Story: “Afterlife” (<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction; Pre-, During-, and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction; Zombie Stories That Don’t Say the “Z” Word
Keywords: “Holy Sh*t, They’re Here;” Hurricane Katrina News Clips; Goth Clubs of Washington, DC
Trivia: The soundtrack to the preview for the never-been-filmed movie version of this story is the Shiny Toy Guns cover of Depeche Mode’s song “Stripped.”
You’re known for writing strictly realistic fiction. What made you decide to try your hand at a zombie-story-that-doesn’t-say-
It was actually my husband’s idea. He said he would like to see a story or movie about a group of characters who were descending (or ascending) into decadence (alcohol, sex, drugs) as a form of escapism during an apocalypse. Or, he said something like that and that’s how my brain chose to interpret it.
Of course, once I started working on the story, I realized that none of the characters would be in the mood for sex, so they just went with alcohol and drugs instead. And only some of them did even that. I didn’t actually hew all that close to his original vision, come to think of it.
I felt pretty sure that I could write about a sci-fi type of thing like a zombie invasion, but do it my way – in this realistic tone that’s supposed to make you trust that the narrator is telling you the truth. I didn’t want this story to be about entertainment, or gore. But then, a lot of apocalyptic stories are more about the atmosphere or aesthetic than anything else – I think that’s why so many of them skip the apocalypse action altogether and put you right there in all this bleakness. It’s almost a style thing for some writers, I think.
The short answer is that I pride myself on being a flexible and experimental writer who will try just about anything. My friend Oliver used to issue me writing challenges – we imagined we were all cerebral and fancy, like Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth in “The Five Obstructions” – to shake me out of my comfortable trance. He’d tell me to write a mystery story, or about sports. And I did it, and some of those writings are among my favorite pieces I’ve created. … That’s not really such a short answer after all. Sorry.
As is often the case in your writing, the characters in this story are based on actual people you know, right?
Yeah – you know how you always see that blurb in books, on one of those terribly official front pages, that says: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental?” If you ever see that in one of my books, know that it’s a lie. Know that some lawyer made me put that in there.
As for the specific characters, the boyfriend who went away to help fight the zombies, or the terrorists or the epidemic or whatever the unnamed scourge is (probably zombies), is my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time I wrote the story. Udo is my friend Kier, who is in love with me. That might sound like a weird or arrogant thing to say, but he will tell you that it’s true. Kiki is heavily based on one of Kier’s former roommates, and Arthur is lightly based on “Kiki”’s friend from her hometown who visited her one time, and about whom I know almost nothing. Donnie is somewhat based on the druggie roommate I lived with briefly in San Diego. And of course, the protagonist is always me.
I was just going to say that your fans have come to expect to find a stand-in for you in most of your stories – a female, approximately whatever age you were when you wrote the story, probably living in the DC/VA/MD region, with many of your characteristics (introspective, atheist, etc.).
It’s true. And this story’s no different. That’s me in there, the first-person narrator. I guess that’s just me being lazy. Nothing feels as natural as speaking in your own voice. Part of me worries about coming across as inauthentic when I write from the point of view of, say, a 70-year-old Hispanic man living in Arizona (I did that for my story “Two skies, one in Heaven and one on Earth”). At least, if I write as “me,” no one can accuse me of having the protagonist do something out-of-character, because I can say, “Hey, that character is me, and I’m telling you that’s what I would do.”
You’ve said that the zombie-story-that-doesn’t-say-
That’s right. At the center of this story is this girl whose boyfriend has gone off to do something noble – and she respects and admires him, but she wishes he were there with her. At the same time, there’s this guy – Udo – who’s right here, right now. He loves her. He’s saying, “Stay with me,” sleep with me in my bed, your boyfriend is not here, and so on. For the protagonist, there’s a tension between her loyalty and commitment – and love – to and for her boyfriend, and the more immediate comfort and companionship – and love – that Udo can offer her right now.
Of course, this dynamic isn’t characteristic of all long-distance relationships. When I wrote this story, my boyfriend (the man who’s now my husband) was working a civilian-contractor gig in Baghdad; he’d been over there before when he was in the Army in 2003. I totally understand why he did this, but at some point while we were dating long-distance he made the decision to stay in Iraq for another six months. The pay was great, the work was interesting, he was working on paying off his house, and working through some other personal issues that were partly why he went out there in the first place. But it made me sad, because I wanted him over here with me.
So I guess the only thing I can say with any degree of confidence is: This story is about my long-distance relationship. But I find comfort in this James Joyce quotation, which I stuck atop one of my blogs: “In the particular is contained the universal.” I tell myself that whenever I’m worried that I’m being too self-absorbed. Hey man, James Joyce says I am universal.
Why did you decide that the goth club in DC – which I believe is based on a real goth club you sometimes go to – would make a cameo in the story?
