1 - My Book By Nathan Sullivan
I have recently begun work on a story, which my friends and I had talked about for a number of weeks. The idea for this story came to me and one of my close friends at a party. We are both fans of over-the-top action movies with unrealistic fight scenes, near impossible story lines, and villains so evil and corrupt that you have to love them. It was with this mindset that we began our plotting for what we believed could become one of the greatest horror/drama/action stories to ever come out of Illinois. It was a Friday night and the going away party for a friend was winding down. I was standing over the slowly dying fire looking into the flames as they slowly grew dimmer, when Brian Mendez moved over to me. We had gone to school together for about two years; he was a year above me and was one of my best friends. Also he had just finished his first year in college and knew that I was about to start mine. When he came over to me he asked the normal things: when do you leave for school, how do you feel about it, all things that I had heard more than once that night. Then he asked if I had finished reading Max Brooks' latest book. He already knew the answer; I had been talking about Max Brook's The Zombie Survival Guide for days. It was a mock survival book for a zombie outbreak. The book-contained ways to hunt down the zombies along with ways to kill them. With lines like "remember blades don't need reloading." And one of my favorites "use your head, cut off theirs." It was almost a step by step on how to make death and gore funny. I smiled as I answered, "Who could have put that down, that
- 2 was one of the funniest things I have ever read!" He laughed at me saying, "Now Nathan, that was a book meant to help you prepare for the invasion to come." I hit him with a half full bag of Doritos for saying something that lame. He made fun of me for buying it so fast, but we both knew he had no place to talk-after all; he was the one that showed me the book. We talked about the book for a little while and then the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, and then he talked about a book he was reading that was too over the top for my taste. And it was at that moment that we had the idea for our story. I said to him, "What is a monster that is subtle yet merciless?" He chimed back "A zombie." "What was one of the things that made "28 Days Later" such a cult classic?" I asked him. "Well one thing is that you followed normal people that were thrown into the horrible event," he replied. We then began planning our own story with some of the same circumstances. Where instead of the viewer following people after the breakout of these monsters had happened they would see the breakout itself as it happened. They would witness the mass confusion of humans trying to explain and understand what was going on, as well as just trying to survive. We then talked about different camera angles, actors we could use, the way that they economic class of our characters may play a part in how good of a chance that they had at survival, and of course, the mass hordes of blood thirsty undead. However, after the party ended, so did our planning our for dream movie. We wouldn't even see one another, let alone talk about the movie until two weeks later. Brian and I met again at a more than boring party and began reminiscing our old movie idea. The more we talked, the more we wanted it to be real, and the more we wanted it to be real, the more we made it about the story and the characters and less about the gore.
- 3 The more we talked, the more in-depth we got with or characters and their lives. We began planning how the characters would know each other, and where they lived and what they did to get by before this outbreak of undead. We talked about their strengths and their weaknesses, if they had family close by or in another state. We came up with stories about smaller characters that would be eaten almost at the start, and even with them we put in so much work and detail. Again the party ended and Brain and I went our separate ways. I got ready to go to sleep like any other night, but this time I started working on the story. I hated to write and I was always terrible with details. However, when I began work on this, the lines for my book poured out of my pen with a skill that I had never known was there. I worked into the early hours of morning night after night, until finally I had the first chapter finished. I read and re-read the work that I had done; I changed a line here and added something there. I felt like what I had gotten done was a pretty good way to start off the story, my story. I was so excited about what I had gotten finished that I called Brain to tell him all about my work. After a brief review of what I had done, he sounded almost excited. He said he couldn't wait to read the real thing. I then took my paper to some of my other friends to proofread my work and let them write comments down about it. This was a feeling unlike anything I had felt before. I wanted people to read what I had spent so much of my time working on but was almost scared to hear what they would say. I had to almost force myself to hand them my notebook, but I knew that what I would gain from their comments could help me a lot. So with a nervous smile I bit my lip and handed my work over to them.
- 4 When I met with my friends again, it felt like I was walking on needles. This felt like one of the biggest days of my life; I was excited and terrified at the same time. My fear turned out to be meaningless. They had so much to say about they characters and way that I changed from one persons' view to another almost flawlessly. My friend Tyler talked to me about one of the main characters named Hank, "He seems to be cold hearted when you first meet him; I really didn't like him at first." Then he added right behind it, "But the way he comforts his sister gives him a bit of a redeeming quality." My good friend Matt laughed at me saying that he could tell I wrote it late at night because I repeated myself in places, but he said that he enjoyed what he had read. They loved what I had done with just a first chapter and couldn't wait for more to be done. I was overjoyed to hear this news, I thanked them and went home to plan what tale of drama and fear would unfold next.
I have neither given nor received nor tolerated the use of unauthorized aid.