I was going to collect clippings, quotes, and pictures from 2012 newspapers to create a zombie story linking reality with imagination as I created a new, crazy, apocalyptic, sad, gruesome, romantic, touching, etc story that had to do with the end of the world and the 2012 presidential election. Unfortunately, I didn't think of this idea until much too late in the year. I wasn't able to collect clippings from all of 2012, and I wouldn't have had time to finish it before election day anyway. It just wouldn't be topical any more if I pursued it at this point.
But, I thought I'd share the synopsis:
A brother and sister (Catsup and Mustard) are home alone when an army of zombies burst into their house. They are children of a washed-up movie star (Tootsie Collins) and a camera man she picked up from her last film (Javier Chavez, who is an immigrant). They are a middle class family, but they are bent on living above their station (because of Tootsie’s history of would-be-glitz). They are an average American family, and yet a picture of how the American Dream doesn’t quite get you anywhere special. News snipits caught from TV’s, radios, etc alert the small town that they will receive no help from anyone…the government is too busy fighting itself. The children die because political “monsters” in Washington become more important than the actual problems of the every-day American.
I didn't really know how to fill in the holes though, so the project has just been sitting in my computer, a concept without a body.
I did get this far thought:
“I am never living in New York,” Mustard announced as
they marched out of the dark theater into the bright sunshine.
Tootsie and Javier laughed.
“Oh, my darling. That wasn’t real,” Tootsie said in her Hollywood Voice with a sweep of her
thin, white hand and a chortle that surely would impress the Queen of England
herself. She always used her Hollywood Voice after they left the movies.
"Yeah, dummy. Don't you know that movies are fake?" said Catsup, Mustard's horrible older sister.
Mustard just stared at his feet as he walked across
the hot asphalt. It was true though. Bad things always seemed to happen in New York. Today, as
the family sought to escape the July heat in the pleasantly cool town movie
theater, there had been an alien attack led by a Norse demi-god. The city had been destroyed.
Then I didn't have anything else to say, except for this little paragraph, which would obviously be much later in the story:
Mustard hauled the old and heavy boxes over the
attic door. They weren’t getting in here. He would be safe up in the attic. Wood and cardboard
scraped over the dusty floor boards as the sound of undead feet dragging across
the carpet below drifted up into his ear canals. They could search the house
high and low. They would never find him. And then they would move on.
That's all I have, and tomorrow, it won't matter anymore (thank goodness it's election day). Should I write it anyway? Maybe I'll save it for the next election. Who knows. But it would have been perfect to add clippings from the news on Hurricane Sandy (Everything bad always seem to happen in New York!), at the risk of sounding unfeeling or unsympathetic.
What do you think? Should I give up on it, or does it have potential to be awesome?
No comments:
Post a Comment