Last week I talked about my overall philosophy of sequels—that they must have more of what the readers liked in the first work, while adding something new and exciting and unique, while extending the main character in a fresh and logical new direction, all while being better written and more awesome than anything you’ve done before. In other words, they’re really hard.

With all of that in mind, I sat down to plan out some sequels to I Am Not a Serial Killer. Lurking in my notes from that book was a single line about series potential: “A serial killer who hunts serial killers, except they’re actually supernatural monsters whose methods mirror standard serial killer behaviors.” In the first book, of course, I’d used souvenirs: many serial killers take pieces of the bodies they kill, as souvenirs or trophies or even for food. I built the first book demon around that idea, coming up with a spooky supernatural reason to explain why he would need so many body parts. It worked pretty well, so I figured it was a good place to start in planning the sequels, and I sat down to list some other standard serial killer behaviors.

Cannibalism? That’s a cool one, but probably too similar to the “steals body parts” idea. Rape? Definitely typical to the majority of serial killers, but not really something I wanted to deal with. I could technically have gotten away with it, even in YA, because the YA horror market is far, far darker than most people realize, but I really just didn’t feel comfortable with it, personally, so I discarded it.

How about kidnapping? That really piqued my interest, as I’d just read a couple of really fascinating articles on the subject. Kidnappers are not all serial killers, of course, but those who are have a really interesting subset of quirks: they often have self-constructed dungeons to keep their victims, they choose their victims based on very specific concepts, and they tend to have strange, almost ritualized ways of communicating with their victims. Another great benefit to this idea was that it would shake up the formula from the first book, by focusing so much of John’s investigation on one location instead of following a killer through the streets; it might even be fun to have John himself get kidnapped. What I really liked about the idea was the tiny hint of pathos buried behind it; one of the more famous serial kidnappers was a man named Gary Heidnik, who kidnapped women because he wanted a family. I loved how the demon in the first book had an element of sadness, a sort of yearning for humanity buried inside of a horrifying evil, and the kidnapper idea seemed open to similar possibilities.

So I liked the idea, but I needed a supernatural backstory to explain it. Maybe he kidnaps people because he…? I couldn’t think of anything. I hopped on the Internet and hunted around for ideas, looking at famous serial kidnappers to see what they did, and why, and after some reading I hit on the idea of torture: many kidnappers, especially those who eventually kill their victims, will often torture them first. I had a very cool supernatural basis for the torture, too, though obviously I can’t tell you what it is.

I folded the torture together with the kidnapping and I had a pretty cool bad guy, but there was still one piece missing: why were there two demons in such a small town? Isn’t that kind of a stupid coincidence? My first thought was a variation on the Hellmouth idea, but not only did Buffy already do that, I really didn’t want these things to come from Hell. They’re only demons because John calls them that—their actual origins should be far different. I switched gears at this point and started coming up with ideas for their background, and while I jotted them down a solution presented itself: if these things were an ancient group, and if the demon from the first book had spent so much time trying to be human, it made sense that the others would lose track of him—and it made even more sense, given that, that this ancient group would be looking for him. So, why are there two demons in Clayton? Because the first one got some national attention when his disguise started to slip, and the other has coming looking for him.

The ideas were coming together. I had a cool idea for a bad guy, and a good reason or him to be there, and a neat (and terrifying) supernatural background to pull it all together. That same night I sketched out plans for the third book, as well, but you’ll have to wait a while to learn about it. For now I’ll give you just a few hints: first, the serial killer traits I use in book three are stalking and ritualization. Second, the basic outline for book three really, really creeped me out. I didn’t realize I had it in me.

Tune in next week for the second half of the sequel planning: where should John go next?

