BYBS: Zombies

I know when it's my turn to be torn apart by zombies I will want people to
photograph the event.
Photo by Laughing Squid

As with many people who happen upon a scene of flesh eating zombies who are about to turn someone into a Big Mac, my first thought was "Hey!  Maybe I can make this into a blog posting!"  OK, so maybe that might not be most people's first thought, but up there in the top 10 would be "Maybe I can make this into the topic for a short story!"  This posting is about both so I get double blog-scrabble points, even though it's not a Sunday so it's not quite a BYBS posting.

Where was I?  Oh yes, flesh eating zombies!  Well, the story idea is this: what if zombies were actually tastee critters?  Like most of my good ideas, this one isn't mine: it was already the topic of "Ultimate Survivor," a flash spoof of the Survivor "reality" TV show that Kev created on the long neglected site of Killfrog.com

Note: that site is sick, sick, sick, as one might imagine if it shows up on this site, so if you visit it please remember that I warned you.

At any rate, if zombies did make good eatin' then they would actually be in a rather poor situation.  True, there are an awful lot of them, at least according to most movies, but they are usually rather slow, stupid and uncoordinated.  Therefore, it seems to me that in our, erm, "consumer" society they could end up on the defensive rather quickly.

So my story centers on a bunch of zombies who hole up in a mall, with hordes of normal people trying to eat them...

BYBS: An Audience

I recently embarked on another abuse of the English language. That is, I started writing another story. This one is called "Evening" and is a spoof of the "Harry Potter" series as well as the movie "Twilight." I had attempted to write this story before, but stopped when I found that I didn't like the premise as much as I thought I would.

I'll hopefully do better this time because I'm writing for an audience, or specifically Tanis who has encouraged me to keep at this whole writing thing. Hence by blessing for the week is having an audience who is willing to read the stuff I write.

This neatly allows me to both creating another page in said story while creating a BYBS entry at the same time. What's more, I even have another idea for next week. Which I will write. I wont put it off. Honest.

Less is More

When it comes to writing, I think less really is more.

In the case of editing a story, I think trying to limit the length results in a better story. It forces me to cut out scenes, dialog, etc. that are superfluous in favor of those that are absolutely necessary. The scenes that are left end up getting picked over to make them more efficient.

The result is a story without a lot of filler. It gets to the point quickly and takes less time for my readers (both of them) to get through.

I've heard this sort of thing from a couple of my favorite authors. Roger Zelazny and Larry Niven both had several short stories that they turned into novellas or novels – in a couple of these cases I recall reading that they preferred the short story because it was "tighter" or that it tried to communicate fewer ideas.

I have to say that as a reader, I agree with them.