The goth club is based on Spellbound, which is a goth night that’s held in this spunky little basement bar with cobblestone walls, in the bottom of a big chain hotel. They have lasers for the dancefloor and a fog machine and it’s pretty adorable. I was never really into that subculture, but a friend invited me to it several years ago and I met such good people there. I met Kier there; I met a lot of the people I interact with regularly on Facebook and such at Spellbound.
The Spellbound cameo – and also that of the crepe place, where a lot of us go after Spellbound – was more of a shout-out than anything. It’s a little arbitrary. You could read some deep meaning into it – for example, you could say: “These people used to feign death as a style, as an aesthetic, and now they’re surrounded by rot and decay and it’s not so fun anymore,” or something like that. But when I was writing the story, it was more just a place for the group to go together.
There really is a dude who reads Tarot cards in a red-lit corner. And some of the other specific characters I described there are based on real people, too.
A lot of the scenes in this story are slice-of-life – they describe little moments and details – but it’s a slice of life you’ve never experienced, and that nobody has ever experienced (if in fact the apocalypse in this story is being caused by zombies). How did you make those details up?
I was very nervous about creating fictional-yet-factual details for this story. It’s as if I had a chorus of zombie-fiction nerds watching me type with their arms folded across their chests, saying: “Pfft, everyone knows it wouldn’t happen that way.” Or: “Picking through raided grocery-store produce? That is so played-out.” I don’t read zombie stories, so I don’t even know what is or isn’t cliché for that genre. If I accidentally put in stuff that’s cliché, I feel as if it shouldn’t count against me, because I didn’t know it was a cliché, so it was new to me!
I pretty much just tried to imagine how things might play out if, say, the grid went out. If suddenly there were no government-provided amenities, no media, just people hearing things through word of mouth like in the olden days. I’m sure I flubbed some things. I did my best.
For me, images from news coverage I’d seen of Hurricane Katrina served as a sad sort of guide – such as the footage I describe in “Afterlife” of the young people in the apartment, the girl who said: “We’re a band of merry pirates.” They even had a little flag.
I guess the more direct answer is simply that I made everything up. As usual, I didn’t do any research, beyond the most cursory Google searches. I just thought: “I wear contacts and am legally blind without them; wouldn’t it suck to run out of contacts and not be able to see the stars?” “I bet seeing old ‘normal’ things, such as magazines coming out every month, would make them nostalgic.” I hope that at least some of the details I came up with were fairly original.
What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That humanity is infinitely inspiring and poignant – to quote myself here like some kind of egomaniacal jerk: “I felt an ache for the fragile beauty of this world.”
Genre: Short Fiction; Pre-, During-, and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction; Zombie Stories That Don’t Say the “Z” Word
Keywords: “Holy Sh*t, They’re Here;” Hurricane Katrina News Clips; Goth Clubs of Washington, DC
Trivia: The soundtrack to the preview for the never-been-filmed movie version of this story is the Shiny Toy Guns cover of Depeche Mode’s song “Stripped.”
You’re known for writing strictly realistic fiction. What made you decide to try your hand at a zombie-story-that-doesn’t-say-
It was actually my husband’s idea. He said he would like to see a story or movie about a group of characters who were descending (or ascending) into decadence (alcohol, sex, drugs) as a form of escapism during an apocalypse. Or, he said something like that and that’s how my brain chose to interpret it.
Of course, once I started working on the story, I realized that none of the characters would be in the mood for sex, so they just went with alcohol and drugs instead. And only some of them did even that. I didn’t actually hew all that close to his original vision, come to think of it.
I felt pretty sure that I could write about a sci-fi type of thing like a zombie invasion, but do it my way – in this realistic tone that’s supposed to make you trust that the narrator is telling you the truth. I didn’t want this story to be about entertainment, or gore. But then, a lot of apocalyptic stories are more about the atmosphere or aesthetic than anything else – I think that’s why so many of them skip the apocalypse action altogether and put you right there in all this bleakness. It’s almost a style thing for some writers, I think.
The short answer is that I pride myself on being a flexible and experimental writer who will try just about anything. My friend Oliver used to issue me writing challenges – we imagined we were all cerebral and fancy, like Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth in “The Five Obstructions” – to shake me out of my comfortable trance. He’d tell me to write a mystery story, or about sports. And I did it, and some of those writings are among my favorite pieces I’ve created. … That’s not really such a short answer after all. Sorry.
As is often the case in your writing, the characters in this story are based on actual people you know, right?
Yeah – you know how you always see that blurb in books, on one of those terribly official front pages, that says: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental?” If you ever see that in one of my books, know that it’s a lie. Know that some lawyer made me put that in there.
As for the specific characters, the boyfriend who went away to help fight the zombies, or the terrorists or the epidemic or whatever the unnamed scourge is (probably zombies), is my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time I wrote the story. Udo is my friend Kier, who is in love with me. That might sound like a weird or arrogant thing to say, but he will tell you that it’s true. Kiki is heavily based on one of Kier’s former roommates, and Arthur is lightly based on “Kiki”’s friend from her hometown who visited her one time, and about whom I know almost nothing. Donnie is somewhat based on the druggie roommate I lived with briefly in San Diego. And of course, the protagonist is always me.
