Working Title "Alive"

[summer_sparrow]

Looks like I might be kind of accidentally Nano-ing. Sort of. And right after a post complaining about how I can't write anymore... I try to do NaNo even when I feel like I can't write.

(I had a fair large chunk of text LJ cut here as to why I wasn't doing NaNo, then I realized that it really had no bearing on the post. Anyone who wants to know can ask. The short version is I find the place far too cliquish and not particularly welcoming these days.)

And THEN I discovered post-apocalyptic novels are not as uncommon as I thought.

I can't being to express my love for apocalypse scenarios and post-apocalyptic stories. I thought WaterWorld was great. I read a Niven story recently (Fallen Angels was the title, I think) wherein fen basically saved the modern-ice-age world.

So I was poking around Amazon.com last night, reading reviews of various post-A fiction and non-fiction. The reviews for two books in particular struck me, because they mentioned realism (as regards post-apocalyptic scenarios).

Fast forward twenty minutes, I'm taking a shower, minding my own business, and suddenly my brain starts trying to figure out realistic zombies and how this affects the world.

Yeah, I'm sure you can all guess what happened from there.

(If this sounds snippy, please chalk it up to the fact that I'm at work and I hate it here. It's not meant to be but I think I read things differently than a lot of people do.) Edited to remove the book titles as they're not actually releveant to my point which was "I'm wanting to write again HURRAH!" and all three comments thus far referenced them. I'm just so completely disinterested in both books (they're not at all my style).

Comments

[sparrowinsky.livejournal.com]

Disease. I'm still working out the kinks, but essentially it's a virus that works in three stages. Stage one, abnormal behavior and some physical effects. Stage two, seizures followed by a coma. Stage three, zombieism. The bodies are still alive, however the infected are at this point mindless, driven by the need to consume (anything, really) and infect. They just go until they drop. You could call it decay, I suppose. The infected basically rot away until they die, theoretically having served their purpose of infecting further hosts.

I'm not entirely sure whether it's man-made, natural, or some combination. I'm leaning towards man-made via standard disease routes (pigs, I'm thinking, but not sure yet).