I’ve moved address! While I love my zombies, I don’t think I could handle a blog for every bit of culture and research I get into now or in the future, so it’s all gone to one place.

While zombies will still be a major feature, there’s bits and pieces of other speculative fiction, tv, media, the book industry, whatever conferences I end up going to, things like that.

How to write by awesome and award winning author Angela Slatter

Last night during Masterchef I kept an eye on my Twitter feeds for #phdchat, started by the Thesis Whisperer. Although I’m not a PhD student, it is important to not only learn about the community I want to join and the people around it, but also the issues that come up when writing a massive thesis and being a researcher and academic.

So the conversation yesterday revolved around keeping in the writing mood and getting it done. There was a lot of mention of chocolate and treats!

I started out writing fiction from when I was around twelve. I’ve got a shelf of books dedicated to writing characters, plots, action scenes, and a few around writing articles or specific genres (of course, mostly fantasy). Right now I’m not in the fiction writing sphere, but if I learned anything from fiction writers it’s this: everyone is different! You may plan every step of the way, or free-write the first draft. You might focus on quantity, you might focus on quality. The below suggestions are ideas to help you figure out what your style of writing is. An absolute blank wordprocessor may be what works for you, where I at least need a selection of fonts (I write in pretty fonts, and then strip the format when I’m done to make it appropriate font-ed). One of the things you can’t rely on is only writing when you feel like it. You HAVE to write. You don’t have a choice at uni or in a research course about ‘aww, I don’t feel like it today’. Another thing, that was also mentioned on the hashchat, accept that whatever you do will need editing. It’s very rare the creature that writes one draft and that’s it. That’s partly why publishing books takes so long, it’s revising the editing between the editor (freelance or in-house) and the author.

Here’s my notes from last night:

• The Pomodoro Technique: Setting short time goals and rewarding yourself with breaks. Join a group for Shut Up and Write
• Set word based goals – 1000 words a day, 500 words a day – even if it’s a crap 500 or 1000 words, it’s still writing!
• Use Wordle to analyse even a sample of your writing to see the words you are using too much unconciously, or use the Writer’s Diet Test
• Edit finished text in a new file
• Write the PhD question on the header of every page to keep it in mind and help stay on track
• Use mind maps or concept maps to plan
• Put research/paper in progress/additional info on DropBox so you can access it anywhere
• Utilise verb lists. Try the Academic Phrasebank.
• Plan your writing a day or even week before your writing session
• End each writing session with a bullet point list of what comes next.
• Outline sections to help focus writing
• Write like Leonard, Edit like Sheldon
• Disconnect yourself from the internet. Use paper and pen, or if you need to be online, use something like Chrome Nanny to lock yourself out of social media.
• Blog, get some writing buddies or a group together – responsibility to share with others as a motivator for writing. Set yourself deadlines.
• Attend writing workshops or go on a writing retreat.
• Don’t write linearly – put in titles and develop ideas in sections, then review and revise between sections
• Take a break! Go for a run or to the gym, or go take a shower or bath
• Good to write conference papers and articles during PhD
• Read about writing as well as content and research processes
• Writing is something you learn as you go along, you won’t know it all upfront.

Suggested Programs:

• Evernote
• Scrivener ($$)
• Focus Booster
• yWriter

Also check out:

Writing Hacks for Starters

Creating a research space

NaNoWriMo – Rather than writing a novel during the month, write a thesis!

Writing an outline

How to create a science blog
Developing Effective Research Proposals by Keith F Punch

Qualitative Research Design by Joseph Maxwell

This looks incredible! Donate here!

I’ve read a few comments and reviews on this doco and it’s been mostly negative. That the direction of the documentary shows those into romance books to be pathetic, sad sacks of loneliness or desperate for romantic attention, and ignores the range of romance readers. There’s one at Dear Author, and one at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

It’s available online at SMH.tv (maybe only for Australian viewers? If you are international, it might not work for you)

Despite or maybe because of the negative images around it, I decided to watch it. I’m still new to admitting I read romance (mostly historical outside paranormals and zombies), but a lot of my friends are romance – particularly paranormal – readers and I do wonder about the difference between the stereotyped Mills and Boon readers and the real readers I know. What is it about the books we like?

So I’ve jotted down some quotes and comments onthings that happened in the doco.