I was just going to say that your fans have come to expect to find a stand-in for you in most of your stories – a female, approximately whatever age you were when you wrote the story, probably living in the DC/VA/MD region, with many of your characteristics (introspective, atheist, etc.).
It’s true. And this story’s no different. That’s me in there, the first-person narrator. I guess that’s just me being lazy. Nothing feels as natural as speaking in your own voice. Part of me worries about coming across as inauthentic when I write from the point of view of, say, a 70-year-old Hispanic man living in Arizona (I did that for my story “Two skies, one in Heaven and one on Earth”). At least, if I write as “me,” no one can accuse me of having the protagonist do something out-of-character, because I can say, “Hey, that character is me, and I’m telling you that’s what I would do.”
You’ve said that the zombie-story-that-doesn’t-say-
That’s right. At the center of this story is this girl whose boyfriend has gone off to do something noble – and she respects and admires him, but she wishes he were there with her. At the same time, there’s this guy – Udo – who’s right here, right now. He loves her. He’s saying, “Stay with me,” sleep with me in my bed, your boyfriend is not here, and so on. For the protagonist, there’s a tension between her loyalty and commitment – and love – to and for her boyfriend, and the more immediate comfort and companionship – and love – that Udo can offer her right now.
Of course, this dynamic isn’t characteristic of all long-distance relationships. When I wrote this story, my boyfriend (the man who’s now my husband) was working a civilian-contractor gig in Baghdad; he’d been over there before when he was in the Army in 2003. I totally understand why he did this, but at some point while we were dating long-distance he made the decision to stay in Iraq for another six months. The pay was great, the work was interesting, he was working on paying off his house, and working through some other personal issues that were partly why he went out there in the first place. But it made me sad, because I wanted him over here with me.
So I guess the only thing I can say with any degree of confidence is: This story is about my long-distance relationship. But I find comfort in this James Joyce quotation, which I stuck atop one of my blogs: “In the particular is contained the universal.” I tell myself that whenever I’m worried that I’m being too self-absorbed. Hey man, James Joyce says I am universal.
Why did you decide that the goth club in DC – which I believe is based on a real goth club you sometimes go to – would make a cameo in the story?
The goth club is based on Spellbound, which is a goth night that’s held in this spunky little basement bar with cobblestone walls, in the bottom of a big chain hotel. They have lasers for the dancefloor and a fog machine and it’s pretty adorable. I was never really into that subculture, but a friend invited me to it several years ago and I met such good people there. I met Kier there; I met a lot of the people I interact with regularly on Facebook and such at Spellbound.
The Spellbound cameo – and also that of the crepe place, where a lot of us go after Spellbound – was more of a shout-out than anything. It’s a little arbitrary. You could read some deep meaning into it – for example, you could say: “These people used to feign death as a style, as an aesthetic, and now they’re surrounded by rot and decay and it’s not so fun anymore,” or something like that. But when I was writing the story, it was more just a place for the group to go together.
There really is a dude who reads Tarot cards in a red-lit corner. And some of the other specific characters I described there are based on real people, too.
A lot of the scenes in this story are slice-of-life – they describe little moments and details – but it’s a slice of life you’ve never experienced, and that nobody has ever experienced (if in fact the apocalypse in this story is being caused by zombies). How did you make those details up?
I was very nervous about creating fictional-yet-factual details for this story. It’s as if I had a chorus of zombie-fiction nerds watching me type with their arms folded across their chests, saying: “Pfft, everyone knows it wouldn’t happen that way.” Or: “Picking through raided grocery-store produce? That is so played-out.” I don’t read zombie stories, so I don’t even know what is or isn’t cliché for that genre. If I accidentally put in stuff that’s cliché, I feel as if it shouldn’t count against me, because I didn’t know it was a cliché, so it was new to me!
I pretty much just tried to imagine how things might play out if, say, the grid went out. If suddenly there were no government-provided amenities, no media, just people hearing things through word of mouth like in the olden days. I’m sure I flubbed some things. I did my best.
For me, images from news coverage I’d seen of Hurricane Katrina served as a sad sort of guide – such as the footage I describe in “Afterlife” of the young people in the apartment, the girl who said: “We’re a band of merry pirates.” They even had a little flag.
I guess the more direct answer is simply that I made everything up. As usual, I didn’t do any research, beyond the most cursory Google searches. I just thought: “I wear contacts and am legally blind without them; wouldn’t it suck to run out of contacts and not be able to see the stars?” “I bet seeing old ‘normal’ things, such as magazines coming out every month, would make them nostalgic.” I hope that at least some of the details I came up with were fairly original.
What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That humanity is infinitely inspiring and poignant – to quote myself here like some kind of egomaniacal jerk: “I felt an ache for the fragile beauty of this world.”
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