ChronoGrl
12-14-2010, 06:50 PM
At my previous job, I used to fantasize about a zombie invasion breaking out at work and who I would want to save and who I would watch die horribly at the hands of the flesh-eating horde.
The first thing to consider when fantasizing about a zombie outbreak is how, exactly, it would start. I remember that the first zombie I would see would be Vlad, a loud, rotund Ukrainian man who asked me out enough to lunch to make me think that he was hitting on me. Then again, I made enough "let's take vodka shots" comments to him, so that he probably thought that I was a lush, or, at a bare minimum, an easy lay.
Like most of the developers that I worked with, Vlad was generally unkempt, in jeans and a tee shirt, so I would imagine him stumbling into work but not exactly realizing that he had become one of the walking dead - Here I could conceivably slip in some kind of "dirty foreigner" joke of ironically bad taste and ignore the grumbling monstrosity for the time being.
The next thing that I would start thinking about is who I would watch die - At the time, my angst was mostly aimed at two people: My boss Todd and my frenemy Shannon, whose goal at work had suddenly become making my life miserable. She would constantly IM me short novels about her insipid melodramatic relationship with the manchild that she was dating (both of them being 40, I had very little patience for this whiney drivel), so of course I would imagine that, as the zombies started to take over the building, Shannon would stay behind, trying to connect with Sam, who, of course is seen leaving with the first group of runaways to successfully extricate themselves from the premises.
Later on, when she predictably became a zombie, I would imagine taking one of my pens (the Pilot G2 gel pen - blue) and using it to gouge out her eyes and force feed her the goldfish of one of our coworkers (did I mention that she was a vegetarian)?
Unfortunately, I would get stuck when it came to fantasizing about slaughtering my zombie-fied boss because at that point I started thinking that I was some kind of sociopath and that if I actually wrote any of this down, I would not only be fired but quite possibly incarcerated for assault.
Which then, of course made me wonder what type of guts I actually have as a write...
And THEN that awful voice inside myself would say, "Well, you probably couldn't articulate it well enough anyway..."
SO
Here comes the crux of this thread - Have you ever used prose to fight your enemies? If so, share it here, however long or short... Do you feel comfortable doing so? As horror writers, how much truth to you pull to construct your victims? And if there is any at all, do you feel bad doing so?
The first thing to consider when fantasizing about a zombie outbreak is how, exactly, it would start. I remember that the first zombie I would see would be Vlad, a loud, rotund Ukrainian man who asked me out enough to lunch to make me think that he was hitting on me. Then again, I made enough "let's take vodka shots" comments to him, so that he probably thought that I was a lush, or, at a bare minimum, an easy lay.
Like most of the developers that I worked with, Vlad was generally unkempt, in jeans and a tee shirt, so I would imagine him stumbling into work but not exactly realizing that he had become one of the walking dead - Here I could conceivably slip in some kind of "dirty foreigner" joke of ironically bad taste and ignore the grumbling monstrosity for the time being.
The next thing that I would start thinking about is who I would watch die - At the time, my angst was mostly aimed at two people: My boss Todd and my frenemy Shannon, whose goal at work had suddenly become making my life miserable. She would constantly IM me short novels about her insipid melodramatic relationship with the manchild that she was dating (both of them being 40, I had very little patience for this whiney drivel), so of course I would imagine that, as the zombies started to take over the building, Shannon would stay behind, trying to connect with Sam, who, of course is seen leaving with the first group of runaways to successfully extricate themselves from the premises.
Later on, when she predictably became a zombie, I would imagine taking one of my pens (the Pilot G2 gel pen - blue) and using it to gouge out her eyes and force feed her the goldfish of one of our coworkers (did I mention that she was a vegetarian)?
Unfortunately, I would get stuck when it came to fantasizing about slaughtering my zombie-fied boss because at that point I started thinking that I was some kind of sociopath and that if I actually wrote any of this down, I would not only be fired but quite possibly incarcerated for assault.
Which then, of course made me wonder what type of guts I actually have as a write...
And THEN that awful voice inside myself would say, "Well, you probably couldn't articulate it well enough anyway..."
SO
Here comes the crux of this thread - Have you ever used prose to fight your enemies? If so, share it here, however long or short... Do you feel comfortable doing so? As horror writers, how much truth to you pull to construct your victims? And if there is any at all, do you feel bad doing so?