I'm not Stephen King, but...

[Angel_Hammer13]

... but, now you're here looking at this, aren't you? Someone once told me a title isn't as important as content; I have to disagree. The first thing you see in the bookstore is a title and some pretty cover art, and this, coupled with the back cover comments, summary, or exerpt is what sells the book- You're not going to stand in B. Dalton and read The Stand before you decide to buy it.

What I intend to do here is offer you a taste, a minor sampling of what it is I can do with the printed word, and the opportunity to tell me what you think. I won't write a full story... Just enough, (I hope), to get you interested, and to give you something to reply to. I'd like to know what you all think of the idea, and its presentation. For critiquing purposes (or bragging rights), I'm going to start in a new post- That way, the post time for the work can be compared to the post time for this intro, and you can see how long it took me to put this together.

[Angel_Hammer13]

The world ended. Not with a bang, and not with a whimper...

The world ended with screams.

"Ended", however, is a subjective term; The planet itself remained, as did the human race- At least, portions of it. What was left of humanity didn't so much live as survive, and most of those left had not a single idea of how long that survival would last.

It bears mentioning that throughout the history of man, the phrase "It isn't nice to fool with Mother Nature", has been used over and over, most often in films where the ultimate result of the foolish disregard for this advice is ultimate peril for humanity in general; Ironically enough, mankind's end was engineered by (stereotypically so) individuals generally regarded to spend their free time with such films- Geeks and nerds, in other words. Not surprisingly, their work was the result of a Top Secret Defense Department grant.

The development team, now a list of forgotten names, DID consist of a group of such persons, most of whom had, in fact, seen numerous old horror films in their lifetimes; And they did use that knowledge to attempt to differentiate the results of their labor from that of the Saturday afternoon matinees. Instead, they produced one of the worst terrors ever concieved.

The aptly named Romero Project (Top Secret level BLACK) sought to produce superhuman, disposable soldiers for high-risk operations by reanimating dead soldiers. In an attempt to counter the most noteworthy danger (infection, and ultimate destruction of humanity), the development team attempted to deter the problem at its source, and, in turn, created a monster worse than anything that ever crawled from the zombie film director's nightmares: The Armored, Weapons-Grade Reanimated Soldier Unit, or "Super Zombie".

Zombiism results in the brain being mutated into a separate, independent organism. The body itself becomes merely a manner of conveyance, just as an automobile is a vehicle for a person. Only the brain, and those organs most directly connected to it, notably the eyes, ears, and mouth, pose any outside threat, therefore, the most logical solution was to isolate these organs, by way of encasing the reanimants' head in an armored helmet. This prevented not only the danger of unchecked spread of the disease, but also rendered the reanimant highly difficult to subdue.

Further, the subjects used for the initial experiment were augmented with a cerebro-spinal motor-control system, a small computer system inserted into the base of the brain stem intended to control the reanimant's basic motor control functions and counter one of the zombies' most noteworthy shortcomings: Its inability to perform several basic functions, such as opening doors and climbing stairs, that a soldier would be useless without.

During the course of the project, precautions were painstakingly observed to the point of redundancy; It's failure was due only to the single uncontrollable variable- Human error. Or, more specifically, human ignorance.

A young intern, new to the project, was accidentally infected during a routine procedure. Fearing for her life, or her career, she failed to report the injury, a minor bite, and instead went home sick. The next day, she truly was ill, and the following day, the first unaccounted-for reanimant. From there, the infection spread quickly. By the time the epidemic was recognized for what it truly was, it was beyond control. Though the actual escape, or release of the Weapons-Grade zombies was undocumented, it nonetheless occurred, and it took mere weeks for mankind to be reduced to several small tribes of survivors, scrounging for the means to prolong their terrified existence from the remnants of their former glory.

[Perversion]

Re: I'm not Stephen King, but...

You had me until you used the word "whisper" in the first line. If you are gonna go through the effort of paraphrasing T.S. Eliot, at least paraphrase correctly.


"What is whisper."
"Oh, I'm sorry. The word we were looking for is whimper."


"I'll take, Reasons not to continue past the first line of a written work for $200 Alex."



Sorry. I might read this later.

[Shard]

Re: I'm not Stephen King, but...