Time for another common question:

Mr Wells,

I have planned out my story from beginning to end and I had assumed that by creating this plot line, it would be easy to follow. However, I have found that the case is almost exactly the opposite. As I write, I know where the plot is telling me to go but, for some reason, my characters are heading in a completely different direction. I’ve had to pull myself back and delete chunks of my writing because it contradicts with how the plot should unfold. I know how I want my story to start, and I know how I want it to end, but at the moment the middle is all over the place. I was wondering if you have any advice on this matter as I have no idea how to resolve this issue. I have been thinking of writing the beginning and the end and just letting the middle unfold. Is this a good approach or is there something else I could do that would be a better way to go about solving this?

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Emily Hawkins

This is a VERY common problem, even for established authors, and it’s one that a lot of people don’t really understand until they start writing. “How can your characters do something they’re not supposed to do? You’re the one writing them, aren’t you?” Well, yes, but the things we write, and the things our characters do and say, are informed by a lifetime of experience, and it is often very hard to write something completely unnatural–i.e., if your character is in a certain situation, doing or saying a certain thing, the natural flow of human behavior will send them in a very specific direction when it’s time to move on and do something else. The flow of speech and conversation will tend in a certain direction, because that’s just how people talk, and this will often come out in our writing whether we want it to or not because it’s hard-coded into our subconscience. This is good, because it helps us write more believable characters and stories, but it can also be bad if you don’t plan ahead.

When the story you’re writing is trending very strongly away from teh story you outlined, the problem is easy to identify but very hard to fix: put simply, either your characters are wrong, or your outline is wrong. They do not work together, and one of them needs to be changed. Figuring out which one is wrong can be very hard, though it helps to think of it in terms of goals: what do you, as the author, want this story to do?

In the question above, she knows how she wants the story to end–that ending is the goal. Her characters, in their present state, do not trend naturally toward that ending, because their personalities are wrong or their skills lie in other areas or their personal goals are simply too different. I don’t know anything about her story, but let’s say, for example, that it’s a story about people trapped in a spooky house, being pestered by a ghost, and it ends when the characters solve the ghost’s problem and put her to rest. Maybe the characters just don’t care about helping ghosts, or maybe their not inquisitive enough to figure out why the ghost is so upset, or maybe they’re too rambunctious and keep trying to solve the problem in physical ways instead of mental ways. Whatever it is, the core problem is the same: the characters she has created are not the kind of people who will resolve her conflict in the way she wants. When she sits down to write them, they naturally tend to do things that lead the story in other directions.

There are two solutions to this problem: first, consider changing the characters. Maybe your swashbuckling hero needs an academic background to help pull her more towards research and away from violence. Maybe you could give the character a personal connection to the ghost so there’s more emotional incentive to help. Second, add an outside force to help guide the characters in the right direction: if they’re supposed to investigate the basement but they’re too smart/scared/whatever to actually go down there, throw in a trap door or a broken floor board and MAKE them go down there. Sometimes a story about characters acting against type is the most interesting choice.

Now, in this case Emily’s goal is her ending, but lets say for the sake of argument that it isn’t–let’s say the characters and the story are the part that excites her, and the pesky outline is the spoiling all her fun. In that situation she would do the opposite: change the outline to better match her characters. If the people trapped in this haunted house want to destroy the ghost, and if you as the author think that would be cool, then go ahead and change the ending, and let them destroy the ghost. You’re not tied down to the first ending you think of–you’re the one who thought of it, and you can change it all you want.

So, to recap: when your characters refuse to follow your outline, decide which one you’re going to keep (character or outline) and then alter the other to match. This can be sad, but it doesn’t have to be–just save the element you’re discarding and use it in a future story.

I hope this has been helpful. If any of you have any more advice on this topic, please feel free to post it here and expand the discussion. And if you have any other questions for me, shoot me an email and I’ll do my best to answer it.

Me: What happened to your forehead?

Crazy 6-year-old son: It got cut.

Me: Obviously it got cut, there’s a huge gash in it. What happened?

Crazy 6-year-old son: I was playing on the slide.

Me: And that’s it?

Crazy 6-year-old son: Yeah.

Me: No one gets a huge gash in their forehead just playing on the slide. Did you do anything weird on the slide?

Crazy 6-year-old son: No.

Eagerly accusative sister: He was sitting on his backpack!

