Guest Post #4 — October Weeks Talks About Zombies!

October Weeks is a fellow urban fantasy writer. Her writing is as dark, creepy, and fun as the month she’s named after. Check out this little snippet from her current work-in-progress.

She squirmed on the floor, trying to get closer. Hideous, wet sounds coming from her torn throat. Her lower jaw was gone. The left half of her face was gone as well, nothing but sickly strings and rotting flesh. No eye.

It took just one day for this to happen…

Clothes had been ripped and torn from her body when her brother had gone for the real food. There were several chunks of flesh missing; it looked as if Jaron had gone for the meat of his sister, right up and down each side of her torso and thighs.

It took me several minutes to realize that her breasts had been eaten as well. She had been well-endowed, now there was nothing at her chest except a small amount of rotting fatty tissue and the skin of one side of her left breast. And that piece of skin, though it was rotting, had obviously been licked clean.

Licked clean.

And that, my friends, is what the seventeen year old heroine of my YA Horror novel- my current WIP- has to face in her line of work. See, she’s a zombie slayer, trained by her uncle. She has sworn to help protect the town she lives in from the walking dead. And this is twenty years after the Zombie Apocalypse started to cool down, where humans have a fairly normal routine…albeit a completely different type of normal.

I never expected to write a YA, let alone one about zombies- mainly because I have a love/hate relationship with the walking dead. I love them, but they are the only horror creature that has ever given me nightmares- they still do. I cannot watch anything with zombies in it- save Scooby Doo- without having bad dreams for days afterward. Not even Disney movies wash them out. It just makes for a really messed up bad dream 

Seriously. I once made the bad decision to watch Resident Evil while I was sick and had just taken Nyquil. I dreamed in animation- the Disney kind of animation. There were zombie pumpkins, killer vines, headless horsemen, and a psychotic vampire elf.

I should write a story about that one…

Anyhoo  this fear of the walking dead doesn’t stop me from watching zombie movies or television (The Walking Dead season two is now on!!!), or reading a good zombie book. As a matter of fact, I think it all makes writing zombies easier for me because my fear is right there in my face. That translates to my heroine fighting without fear while I fear every second of what will happen if she loses- which makes for good action scenes! And I pray that all the dark and gory and vivid details in this zombie world will make those unafraid of the walking dead, afraid 

As a writer, I want my readers to feel what my characters are feeling, see what they’re seeing, touch what they’re touching. Even if that means they’re touching a rotting corpse…or killing one. If I scare a reader into nightmares, that’ll make me very happy. As a matter of fact, I’m looking forward to that day. For now, I’ll be content scaring myself as I write about my character and her world. I’d say it was therapeutic but it’s not *shrug* I just keep giving myself bad dreams.

But I’ll tell you this- I have several survival plans for the coming Zombie Apocalypse. One must be flexible. After all, you never know what type of walking dead is in our future 😉

What about all of you? Do you have a zombie survival plan? What monster still scares you?