The Night Was Moist.
When I first started Tweeting this story the only thing I knew for certain was the date. I first tweeted on Dec 1. I had just gotten back from walking our Great Danes. We had two at the time and to keep them from eating the furniture out of boredom we found that they needed a mile long walk every day. After that they could just sleep for the next 23 hours only getting up to eat and relieve themselves outside. What a wonderful life they have.
I had only casually put in some thought about what to tweet. I knew it would be a story, I knew it would be a bad story after all who tweets a story outside of kids? When I got back in the house from the walk I sat down and tweeted. ZWD. At the time there was no King of an Empty City in the title just ZWD. With 150 characters to use I had to figure out some sort of short hand with my writing. At the time things like LOL were just coming into use and I was only vaguely aware of simple tings like LOL much less trying to figure out how to write an entire story with them. So I had my title: ZWD. somewhere in there I was going to explain that it stood for Zombie War Diary, I don't think I ever did. The date I just threw in because I didn't have even the first lines.
Ten characters down and I thought about how cold the house was when we got back from the walk. I needed to bump up the heat. At the time I worked nights and we had the thermostat set to drop down to 68 degrees at 8:am after my wife went to work. It was cold outside and cold in the house I would bump it up to something comfortable everyday after I woke up and if I could stand it at 68 it stayed. This day there was a dampness in the air and I used that as I though about going back to bed. I didn't need to be at work till 2:pm so I could sleep for a long time. I threw the line in about the dog just because I had walked mine moments before.
And there you have it the firs tweet to the story:
ZWD: Dec 1
The house as cold even with all the blankets we found but it was nice sleeping in a bed again. We picked up a dog from somewhere.
When I started writing the story I had to turn that into a chapter. Somehow I managed to do that and it led to the story. Below is the first paragraph of the story. there are two different versions of it. The original from the final draft and the one that made it into the book after the final edit.
It was one of the hardest parts of the book to write and I revisited it several times. I had for some time looked at the advice of other writers like Hemingway, Asimov, etc. and seen what advice they could offer about writing and they all offered something different but they agreed on one thing the first paragraph had to grab you as a reader. I still am not satisfied with the final edited first paragraph for this story. But it is what it is.
Side note on the writers advice; one of them I forget who said never start a story with weather. What ever I write, short story, novel, blog I almost always start it with the phrase "The night was Moist." I eventually take it out but I almost always start with it. It puts me in a mood to make stuff up and after all that's what a writer does, am I right?
Final Draft
We slept in our clothes. I think it was the first night of real sleep we had had in a few weeks. It’s a shame too that we slept in our clothes because I like to sleep naked. But you can’t do that anymore, not these days. You never know when you’re going to have to fight for your life or run. We have been doing a lot of running over the past month.
Final Edit
It was a cold morning when we woke up. I think it was the first night of
real sleep we had had in a few weeks. It was so cold in the room you could see
your breath in the air. But the blankets and quilts were so warm that we just
wanted to stay in bed forever. We slept in our clothes. That was the only bad
part. I like to strip down and sleep. But you can’t do that anymore, not these
days. You never know when you’re going to have to fight or run. We have been
doing a lot of running over the past month.
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