Note: Words not exact because the video was being evil for me and I couldn’t go back to get the words right :S

~

Women make male or neutral pseudonym for sci fi (and other genres) – men make female pseudonyms for romance books

“It’s okay for her [my wife] to read these novels to compensate what I can’t give her” – a reader’s husband

Men must be alphas, have to look imposing, got to present a good physical appearance, got to be fit, never fat. The kind of man every woman would fancy – Romance writer

Mills and Boon readers are usually past the bloom of youth, intelligent, and have steamy determination – Romance writer

Sometimes are accused by ardent feminists of being anti-feminist, of  promising women things that they will never have, which I think is ludicrous. Readers know they are reading a work of fiction, they don’t expect it in real life. – Romance writer

A reader takes up ballroom dancing inspired by the novels she reads. She admits to dressing up specially for her private tutor, but not so for her husband.

‘It gets hotter and hotter’, ‘Why can’t we expect that in real life?’ – a reader and her friend

‘There was a lot missing in my life and that’s why I enjoyed reading the books. I think it’s escapism. You just indulge yourself in them and think ‘wow, I wish that was me’ – A reader

Romance reader who likes ballroom also watches competitions and seems to admire other men who are tall and Harlequin-heroesque, pointing out features of men not her husband that she likes.

Writer takes notebook to cafes and restaurants and will note down snippets of discussion or movements. That’s what readers like, little things rather than big things, little words, little looks.

Of course she likes reading. It’s a harmless past time. – Reader’s husband

You used to get a sex scene that faded into dots … but now it’s very different – Writer

The idea that any fool can write a Mills and Boon is a mistake – Writer

The sex scene must always be in the context of a loving relationship. – Writer

This is all fantasy, it’s not the real world. It’s a nicer world and we want to maintain that image – Writer

That’s why you read the books. You want all that romance … At the end of the day, you live in the real world and everyone has their downfalls.  – Reader

A Mills and Boon book is not just happy and straightforward -  they have to work through trials to get to a happy conclusion – Writer

Why do men find it so hard to say ‘I love you’? Maybe because it’s so trite, everyone says I love you. There’s almost an in-built fear of commitment, they don’t really want to say something that will tie them down. – Writer

She’s an extremist [about reading Mills and Boon]. Militant, feminist. – a reader’s separated husband

The dancing reader is not happy. Her husband has joined her in dancing so she can go in competitions, but she envies those couples where the husband/male teaches the female. The husband is nervous, but excited to be working with her.

Women are more interested in relationships and talking about relationships than men. Women like to be told things over and over again. – Writer

We’re all yearning for love … I think a fraction of 1% get to meet their true love. It’s so powerful it’s unstoppable. You have to believe in that.  – Model

In every book I write there is a development in the character. The person at the end of the book is not the same as at the beginning, they’ve both learned something about themselves. – Writer

Mills and Boons create an excitement in my life … but it’s not something I’m setting my heart on, because real life is about different things. It’s about romance in your self, that will save you. Relationships will come and go … but it’s the relationship with yourself and how you develop that – Reader

If you think it is getting a bit stale, you have to throw something in there – Reader’s husband

We celebrate, in every Mills and Boon book, the emotion of love which is in everyone’s lifes – Writer

Real life begins where the Mills and Boon ends – Reader

~

After thoughts:

So a lot of this was about true life love and relationships and not just the romances. It feels a bit awkward to have watched someone else’s unfulfilled relationship.

I’m not so sure that reading the romances gave the women an unachievable relationship to desire as the film seemed to suggest. They wanted to be respected, to have some fun in the times they spent together and to enjoy each other’s company and work with their passions.

I didn’t think there was enough breadth in the film – there was no happily married/together couple of which one reads romance, there had to be something lacking or different in the relationship. The people were set up to be seen as trying to live in their own fantasy world, but I didn’t feel that’s what was really going on. Also, the restriction of only connecting with Mills and Boon romance – there are soooo many other imprints and publishers and types out there.

And none of them seemed to read or write or model for paranormal romance. Mores the pity, because I think it brings a new dimension in. I particularly love when the female is the special paranormal, and the male is lesser aware of the paranormal because all too often, it’s men as alpha weres/head vamps and women as the humans. Where once a woman had to be a lady to marry a lord – and there’s more than enough stories about lower class women and higher class men – it’s about changing an entire life-state, not just being able to pick nice clothes and not insult a royal guest. Could argue that romance is the same all around, it’s just paranormal types  ramp up the problems that can be had in any normal relationship. Still, I think it’s a missed opportunity to show only one kind.

* Of course it depends on what universe of zombies, but, in general, this dude totally nails it XD

There are some short stories I’ve read lately which deal with the bond of lovers or family after death. You might question if they are zombies because they might not be precisely called zombies; maybe just undead, reanimated corpses. This is not romance WITH zombies but love for the human-that-is-now-zombie (although one story by Williamson isn’t on this specific theme of love in the time it’s set).