Me: Were you sitting on your backpack?

Crazy 6-year-old son: No. I was standing on my backpack.

Me: You were standing on your backpack.

Crazy 6-year-old son: I was snowboarding down the slide.

Eagerly accusative sister: It looked like he was sitting.

Crazy 6-year-old son: That’s because I was in Mini Mode.

Me: What’s Mini Mode?

Crazy 6-year-old son: That’s when you squat down and tuck your knees inside your shirt.

Me: So you went down the slide, on your feet, on your backpack, with your knees tucked inside your shirt.

Crazy 6-year-old son: Yeah.

Me: I guess you’re right, there’s nothing weird about that at all.

Crazy 6-year-old son: I know. It’s just that it was the really fast, bumpy slide, so it’s kind of dangerous.

Me: Aha.

THE END

As I mentioned a week or so ago, Turner Classic Movies spent the entire month of February (and a couple of days of March) running nonstop Oscar nominees, 24 hours a day. I cleared out my DVR and grabbed everything that looked interesting, and I’ve been watching them as fast as I can (which works out to about one every three days. I don’t have a lot of time). I won’t bore you with gigantic reviews of each one, but here are some general thoughts:

The French Connection: Everyone knows this for the chase scene, though in my experience very few people have actually seen the chase scene, and even fewer have seen it in context. My advice: go out and watch this movie right now. One of the reasons that chase scene works as well as it does (and it works astonishingly well) is that it’s the only burst of action in a very tense movie about watching–the good guys watch the bad guys, sitting in parked cars or listening on wire taps or standing in the cold and trying to look suspicious. One of the best scenes (possibly rivaling the chase) is an extended sequence where Gene Hackman tails a French drug dealer through the streets and down to the subway, trying to stay on his tail while the Frenchman suspiciously tries to figure out who is tailing him, and how to escape. There’s so little dialogue in this movie you could watch it with the sound off, and yet you’d always know what’s going on because it’s just so GOOD. If you’ve watched the chase on youtube and wondered what the big deal was, do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing. It’s awesome.

Alfie: I tried to like this, and just couldn’t get into it. The movie that made Michael Caine a star, for crying out loud. I don’t know, it just didn’t work for me.

Stage Door: A comedy from 1937 starring Ginger Rogers, Katherine Hepburn, and a very young Lucille Ball, along with a slug of other women (and one man) you’ll probably recognize if you watch a lot of old movies (Gail Patrick, Eve Arden, Ann Miller; I could go on and on). I loved this movie, absolutely loved it, though the overarching story was a little wonky and the ending faltered for a bit (just a bit) into awkward melodrama. The dialogue, on the other hand, absolutely crackled, with joke on top of joke on top of insult on top of sly innuendo, in such a rapid-fire onslaught that I couldn’t help but smile. The premise is simple: a bunch of aspiring actresses/dancers/etc. live in a boarding house in New York, and they all try to get jobs and have lives and stay afloat; it’s mostly comedy, with an odd turn toward drama that ultimately works pretty well (though the turn itself is a little jarring). I kept waiting for the writers to run out of steam with the dialogue, but they just kept going and going, and half of the scenes play like verbal fencing matches. Some of the conversations between Rogers and Patrick (and, of course, between Rogers and Hepburn) were absolute marvels of character and wordplay. If we had more than a handful of really gifted comediennes in modern Hollywood, you could remake this today with very few linguistic updates–though I really want to go through and clean up the narrative a little, because the ending is too good to be almost spoiled by a couple of bad missteps.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre: Humphrey Bogart in one of his rare non-heroic roles, as a homeless bum in Mexico who scrounges up enough cash to go prospecting for gold. He and his two companions find some, far more than they’d expected, and the generally honorable slowly degrades under the force of such powerful greed that he almost starts to hallucinate, seeing robbers and treachery behind every shadow. It’s kind of slow, and has an ending almost certainly dictated by a clueless Hollywood producer, but the greed for gold and the madness it creates are fascinating to watch. Also of note: this movie is the origin of a very famous quote, but I didn’t know that going in, and it was an awesome surprise to see it come flying out of nowhere. I won’t spoil it–watch and see for yourself.