I read the whole thing. You're technically proficient, but there are a few hang-ups that need to be addressed.

If this were a play, I'd say the voice of the narrator is a little dry, and his part runs a bit long for his own good. I understand this is mostly set-up and background info, but you cover a lot of ground without having introduced any significant characters, sources of conflict (except in the military sense), or any emotional pegs for a reader to hang their hat on.

In essence, it reads like you're trying to get a lot of fluff out of the way before you proceed to the business of kicking ass. You might be better served by parceling this information out and filling in background info as it becomes pertinent to the story you're trying to tell.

Speaking of telling... and I feel a little cliched saying this, there's a lot of "tell" and a dirth of "show". If I had to some everything up succinctly:

It reads as the seeds of several ideas, not particularly fleshed out yet, some of which will blossom and bear fruit, the rest having died on the vine.

[Big Rick Cook]

Re: I'm not Stephen King, but...

You sound far too pretentious in your starting post.

You use hyphens, parentheses, and semicolons like you got them on sale 10 for $1, and don't use them well at all.

Everything Shard said, cause he's my hero. <3

[Angel_Hammer13]

Re: I'm not Stephen King, but...

Somebody: @#$%, I knew it was one or the other. My bad for choosing incorrectly, and I don't even get a lousy copy of the home game.

For the others: I didn't mean to sound pretentious, or anything else... I just wanted to get out of the way what I'm asking you to do with your time and why. Beyond that, there isn't really meant to be any particular depth just yet. I had this idea, which basically comes down to "what's scarier than a zombie?". Since movies have been teaching us for years how to dispose of them, it isn't fear of the unknown so much as fear of sheer numbers. But what happens if your standard, (relatively) easy to dispose of shambling corpse suddenly becomes not only (almost) invulnerable, but smart, to boot? Had the idea grown (it didn't... I don't much like it either, honestly), then the story itself would no doubt follow a group of survivors trying to carry on their existence with this constant threat looming over them.

Thanks to you all for reading, and for those who took the time to reply. I'll listen to anything you choose to say- If I didn't want to hear it, I wouldn't be here, yes?

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: I'm not Stephen King, but...

what happens if your standard, (relatively) easy to dispose of shambling corpse suddenly becomes not only (almost) invulnerable, but smart, to boot?

[Big Rick Cook]

Re: I'm not Stephen King, but...

I think that's why he called the plan the Romero Project or whatever.

When I typed my bit last night, it was late and I was getting ready to sleep, so I might have been kind of curt. Sorry about that. I appreciate that you know you're not perfect, because we all have room to improve. While I don't mind so much reading general plot catches like this, I would love to see a bit of true narrative and a few characters that I could alternately root for or boo at. A zombie movie doesn't need good characters to be a good zombie movie (though I'm sure someone will argue otherwise), but a written zombie story might suffer if you just create "hero character" and "love interest" and leave it at that.

Now what I was saying about the hyphens (dashes, whatever), parentheses, and semicolons: less is better. Your paragraphs drown themselves in excess punctuation, commas included, in clauses, well, much like these I'm doing now, and, let's be honest here, this isn't easy or fun to read, now, is it? =P That was exagerrated, of course, but that's kind of what I feel like when reading your little blurb up there.

I say give me narrative. I once wrote a good portion of a novel here a few pages at a time to get ideas and constructive criticism from people until I had a good idea about what I was doing and where I was going. Shard in particular was insanely helpful. Then I finished it all by my onesies. Who knows if that'll work for you, but it did for me.

[Riotsword]

Re: I'm not Stephen King, but...

I was also interested, but I think it would have been easier for me to be interested if the narrative weren't so dry and procedural. Instead of doing that, maybe a prologue following this intern and giving bits of exposition along with it. Not all of it, of course. Just a name or two, a glimpse of the experiments being done. Enough that the reader might be able to infer what they're doing and why.

As for the first post, and people saying it sounded pretentious, I didn't really pick that up. To me it read much like one of Stephen King's own forewards, especially the one in the uncut version of The Stand.

[Big Rick Cook]

Re: I'm not Stephen King, but...

What I intend to do here is offer you a taste, a minor sampling of what it is I can do with the printed word, and the opportunity to tell me what you think.

That's where the pretension came from, for me.