I do think that we can’t be so direct about what a zombie is or isn’t, because authors are bloody inventive creatures and they will force these creatures we once knew to evolve. There’s been quite a few changes in the short 100ish years of the Americanised fictional zombie, and that’s a damned quick evolution from zombiing individuals to mobs (Vampires used to be hidden singular vamps or in small groups, and now are a whole known race in literature with great numbers).

Anywhoos, here’s the stories (I haven’t finished the whole compendium yet, so might add more later):

Was it a dream? by Guy de Maupassant (1910)

The Cairnwell Horror by Chet Williamson (1990)

Later by Michael Marshall Smith (1993)

In Combined and Uneven Apocalypse by Evan Calder Williams, the author questions critiques of zombie works for over-reading the text. Some of the analysis, he says, is not really in-depth but just pointing out what happens in the movie and only a surface interpretation. E.g. Dawn of the Dead being totally about consumerism because zombies are in the mall or an African-American dies by a redneck, therefore the text about race.

“Simply because a film seems to point out problems of social inequality does not mean that it is a radical film, or even one that is therefore ‘smarter’ and more aware than those films hell-bent on entertainment, social critique be damned.”

So I’m trying to think about this and my own work deeper, but I’m not sure how it’s going. Directors of some zombie movies had spoken in interviews about how the movie and zombies are very deliberately placed to examine 9/11 or consumerism or race or whatever. Dawn of the Dead is not just about consumerism because the zombies are in the mall, but about how the humans interact with being in the mall too. Maybe I’m not reading this bit properly.

I’ve seen the ‘reading too much into things’ directed at scholars and reviewers before. Is it always about the author’s intention? One of my favourites, I kissed a zombie and I liked it by Adam Selzer, has zombies reborn through the magic of a big supershop wanting free slave labour. Asking the author on twitter (ages ago) if it was relating to the original Haitian zombies as plantation slaves, he said he wanted a good reason to have zombies in our world. Does this mean that we shouldn’t read into the whole Walmart-like business wanting to use people (or zombies) for their benefit?

You can check out a review of this book here and a preview of the book here.

This movie is epic. You don’t need to be a zombologist to see the links being made between zombies and real life. It compares societal panics – the ‘gay’ panic, terrorism panic, religious panics, etc – to zombies. Just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t smart or funny, and I can’t quite decide what I liked the most about it. I do like some politics on the side of zombies and other monsters, mostly because of how damned crazy politicians are, and this movie brings out the best (worst?) of it.

There’s a few main characters. There is the gay couple – the totally out there Lance (wearing an ‘I’m with him’ shirt, a big f you to small town minds and proud of who he is – right on!), and his partner Tom, who is returning to the small town to finally come out of the closet to his mum. There is an Iranian-American, Frida, who is constantly harassed with the rednecks of the town who mistake her for an Iraqi and use her as an excuse to go on about the war on terrorism, which clearly she has nothing to do with as she has lived her whole life in America. She wants to be seen as American, which upsets her Iranian father who is proud of his heritage. There’s Mrs Banks, a teacher and running for Mayor against Mayor Burton who has been in control of the town for some time and is a god-fearing good Christian. And as always, never trust a priest, particularly a small town priest!

As well as the story and great characters (and great acting!), there’s some awesome makeup and zombie design with skin being pulled off faces while they are still screaming – lovely (and not being sarcastic, it was beautifully done)! Unlike some comedy horrors, it’s not more depressing than funny (maybe it would have been more depressing if a certain person was still in charge of a certain oval-shaped office in a white coloured house).

This is totally a buy!

~

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

As with all zombie movies from the 70′s, I look out for boobs. The first made an appearance in 3 minutes. Actually there was less boobs in this movie than other 70′s movies I’ve seen!

While the character interaction was a bit weird, boring or misogynistic most of the time (one moral you could take from this is: women are hysterical and can’t drive!), the underlying zom plot was pretty good. Admittedly, I’d tried to watch this a few times before and had just zoned out – maybe that’s the whole generational thing of “OMG were lyk Gen Y n ned action all teh tym!” (It killed me to write that ><).

Two young (one very lefty/hippy like) people are being stalked by the coppers (the bad authority who don’t know nuffin!) for murders that were actually caused by the walking dead. These zombies are different from typical zombies, and although the cause is explained, there’s something that bugs me about them. One, a man who died from drowning, is shown wet and dripping in every scene, very ghost like. Of course, Romero had only made Night of the Living Dead a few years before this and although brought back in the interest in zombies, not everyone made Romero-esque zombies yet (you see a lot of people who comment on Youtube that zombies are ONLY like X and can only be killed with Y etc etc. but either ignore the evolution of creativity or don’t know the actual evolution of zombies. I used to be one of those ignorant fools! Except I don’t comment on Youtube )

As a relatively early modern zombie movie, it’s pretty good. It doesn’t have the absolute gore of other zombie movies in the era (perhaps this lead to a lighter rating?) and the makeup is okay for the time. They have the zombie shamble  and dead eyed stare down pat!