Mrs. Brown: A movie by and for historians, not because it had any special academic merit, but because it lacked any semblance of a story that might have made it appeal to non-historians. It turns out that when Queen Victoria was widowed, she went into mourning for years, threatening not only the peace in her family but the viability of the monarchy itself. During this time she was befriended, sort of, by a Scottish highlander named John Brown, who sort of helped her come out of her shell and get back to real life. Sounds like a pretty cool story, huh? Well, this is not that story, though it does contain a lot of scenes that make you think it might be. It’s basically just a bunch of stuff that happens, and in the beginning the queen is sad and at the end she’s still sad but in a different way, and John Brown kind of helps but also kind of doesn’t, and I honestly don’t know what to tell you. After 90 minutes or so I told my wife I had no idea what the movie was actually about–what it was trying to say, or where the narrative arc was going–and then about twenty minutes later it was over, and I still had no idea. We had about fifteen solid minutes at the beginning, where it looked like we’d get to watch Brown (Billy Connolly) pull Victoria (Judi Dench) out of her funk, but then that part ended, and then it just kind of meandered around until it stopped. It’s worth watch for some very good performances (including a young Gerard Butler showing off the full power of his native Scottish burr), but if you’re the kind of person who gets frustrated with movies that don’t go anywhere, steer clear of this one.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: A classic John Ford Western, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Lee Marvin, Vera Miles, and the guy who did the voice of Friar Tuck in Disney’s Robin Hood (turns out that wasn’t a voice–that’s just how he talked). The title comes right out and tells you what happens at the end–someone shoots evil gunman Liberty Valance–but the point is that you don’t know which of the two heroes does it until the end, and what it means, and how it changes everything. What you’re really watching is a parable about the rule of might versus the rule of law, which could become heavy-handed with the wrong artists at the helm, but that uncertainty makes it work. Includes some rousing speeches and some classic Wild West moralism (Westerns have always been one of the film genres most urgently concerned with morality), and just thought-provoking enough to be satisfying.

The Road to Morocco: Bob Hope and Bing Crosby made a series of goofy, slapstick, self-referential comedies that were, at the time, the biggest movies ever; this was arguably the very best of them, and I was shocked at how well it held up over time. There are a couple of jokes that have deflated over the years (a jab or two at the previous films, which modern audiences probably haven’t seen, and a scene making fun of speech impediments), but for the most part this movie is just as funny today as it was in 1942. The reason it works is the interplay between Hope and Crosby, who are always on the run, always ready to sell each other out to save their own skin, and yet always determined to march into hell to rescue their best friend. I laughed out loud at this one many times, proving that over-the-top screwball humor never goes out of style.

I still have plenty of movies left in the queue, so watch for more mini-reviews in the future. For now, go out and watch a few of these and let me know what you think.

Also: if I were forced to pick a favorite from this list, just one that I recommend more than any other…ouch. The French Connection might win, because it really is as good as people say, but on the other hand Stage Door has Ginger Rogers, on whom I have a humongous crush. See The French Connection for ingenious plotting, and Stage Door for ingenious writing (and for Ginger Rogers doing the best drunk scene I’ve ever had the pleasure to see).

It’s almost time for my book tour to begin, spanning two continents (one per book) and starring many of your favorite lines from Knight Rider, because my car’s GPS set talks with the voice of KITT. Happy Birthday to me!

Here we go:

March 16: Fly to Leipzig, Germany, for the Leipzig Book Fair. My wife is coming with me. It will be awesome.

March 17 through 20: Awesomeness.

March 21: Fly to London. My wife will be flying home, to see if our children are still there.

March 22: A library event in London; more info coming.

March 23: Amersham School at 10am, Princes Risborough Teen Library at 1:30pm

March 24: Headline Blogger Party

March 25: Hamble School 10am, train to Brighton for World Horror Convention. Panel at 9pm (reviews and blogs).

