It's My Birthday!

My first professional short story sale was a zombie story without any zombies in it, and zombie fiction has always had a special place in my heart. But while I love zombies, I generally prefer science fiction and fantasy to horror, and optimistic stories to grim ones. To me, there’s a connection between zombies and rebirth—it’s a twisted connection, but that doesn’t make it less real. Zombies do come back from the dead, after all. They’re animated by a hunger for brains and human flesh, but they are up and moving around. Undead is as much of an opposite to dead as alive is. And in some zombie mythology there is at least a vestige of the person that they once were, hidden deep beneath the hunger. I wanted to explore that connection, and I ended up writing this zombie novella. It never felt like the best idea, really, but...

This is a story of persistence. Kristi DeMeester is an author after my own heart. In late 2007, I decided I wanted a Masters degree in something I was actually interested in. Thankfully, my alma mater offered exactly that: a Masters in Professional Writing. I signed up for the GRE—bombing the math portion—filled out the applications, and found two people who were actually willing to write letters of recommendation. That next August, I was back on campus and exhausted. I was working full time, taking classes at night, and somehow still completing all of the required coursework. I learned a lot about craft in my program but mostly spent the next year and a half learning how shitty my poor attempts at story were and that writing was work. All of those romantic visions I’d had of rain-dappled mornings seated in a beautiful office with a perfect cup of coffee...