I’m considering getting this, being an example of X causes zombification and X was a concern of the time and looking at historical context etc etc, but it’s not action packed and seems to go on for longer than it really does.

~

Resident Evil

This is one of the prominent zombie movies of noughties and for good reason. Admittedly, I’ve never played the game, but I love the old evil corporation and bitch-crazy AI.

I am a fan of Milla Jovovitch, she does some damned good movies and she acts damned well too, and it did take me some time to place James Purefoy (he gets his kit off as Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome – helloooooo!) – he’s not as crazy famous as some, but he’s a good actor and … Michelle Rodriguez plays Michelle Rodriguez. ‘Nuff said.

A top secret bad virus is kept in a totally breakable container which is broken, and entire offices are flooded and people killed with gas. We learn soon enough that it was the AI of the complex that directed this and a group of soldiers are directed to go in and find out wtf happened. In the meantime, Jovovitch/Alice wakes up, apparently having collapsed in the shower. She doesn’t remember a thing, but is told she works for Umbrella too. Flashes of memory start coming back, and she’s not so sure she was a loyal employee…

I do like the story, it’s totally a classic and I am very much looking forward to the next one in the series when it comes out later this year. This is very much a modern zombie movie with lots of action, a bit of plot, and loads of zombies and fake blood.

I have half the series already, just need to find this one and Extinction, so clearly it’s a buy for me.

DON’T LOOK BELOW IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS FOR THE REST OF THE SERIES!

~

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

How could we make something good so bad? With Apocalypse! It makes sense in context of the series and how the zombie plague plays out, but the ‘plot’ is downright horrid. I’ve seen on the net that the writer (same as the first movie) blamed the director, but I really don’t believe any director could have saved that script or those characters.

Some things just downright didn’t make sense. So we know the zombie infection is spread by bites and scratches, but how do the long-dead in the graveyard come back to un-life? In the first film, the virus was created for military application, where this one has a different story. The other characters – anyone not Alice – were crap too. There’s the hardened ex-cop who dresses in boob tubes, miniskirts and platform shoes, and decorates her apartment in the newspaper clippings of her own dismissal (why?), then there are some soliders with a really bad sense of one-liners, a black guy who plays a stereotypical black guy – although there is a man of African-American appearance who plays a cop as well, so it’s not completely racist.

Alice is asskicking, as usual, and Milla Jovovitch doesn’t bow to the terribleness of the story. If it wasn’t for her and the movie being a part of an overall good series, this would be totally unworthy. This is the B-Grade of the series, although it does pack some important information right in at the end.

~

Resident Evil: Extinction

So after being saved again, apparently they all decide to split up and Alice is biking her way across the desert and showing some strange powers. Somewhere in that desert there’s an Umbrella lab where they are trying to work on clone Alice’s, putting the clones through rigorous testing and leading to a huge pile of dead Alice’s on the surface that make the horde of zombies rattle the rather weak looking fence for. But there are other survivors tracking across the country, low on fuel, low on food, and Alice shares with them a possible escape – Arcadia in Alaska, the promised land, free of infection and safe with food and shelter. They have to get there first, and Umbrella wants Alice back and doesn’t care who they kill in the process.

Apart from the bad guys being totally evil with no morals, no emotion, no care for humanity and totally stereotypical, this movie does improve on everything else that Apocalypse lacked. There’s still a few strange things that don’t quite make sense (Oh, I didn’t mention this before, but I’m an expert helicopter pilot. Could that possibly, at all, be of use in a zompocalypse?) but less of them.

~

Resident Evil: Afterlife

And to the last one that came out! Apart from screwing up an Umbrella lab in Tokyo, Alice has gone to Alaska to find Arcadia and found nothing, nothing at all except a crazed up Claire with a strange device attached to her chest. They escape the island and find a prison with a few survivors and thousands of zombies outside the gates. Alice decides to stop in, and finds out that Arcadia is not what they thought it was at all. And the prison won’t be safe for much longer, with zombies digging through the ground and a big ass executioner looking zom with a ginormous axe/mace/thing.