March 26: A school event in Brighton; more info coming.

March 27: Panel at 10am (keeping kids reading), Reading at noon.

March 28: Panel at 2pm (future of YA horror).

March 29: Fly home to Utah.

March 30: US book launch at Sam Wellers bookstore in Salt Lake City, 6pm.

March 31: Signing/reading at Orem Barnes & Noble, 6pm.

April 1 though April 4: Blissful days of rest (i.e., playing with hyper kids who haven’t seen me for two weeks).

April 6: Signing/reading at University Bookstore in Seattle, 7pm.

April 7:Signing/reading at Powell’s Books in Beaverton, Oregon, 7pm.

April 8: Signing/reading at Sacramento Barnes & Noble, 7pm.

April 9: Signing/reading at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, 7pm.

April 10: Signing/reading at Dark Delicacies in Burbank, 7pm.

April 11 through April 13: Raiding other bookstores around LA. One or more of these may become official; more info coming.

April 14: Signing/reading at Mysterious Galaxies in San Diego, 7pm.

April 15: Signing/reading at Las Vegas Barnes & Noble, 7pm.

April 16: Complete mental and physical collapse. End of tour.

Today is March 4th, the only day of the year that’s a sentence. I’ve often said there should be a military parade on March 4th, partly because it would be awesome but mostly because it’s my birthday, which means it will eventually be a holiday anyway so why not start now? Also, I’m apparently very arrogant. I prefer to think of it as “strong self esteem.”

In the wonderful year of 2010, March 4th is also the date my second book, Mr. Monster, launches in the UK. Huzzah! My editor celebrated by sending me the “Ultimate Bacon Lover’s Collection,” which includes six flavors of bacon salt, a delicious jar of baconnaise, and (I kid you not) a tube of bacon-flavored lip balm. I used to think I was a bacon fan, until the Internet got wind of the claim and set out to show me what a real bacon fan looks like: a real bacon fan uses bacon-flavored lip balm, bacon-flavored dental floss, and a bacon-scented air freshener. I’m just a guy who thinks pigs are yummy.

But that’s the beside the point, which is that Mr. Monster is finally out! I’m giddy. If you’re in the UK, WH Smith’s has a ton of copies; if you’re elsewhere, Book Depository is the master of free overseas shipping.

Here in the US, we’re just a few short weeks away from the long-awaited debut of I Am Not a Serial Killer, but in the UK we’re launching the sequel, Mr. Monster, tomorrow! To help with that launch I’m writing a series of blogs about how I wrote the sequel, and I thought it would be great to post the same thing here. We will get a cross-post like this every Wednesday for the next five or six weeks. Enjoy!

Long, long ago, having written a novel called I Am Not a Serial Killer and shopping it around for publication, I got a phone call from Moshe Feder, an editor at Tor, saying that he loved it and wanted to buy it. I was, of course, ecstatic, though I’d like to think that I kept my cool somewhat during the conversation. I told him I’d find an agent to help work out a contract, and he said something completely awesome and completely frightening:

“I’d like to do a contract for multiple books. This one and at least two sequels.”

Well. My level of excitement was, shall we say, somewhat boosted by this announcement. It was quickly tempered, however, by the fact that I didn’t really have any idea of what the sequels would be about. I said yes, of course, because one does not say no when an editor tells you they want to buy three times as many books as you expected, but I was a little nervous. The story in I Am Not a Serial Killer was fairly self-contained, at the time, and while I had thought about a series I had never really done any work on it; I just wrote the book and called it done. Where could I go from here?

