny is an absolutely integral part of horror.  Allow me to elaborate.

Have you ever been scared?  I mean really, really scared?  I’m talking about the kind of scared that makes your stomach drop down to your ankles and your head feel like it’s full of helium while your feet feel like they’re made of lead.  Think about that feeling.  Now?  Think about the way you felt immediately after you realized that you weren’t about to be eaten alive by an undead clown made entirely out of spiders.  Are you giggling nervously?  Well, you’re not alone.

Laughter is a natural human response to fear.  When something scares you, you try to laugh it off.  You make light of it, make jokes about it, because that keeps your brain from completely overloading.  (The line between “healthy, cleansing laughter” and “scary, hysterical laughter that makes everyone inch away from you and consider taking their chances with the zombies” is tragically thin, by the way.  So try not to laugh too much.)

My favorite horror movies and novels have always been the ones that included an element of comedy.  Stephen King’s IT is a beautiful example of blending screams with laughter–the kids may have everything evil under the sun to deal with, but they still get the giggles, goof off, and generally act like actual people put into an unbearable situation.  Or take Slither, written and directed by James Gunn.  That movie is insane, and I mean that in the best way possible.  And yes, all those people keep laughing, keep making jokes, and keep getting obsessed with little things, because that’s what keeps you sane when things get unbearable.

I find it really troublesome when horror loses its sense of humor.  No, a decapitation shouldn’t be funny, but that’s an extreme, and there’s a whole lot of room on the other end of the scale.  If things get too grim, too unrelentingly dark and depressing, why should I even bother trying to make it through?  It might be better to bow out while I still can, and go enjoy a story that still allows for a little bit of giggling in between the screams.  (It’s also possible to go too far toward the funny, resulting in things like Jason X, which was a lot of fun, but wasn’t really a horror movie.  Finding that fine line is part of the art of writing horror, like walking a trapeze line over a swimming pool filled with hungry mutant piranha.)

You can’t spell “slaughter” without “laughter.”  And that’s exactly the way I like it.

Sometimes I feel like I’m a missionary from the First Church of Romero.  “Hello.  My name is Mira Grant.  Are you prepared for the inevitable zombie apocalypse?  Have you accepted the shotgun, chainsaw, and cleansing flame as your personal saviors?  Would you like an informational pamphlet?”  Like most missionaries, I feel very strongly about my message, and have grown accustomed to having doors slamming in my face.  Accusations of insanity are not uncommon.  (Unlike most missionaries, I’m not worried about going into bad neighborhoods, because very few faiths are as well-armed as the First Church of Romero.)  The end of the world as we know it is coming, people!  When the dead rise, will you feel fine?

I started preparing for the coming of the monsters when I was about nine, and booby-trapped my closet to prevent the large, hairy, hulking beast I was sure lurked behind my clothes.  My mother was afraid reading Stephen King would give me nightmares, but let me tell you, the man had nothing on C.S. Lewis.  I’m pretty sure we can blame Narnia for an entire generation growing up convinced that their closets led to a magical wonderland…of death.  Stephen King was much more upfront about things, and I appreciated that.

My introduction to the inevitable zombie menace came, not from George Romero, but from old episodes of Doctor Who and issues of Creepy and Eerie magazine.  Their many, many iterations of the undead had only two things in common: they didn’t stop for anything, and they were planning to eat or convert us all.  Pretty straightforward.  I like a straightforward monster.

I like zombies.

I like their flexibility.  Zombies are the Unitarianism of monsters–there’s room for everybody in here, as long as you’re willing to work with a few very simple core tenets.  Zombies will eat you.  Zombies used to be you.  Zombies will make you into a zombie.  Once your mother has been bitten by a zombie, she’s not your mother anymore.  There’s room for fast zombies, slow zombies, viral zombies, parasite zombies, alien zombies, even nanotech zombies.  Some zombies are alive, some zombies are dead, but all zombies want to eat you.  It works for me.

I like that–with very few exceptions, most of them recent, although “I Am Legend” is definitely the granddaddy of this particular branch on the family tree–zombies are the monster you can kill without feeling bad about it later.  It’s not that I’m a bloodthirsty person.  It’s just that, in a world where vampires, werewolves, even unstoppable serial killers and mutant sharks, can have feelings and families, it’s nice to have something where the rational response is “kill it with fire.”  Kill it with fire, I can do.

I like that everyone has a zombie apocalypse plan.  Some of them aren’t very well-thought-out, but they represent a step toward disaster preparedness that many people would never take unless it was directed at a fictional event.  “Do you have your earthquake kit?” is a morbid question.  “Do you have your zombie kit?” is an excuse to start talking about water purification after the infrastructure collapses.  People are weird.  And weird is good.

So this is me, ringing your doorbell, knocking on the door of your underground bunker, transmitting wirelessly through the wall of your hermetically-sealed shack, and asking: Are you prepared for the inevitable zombie apocalypse?  Have you accepted the shotgun, chainsaw, and cleansing flame as your personal saviors?

Would you like an informational pamphlet?