Again, typical bad guys who wear sunglasses inside and underground, but also some unexpected enemies (but should be expected from a zompocalypse) from within the survivor group itself. The last group of survivors all worked together for a common purpose, and apart from LJ who hid his bite (totally in denial), they were loyal to the group. This group is a bit more diverse. Keeping together with the same people for so long must drive you nuts, but some people cling to the falsities of what used to be reality and don’t realise that what was important then means crap all now.

Still cool action sequences. Was shot in 3D, and although I didn’t watch it in 3D, some of the scenes looked brilliant – like the first, a girl standing in the rain in Tokyo, lots of slow action movement to show every breath, every drop of rain. I like that detail. A lot of 3D done today is postproduction, and really not worth being called 3D, compared to something so highly detailed (in design, not plot) as Avatar (which of course started the 3D trend.)

But anyway, good zombie movie!

The movement of zombie mythology from its first period to its second … mirrors the shift from faith in God to faith in science. – Kevin Boon’s essay ‘The Zombie as Other’ in Better off Dead, edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro

One of my favourite and hated of all stereotypical characters is the ‘crazy religious person’ (note: this does NOT refer to every religious person! There are people who take anything too far, no matter the name of their god. Second note: I will always not capitalise the word/name god unless it is from a quote. I use the term ‘gawd’ when I’m being silly.) This is the person who will deny what is front of them, even as the zombies are eating their flesh (literally in some movies). In Stephen King’s The Mist, it’s Mrs Carmody, thinking herself so pure when actually she splits the survivors apart. Whether unshakable belief in anything can be healthy is a topic for another academic. What I think about is god and science.

If you haven’t seen Prometheus, think of Frankenstein. The creation of life is an ability for god alone and no mortal can be god. Your  belief can change the purpose of life completely in a story: in one side of beliefs (of either science or religion), mankind is king, either being certified by god as above all the creatures or through survival of the fittest and evolving above the animals. On the other side, mankind is one of many creations and it’s our ability to think that will save us (and animals) and doom us (and animals). Are humans any more worthy of survival than animals? In some texts, animals are immune or not part of the zombie food pyramid. Could it be god resetting the world back to equality, where mankind no longer has total control? Or is it the animals are better at survival of the fittest?

The disease/plague/whatever itself is another point. Mostly we see zombie plagues either made by man, for bio-weapons, for immortality, for whatever. I’m struggling to think of a zombie plague ‘sent by god’. Usually it’s science or there is no explanation at all. Voodoo is human-controlled, so I wouldn’t quite set that as being god’s power or intent.

Science vs god also determines how we look at the Other. Western society is very paranoid about robots, for example, where in some countries like Japan have huge robot development (just told my partner what I’m writing, and he said how easy it would be to program a robot to kill zombies). But if zombies were created by god? How would that change our perceptions of them (whether you are the religious type, and whatever religious type you are)?

So in all didn’t actually talk about the quote at all, but still an interesting divide, whatever the monster!

This interests me on so many levels, but it’s one of the comments below the article that got my attention and made me think of my dear zombies and cultural anxiety. MariaK1 wrote “I find this article incredibly depressing and if I had money I would be tempted to move to the country and avoid the whole stinking mess.”

I thought of the article completely opposite: a wide viewing of the reach of the human imagination. I thought more of Star Trek and its utopian future rather than the bleak Battlestar Galactica. This is probably due to my upbringing as a nerd.

Technology becomes scary, to me, not just when used for war, but with the unintended side effects. When robots rise up against us, when our lives have such little meaning because technology sustains us so long that we no longer seek to produce anything ourselves but become mindless consumers.

Starting to sound familiar now?

It’s very much a theme of the film Surrogates with Bruce Willis. People don’t need to go outside anymore, they just lay down, hook into a robot, and the robot goes out and does all the work for them. Imagine the muscle waste from laying down so much and doing nothing! Where most of society goes about in these robots, there is a community living in a separate area that are against the use of surrogates and that humanness is the apex of society, not the technology.

So back to zombies. It could be technology used to extend life (Cybermen are sorta zombies maybe?) or radioactive waste that infects people (Redneck Zombies!), or just in general scientific experiments to see how far human life can survive, or maybe exposure to aliens or alien substances (space dust in Fido, facehugger things in Half Life). With the zombie apocalypse, we are forced to strive to survive for any significant amount of time; we must create, build, plant, and grow as the stocks in the stores won’t last forever. Survival is not just for the next day, but for life.

The major theme/moral/etc of so many stories is that technology and its conveniences make us weak and further from nature/true goodness/godliness/whatever and prevents our evolution. That’s why we need a Wall-E, a Greer, a Zombie Apocalypse to ‘reset’ us to this natural state.