I sat down that night and wrote out two quick ideas, about a page each, that would eventually become the two sequels: Mr. Monster and Full of Holes. In my opinion they are both better than the first book. I’ll talk more about those ideas later, but first let me talk a little about sequels in general. The first thing you should know is: they’re hard. For every Empire Strikes Back or Dark Knight, in which the sequel is better than the original, there’s a hundred Daddy Day Camps and Back to the Future IIs, in which the sequel is far, far worse. I see sequels as having three major obstacles to success:

1) The audience wants more of the same, but they also want something new. This is an enormous paradox that a LOT of writers are never really able to solve. One of my favorite examples is the American TV show Heroes, about normal people trying to deal with strange new powers they couldn’t understand. The first season showed them discovering their powers and trying to solve a larger mystery, slowly building up to a climax where they all finally met each other and worked together to defeat a scary villain. Everyone was excited for season two, and then it arrived and we saw…the same people, discovering the same powers and trying to solve a big mystery about the same, not-actually-defeated villain. The writers knew season one worked, and they were right to try to provide more of the same, but they neglected the “something new” aspect and basically just told the same story over again. It almost killed the show.

2) It’s very easy to mis-identify what the audience loved about your first work. Identifying this correctly is incredibly important, because it will let you know what elements need to be the same and what elements can be expanded or altered or improved. A great example here is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In the first movie, the creators were trying to reproduce the feel of the classic adventure serials they’d seen as kids, and they did a very good job and people loved it. What they didn’t realize is that the audience wasn’t responding solely to the concept, but to that specific execution of it: they loved the globe-trotting pulpiness, the 1930s period stuff, the nazi-bashing wish-fulfillment, and most importantly the perfectly tuned love/hate relationship between Indy and Marian. When the time came to make a sequel, they identified the wrong success (“Audiences loved having a movie based on old adventure serials”) and thus moved in the wrong direction (“Let’s make a movie based on other serials, like the jungle-stomping wilderness stories”). The movie they made was great, but it was missing most of the stuff people loved from the first one, and thus had a very poor reception. Go back and watch it today and I think you’ll agree that it’s a great adventure movie, but most of us remember it as “the crappy one” because, at the time, the audience felt a that it went in such an unexpected direction.

2) Your character has already had a strong arc in the first work, and now needs a completely new, unrelated arc that’s even better. Of course your sequel needs to be better than your first—if it’s not, people will feel like they got a bad deal. But how can you tell an even better story about the same character, when the first book already dealt with (presumably) their main personal issue? What do you do with Luke when he’s already learned how to use the Force? What do you do with Bruce Wayne when he’s already become Batman? There are plenty of stories to tell with those characters, but how do you give them the same emotional weight as the first installment after that central character hook has already been dealt with? The answer, of course, is to find a new hook. The first Spider-man movie showed a young, goofy teenager, slightly directionless and rebellious, grow up and learn responsibility. They hit those themes really solidly in the first one, and they told that story really well, and they couldn’t just tell it again; if they’d tried to rehash the same themes in Spider-man 2, it would have tanked. Instead they took it in a new direction, showing Peter Parker growing in other ways as he tries to cope with that responsibility and teach it to others.

These were the thoughts that rolled through my head as I sat down to plan out my series. Next week I’ll talk more about how these ideas helped create the story of Mr. Monster.

Tor put together an awesome trailer for I Am Not a Serial Killer:

Only four weeks away from the US launch! I am giddy.

I was answering an email today from a WRiting Excuses listener, and halfway through I thought: “This is a great question, and people ask it all the time, so why don’t I just put it up on my site?” So I am, and now when people ask I can just point them here. If any of my readers have advice on the same topic, feel free to add it. I don’t know if this kind of thing will become a regular feature on my blog or not, but for now, enjoy the wonder of From the Mailbag.

Mr. Wells,

First off, I just wanted to say that I loved Serial Killer. After listening to Writing Excuses for months I couldn’t stand the fact that I had never read anything of yours, so I broke down and bought the UK version. It was well worth the extra effort (I never buy books online) and I am looking forward to Mr. Monster.
The reason I am writing is to ask for a brief bit of advice. I will be attending a university this fall and am still undecided as what I should major in. Since elementary school it has been my dream to write, but I am unsure as to how I should pursue that path. Do you think getting an English degree is the best possible choice for a aspiring writer? Would getting one improve my writing skills, or is it valuable just in having time to read and meet other writers? I am reluctant because I fear that I will get an English degree and then end up teaching at a High School somewhere with no other job prospects. As an English major yourself and a successful writer to boot, what would you recommend? English or something more useful in getting a good job?

