I wrote “Running with Zombies” completely from the hip. In other words, I didn’t do any notebook work for it, which is weird for me. In the age old debate between pantsers and planners, I put myself squarely halfway between pantsers and planners, haha. I don’t plot out every single detail about my plot before sitting down to write a story, mostly because I’ve found too many times that the way I’ve plotted things out doesn’t make much sense once the characters start living on the page, but I am a solid outliner.
But “Running with Zombies” came at a weird time in my life and I held it in my head, almost as if I was scared that if I started jotting down notes, I’d scare the idea away.
At the time I wrote the story, February 2016, it was a zombie apocalypse in horror fiction. So many anthology calls said no zombies. But I’ve always written the stories I wanted to, confident that they’d eventually find a home.
What really did it for me in the story was the character of Jesse. I feel like he’s at once extremely likeable and irritating. He’s callous, reacting to a woman being eaten live on TV by acerbically correcting the news report that it’s the zombie apocalypse, not a new strain of rabies. But he also stands up for women to another male survivor he encounters. And he’s vegan, something commendable and insufferable at the same time.
At the time I was writing the story, I backed a Kickstarter for Richard Thomas for The New Black. One of the tiers was workshopping a short story with Richard, so I decided to work on RwZ with him. Aside from the process and helpful editing he gave the story, he was also very encouraging, confirming for me that the story was unique among the shambling hordes of zombie fiction.
The Dead Unleashed vol. 3 is available now from Skywatcher Press on Amazon.
The Chimerical Dark 