Dammit.
When I first got the idea for The Outbreak (I first wrote about it, in an email to pal Ken in an email dated Feb. 20th, though the idea itself was maybe two or three days older than that) I thought to myself, “You know, this idea is too damn good never to have been thought of by anyone before.” I did a ton of googling for zombies and zombie blogs, and though I did find some neato zombie-outbreak simulators, I didn’t find anything resembling my idea of an ongoing real-time chronicle of life during a zombie epidemic. So I did my month or so of regular blogging, launched into the revenant stuff, and never looked back.
Today I’m checking my referral log for the site and I come across this messageboard discussion at a site dedicated to the zombie roleplaying game All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It starts with a link to The Outbreak as quoted from this pleasingly favorable plug from Christopher Bahn’s intimidatingly massive linkblog Incoming Signals. It’s a brief discussion, but what it did was lead me to a couple of sites. Sites with the names Slow Motion Apocalypse and Day by Day Armageddon.
You see where I’m going with this?
Oh, well. I knew it was too good an idea not to have been done before. But I’m not all that upset. I’m not going to read too much of those other sites because I don’t want my writing to be influenced by what they did or didn’t do, but simply by taking a quick glance at their site designs you can see that they’re going in a very different direction than I’ve done. They’re much more in a “suited up, ready for war, here are the stats of the assault rifles I’ll be using today” mode than I am. That was an approach I thought about for a bit but quickly rejected. It probably works wonderfully for them, it’s worked wonderfully for some of the zombie/post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve seen in the past, but it just wouldn’t make any sense for me. The notion that I’d successfully become a sharp-shooting warrior even in the face of the undead hordes bearing down on me and mine is just laughable. Much more frightening to me than the thought of having to thrive as a killer is the idea of having to but not being able to, and most likely not even trying. Inadequacy and failure are where I find horror in my own life, and–well, I’m reluctant to get too on-the-nose with how I describe what I’m doing in any of the fiction I write, but, well, yeah. In addition, the mechanics of the plague seem to be much more grim for both parties–SMA, which appears to have been operative for almost four years now, is described by its creator as the saga of the last living human on Earth. Needless to say, insofar as my zombie blog relies on the continuing viability of Blogger (a proposition dicey enough even when legions of resurrected cannibals are not a factor), the situation is not nearly as dire. Finally, from a technical standpoint, both sites appear to be much more elaborate and designed-y than my humble stock-template Blogspot site.
So I think I won’t let the fact that I’m not the Neil Armstrong of Zombie-Centric Online Journal-Style Fiction get me down. And if you’re into that sort of thing, by all means, go and gorge yourself. It’s what the zombies would do, after all.
In other horror fictionblogging news, I spent the morning wending my way through the various sites associated with Dionaea House, and wow. How I’d never heard about this before is beyond me–but you know, between not being able to find any zombie blogs until today and not being able to find a horror blogosphere until a couple of weeks ago, I guess the Internet is just too damn big to know where everything you want is, so I’m not going to let that get me down, either. Instead I’m going to give Dionaea House an extremely enthusiastic recommendation. If you get past a couple-three too-pat moments in the first few pages, you’re in for what is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever read online. (And it looks like I’m not alone in that estimation.) One post on one site in particular is give-you-the-chills, leave-the-lights-on scary. Trust me, you’ll know which one I mean.
Clicking through several of the links posted in comments throughout the Dionaea-related sites led me to other interesting online horror destinations as well. Ted’s Caving Page is ancient in Internet years, having been created and completed about four years ago. It certainly bears the marks of its era–gotta love that primitive htmling!–and it’s not as well-written as some of the other fictionblogs I’ve come across, but it combines deeply specialized knowledge of a particular field and the type of steadily ratcheting fear to which projects of this nature lend themselves so well in what I found to be a fascinating, if not entirely successful, manner.
Fascinating for a different reason is The Confessional, another horror fictionblog discovered through a Dionaea-related comment thread. As you can imagine quite a few readers of the Dioanaea story created dummy blogs and accounts in an attempt to become a part of the story–this in my estimation is one of the coolest possibilities of Internet fiction presented in this manner. Rather than simply riff on the Dionaea concept as most such readers did, however, The Confessional’s Victor Kantius attempted to bridge it into his separate fictional cosmology. Well, either that or shoehorn in a plug for his site in a way that made it look less like a plug for his site. I’d seen his comment in at least one other location (which I now can’t find) than the one linked above, and intrigued, I checked out the site. It turns out to be a pretty good object lesson in the limits of this type of writing. In an attempt to jerry-rig the sort of believability factor that a period of quietblogging on mundane matters or parallel blogging on multiple sites would engender (we’ve seen one or both done with Dionaea, Laylasweetie, even yours truly), Kantius simply backdated several posts to New Year’s Day 2000–a fine enough tactic, if it weren’t for the fact that Blogger didn’t exist back then. His messing with timestamps gets the better of him on what ended up being his last post, one dated February 2006. The technological trickery available to Internet writers can be a valuable tool, but it’s used at the writer’s potential peril.
Three final notes before signing off:
* Reading through recent posts and comments at Laylasweetie led me to believe I was missing a lot. Now I know why. I can’t decide whether to be miffed that you can’t get everything out of the story simply by reading the LJ, or simply floored by the amount of time and effort that is apparently going into it all, but perhaps you can.
* Many a Dionaea commenter noted the similarities between the story and the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. House came very highly recommended to me, but I quickly found the annoying footnote chronicles of the hipster who supposedly found the main text’s manuscript too obnoxious to take and gave up on the book, even though I found its premise a chilling one. Now I’m thinking it’s time to give it another shot.
* I am currently dogsitting at my in-laws’ house, which though I’ve been here many times is still relatively unfamiliar to me. Last night as I went to the bathroom before bed I was contemplating the few bits of Dionaea I had read, as well as Laylasweetie and other bad-place stories I’d come across. After I finished I turned off the light and started walking back to the bedroom. I turned down the hall and thought to myself, “Gee, it’s dark. Amy must have turned off the bedroom light. But wait, she turned off the light in the other bathroom, too? How could she have done that so qui–” and found myself falling down the stairs I had actually turned down rather than the hallway five or six feet to its right. I caught myself after a few steps, but still, yikes. Add in all the malicious real-estate input I’d had that night, and double yikes. Between this and that wicked attack of deja vu I got after reading Laylasweetie that time, I’m starting to think horrorblogging does things to your head.