All the best,
Alex Booth

An English degree can be useful to a writer, but in most cases (including mine) it’s not as useful as just writing all the time. You learn more about writing by sitting down and writing than by any other method. That said, I didn’t major in English for the writing, I did it for two major reasons:

1) I love reading. I studied literature, not writing, and I feel that I was introduced to a much wider range of books and poetry and writing styles than I would have gotten otherwise. This wider range of literary experience has, in turn, impacted the way I write.

2) I graduated with an editing emphasis, which helped me get a job as an editor/copywriter. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but I also knew I needed something to pay the bills in the meantime. Since I love words, this was an obvious, early choice.

On the other hand, there are two reasons I kind of wish I hadn’t majored in English:

1) Writing all day at work, and then going home to write all night, is very hard. I got very burned out, and in eight years I only wrote six books–not a very good pace for a professional author. Working on something else all day would have made the nighttime writing easier (I assume).

2) With an English degree and several writing-based jobs, I’ve been immersed in words since 1998, day in and day out. That’s fine in some ways, because I love writing, but it’s also limited my experience; I’m pretty good at writing, but what do I have to write about? This is why most of the “literary” novels published today are about aging college professors who teach writing–because that’s who writes them, and that’s all they know. Obviously I have a life outside of work, and I try to read a wide variety of stuff, but I often wish I’d dropped English and studied history or psychology or something similar. Something to give me a different facet of background to draw on.

I suppose what it all comes down to is: weighing the pros and cons, would I do the same thing again? Yes I would. I’d even take the same horrible Technical Writing class again, just because I think it helped me in the long term even though I never became a technical writer. As much as I wish for a wider base of knowledge, the truth is that I’ve been out of college for ten years this summer, and I’ve never stopped reading and researching and I feel like I’ve filled in those gaps fairly well. I studied literature, and now I create literature, and I absolutely love it.

Thanks to Alex for submitting the question. If anyone has other questions, go ahead and send them in (dan AT fearfulsymmetry DOT com). I always answer all of my email, and if I feel like I have anything valuable to say on the subject, I’ll put it up here on the blog.

I am, as mentioned, a gamer, and one of the genres I love most are roleplaying games. I also love horror, making me a big fan of horror games, which pretty much puts Palladium’s Dead Reign right in my wheelbox. It’s a zombie apocalypse RPG that focuses on exactly what I want a zombie apocalypse game to focus on: the world is falling apart, everyone is trying to kill you, and you’re running out of pretty much everything. It’s bleak, and desperate, and I love it.

The first sourcebook for the game, called Civilization Gone, really didn’t do anything for me, as it felt small and incomplete, like it was all the ideas that weren’t good enough to get in the main book. That made me sad, because the game is so cool, and when the second sourcebook showed up–called Dark Places–I was not very enthusiastic. As it turns, though, Dark Places is totally awesome.

Civilization Gone added a few new zombie types, but nothing that really felt right to me; they were goofy things like smart zombies that were visibly indistinguishable from humans (which kind of ruins the whole point) and mundane things that I’m pretty sure I didn’t need, such as zombies who are slightly bigger than normal. Dark Places, on the other hand, really takes the concept to new places, creating new zombie types that we should all be embarrassed we didn’t think of before. How about zombies who are completely infested with bugs or maggots, which is not only believable but gives them a meaningfully different appearance and skillset. Very nice.

The other thing Dark Places focuses on are ways to travel through the zompocalyptic world, describing what it’s like in the sewers, and along railroad tracks, and so on. Overall the book was very fun and useful, and I recommend it for all your zombie RPG needs.

One thing I’ve always wanted to do, and which my friend Janci actually did because she’s awesome, is run a zombie apocalypse RPG in which the characters play themselves, in their own town, trying to survive. I think that would be awesome.