on writing

Over the past month I've been working on what I hope to be my last zombie novel. I have this weird OCD thing where I like to write things in three (why'd you think I made "Dwellers of the Night" a trilogy?). This project will be my third and, I hope, last zombie novel. I don't know why I'm so into writing about zombies, especially since I'm not into other zombie books, or graphic novels, or movies, or really anything at all. It's quite surprising. Perhaps there's a sort of romantic element involved, because I wrote my first successful zombie novel in high school; maybe there's a touch of charm and antiquity thrown in there. 

This story's more an experiment than everything. I'm toying with a different writing style, and though I'm tempted to abandon it, I'm going to stick with it just to see what happens. Describing this writing style is difficult. You see, the highest level of English and Literature I ever reached was a sophomore college class. I don't know all the technical names, the formats and structures, all that stuff. I just like to write stories, and I'm damned good at it. My writing style has been an eclectic mix largely dominated by the varying influences of Michael Crichton, H.P. Lovecraft, and (more recently) Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy (though I could just say Hemingway, since what I love about McCarthy is how he took Hemingway's style and reworked it a bit; and the echoes of the Faulknerian tradition in McCarthy take me down happy trails, as well). This writing style could be something glimpsed, perhaps, in Chuck Palahniuk (I'm reading his "Lullaby" right now) or Bret Easton Ellis ("American Psycho," the novel and not the Christian Bale adaptation). 

The story begins in Hilton Head, South Carolina (the beginning part was written in Hilton Head, so why not?), then blossoms in Cincinnati, and then takes a drive up 71 to the Old House in Wilmington, and then cruises right back down to the Ohio River. That's a geographical mapping of the story-line, which follows the Main Character through the first several days of a zombie epidemic (not a pandemic, as I've done in the best), and the story is retold from the main character's perspective as he awaits his final resolution. There's a lot more going on there (sub-plots, turning points, rising and falling action, see what I did there?), but that's the gist of it. My hope is that it's not over 350 pages. I want to keep it small. But my attempts at novellas over against novels always fail, so I'll just accept that it won't be 300 or fewer.