minnesota nice FROM HELL

I can't really talk too mcuh right now, i just hope everyone is safe and managed to get their families somewhere okay and maybe you stil have the internet. im about to get my wife and animals and head out we're going to try to get somewehre isolated where the walking dead won't find us. i don't know if there will be anyhwereh left though. everyone who dies comes back as one of them and THEY are killign so many. its brutal. the television si dead. i supoose the internet will be soon too.i hope youre all okay. i hope you are able to fashion crude weapons and if your hand turns into a demon chop it off but replace it with a chainsaw that will help.
okay i have to go we are heading for the hills. i hope i can figure out how to work this shotgun. bye friends.

ADDENDUM TO BE FUNNY (SINCE THIS POST WAS PREVIOUSLY NOT)

(this was the post that I put on BBT. It, at least, is recognizably a joke and not me having some sort of angst-ridden natural disaster. Sigh.)

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I don’t know if anyone out there is reading this. I don’t know if there’s anyone out there to read it. God almighty, I dont’ know what’s happening. This is terrible. this is terrifying. I don’t want to die. If you’re reading this, you know what’s happened, you know that the dead have risen up, the DEAD HAVE RISEN UP, and they are walking the earth.

I don’t know what to do. Is it safe here? My apartment is on the third floor of the building, am I safe? Will the zombies figure out how to get in, and if they do, will they figure out how to get up here? My door is thick and dead-bolted, does that protect me? God, I don’t know. I don’t know how smart they are, but I’m terrified. I have no weapons. I have a knife in a drawer, a big one, and I own a copy of Gigli, but is that enough? I DON’T KNOW.

I tried turning on the news, or something on the TV, but there’s nothing. Just dead channels and camera shots of empty studios and screams in the background. Nothing I can use. I tried the radio, I found one in my apartment, but it’s all dead air and static. There was one station that had something, but it had a scared woman who was crying and who was reading the Psalms, over and over and over again out loud. She walked in the dark places, and the Lord was with her.

Christ, I don’t know if he’s with me, or any of us right now. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED? I saw, out the window, the undead attack a man out in the street, down the road from my building. They just FELL on him and he screamed so damn loud, it made my legs shake and there was a crunch…I heard it from here…and the screaming stopped. I swear to god, he’s with them now.

They’re shambling closer to my building. Oh god. They’re swarming through the parking lot now. Two of them are sloshing through the fountain up front. They’re bouncing between cars. They’re not coming into the building.

THey’re clustering beneath MY WINDOW. Oh my god. I went and looked down over the balcony and there’s gotta be thirty of them, THIRTY OF THEM, all gathered on the ground floor, staring up at me and my balcony, those that have eyes. THey are clawing at the walls with arms and pieces of hands. The ones with flesh make a dull slapping noise. The ones with nails, or bones, just screech and scrape against the siding. They all smell. Some of them like old dirt, some of them like mildew and mold, and some of them still have that sharp, sweet smell of death, that smell of corn syrup and salt. I almost threw up. Oh god oh god oh god WHAT DO THEY WANT?

It looks like they have something in their…hands…hang on. I’m going to go look.

I can’t see so well, but it looks like they are all holding a few papers, each one’s got some papers in one hand that they’re waving at me.

Hang on, someone let go and his papers flew upward. I’m going to try and snag one….

Oh my god. Oh Jesus. OH GOD.

The paper has a name and an address printed neatly in the top left corner. Then, it has a title followed by an approximate word count centered and the spaced down two spaces, the story starts in Courier New, double-spaced between lines.

How did they find me? Oh my god. Oh pray for me, if you’re out there. But what does it matter? We’re all DOOMED…

Zombie Jokes!

I am not dead. As evidenced by the following zombie jokes, which I made up (despite my wife declaring that I didn't) and which I wouldn't make if I were dead, would I?

Q: Why didn't the zombie move forward with his lawsuit?

A: Because he didn't have a leg to stand on!


Q: Why should you never have a zombie roommate?

A: Because he'll always leave you in the lurch!


Ha! Ha! I am brilliance personified!

Yes, I'll go back to staring at pages of .php code now...

Spring! I say thee, spriiiiing!

Except it's not spring here yet, but my body's decided it should be. Today, despite the temperature being below zero after the wind chill, I opened all the windows. It was wonderful. You don't realize how stale the air is getting until you let it all out.

(The fact that I made fried chicken a couple nights ago, and we have all manner of cats in the house does not help the air-getting-stale business)

It got chilly eventually, but it felt wonderful. Now if only I could go outside in something besides eight layers of clothes...

So.

Writing.

(that's nearly all I ever talk about, I realize, but to be fair...that's nearly all I ever do. It's like being a fish who's preoccupied with swimming and looking goggle-eyed. No one should be surprised.)

I missed my deadline, but I knew I would, and it's not by much, and it doesn't affect anything too badly. I still got a serious lot of fiction written in short order, something I'm pretty proud of.

I kept saying that when I was done with this first batch of episodes, I would take a break for a few days and sleep a lot (since last night I went to bed by 2am, and it felt like I'd gone to bed incredibly early) and I would hang out with friends and such.

Except...

...except that as I wrapped up the last of the episodes, I realized that I have a short story which has been waiting patiently to be written which I really want to write. So I'll work on it slower than I worked on the first four episodes of the serial, but I think I'll work on it anyway.

And between episode's 2 and 3, I started to write the beginning pages of a comic book script, for a one-shot story which I showed to an editor. He read the story, and suggested that it would work much better as a single issue comic book. He's right. It does. So I'm re-writing that.

And...I'm itching to write the novel that Carrie and I dreamed up (remember? set in London? with zombies? Carrie? Hello?) but which I'm patiently waiting to start writing until she and I can work on it together.

I've done so good this time. My collaberations usually fail because I stat wirting something with somebody else, and then I fail to run out of ideas and wind up writing the whole damn thing, and thne I have to go to the co-author and say "er. Sorry. I wound up doing the story myself."

Trying not to do that here.

For my next post, I hope to show off a piece of concept art for my serial, and maybe give some information about it. I raelly want to, I just have to make sure it's not too soon. We shall see.

Right. It's above zero now, time to break out the shorts and go work on my tan!

(or, huddle inside and try to stay warm)