Zombies vs. Vampires vs. Aliens

This post started out as a comment on Gary Ghislain’s blog post: Oh, zombies… (which I cannot find to link and that makes me very sad).  Then it became too long to be a comment and grew some arms and legs and aliens.  Now, ”It’s alive!”.

Hurray for zombies and vampires (and aliens).  The latest TV shows and movies all seem to be about these creatures, and I approve.  I have two projects on the go and they too involve these and many other supernatural or mysterious creatures too.  My social science fiction/dystopian adventure novel has aliens and super-humans.  I am also working on the outline for a YA thriller  that has vampires against zombies (Second of the series. Ideas kept flowing, I couldn’t help myself). For my personal choices - just like you might suspect:  I prefer vampires for companions and zombies for prey (to hunt, not to eat-EWWW). 

The reasoning is simple. Vampires represent what most people fantasize about becoming.  They are smart, immortal, sexy and invincible.  Zombies are more of a metaphor for what we fear and abhor.  The deteriorating corpse situation aside, they tend to snack on intestines, smell bad and always pose a danger to turn you into a stinking zombie too.   Nobody wants to take home a boyfriend that might want to gnaw on mommy’s leg and then have daddy for dessert.

My love for vampires pre-dates the teenage vampire craze of the Twilight era by about twenty years.  When I was seven, I found a book called “The Little Vampire” in a grocery store dollar bin.  My sister bought a few of the series for me right there and before the day was over I had read all three books, dying to get my hands on some more.  I was unstoppable.  I read everything I could find that involved vampires.  There weren’t many.  Anne Rice came into my life in my teenage years, when my school’s headmaster (RIP Bill Bower) gave me the Vampire Lestat as a Christmas present.  Then I read all Anne Rice vampire books and even wrote an essay for school about vampire literature and how it was due for a comeback.  That was in 1998.

Then, not many cared about vampires and the popular view was that they were scary creatures.  I liked Anne Rice because unlike Buffy-style vampire stories, her protagonists were emotionally tormented vampires.  Obviously, I was ecstatic when vampires became popular a couple of years ago.  Vampires were easy to make-over and add charm to (I just wish they would stop sparkling).  Blood drinking is most definitely less repulsive than eyeball sucking, but Zombies hold a different place in my heart.

A few years ago, I started having zombie apocalypse dreams.  Weird, huh?  I had only seen two zombie flicks a few years apart, the Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later. Neither made me a zombie genre fan.  Regardless of my lack of experience in zombie hunting ; after an all night zombie killing spree, I woke up with hurting arms and a very exhilarated soul.  I figured other people must be having these dreams too, so I Googled it (that’s what you would do too, no?). I wanted to know if this was a cultural phenomena or a psychological one (I really just wanted reassurance that I wasn't a psycho).  They were, however in most dreams people were hiding or being defeated by the zombies, unlike me.  I faced them, fought them , killed them.

Yes, me. The crazy woman who liberates spiders, moths and (if I’m feeling absolutely angelic) ants.  In these cinematic dreams, I become this fearless heroine leading people, making plans and killing zombies with sawed off shotguns, machetes and whatever I can get my hands on in Dreamcity.  These dreams have made me enjoy zombie flicks and decide to write my own. Hey, maybe it’s HAARP.  Maybe now they broadcast ads into our dreams to drive the market.

And that brings me (admittedly weakly) to the aliens.  Aliens also have started becoming humans more often than scary green creatures with sharp teeth.  Aliens too have started their metamorphosis into super-human types capable of long life, regeneration and other abilities.  They are not out to eat us, but maybe they have other agenda.  Maybe they are protecting us, teaching us or helping our evolution.  They may turn out to be evil, but we will first find them attractive and friendly.


It really comes down to this: Although both aliens, zombies and vampires might be bad for our health in most cases, we still want to steal the aliens' secret to genetic superiority, make sweet love to a 500 year old lover and become immortal, but zombies are just good for sport.  We just want to kill them.

Education, Blogucation and Life in General

I come up with my best ideas at night and like most folks who are just starting their adventure in writing professionally, I have a day job (pout).  I have to wake up at 7:00, therefore my most productive hours are spent sleeping.  Tonight is Friday (yay!)  and hubby is out, so I can write something.  I am pondering on a short story and reading Nancy Lamb's the Art and Craft of Storytelling.  It's an excellent read and I would recommend to anyone who writes.  Even if you know everything about style and technique, I think you'd find the book inspiring.

I have been thinking a lot.  It is what I do.  Recently, on and off, I have been thinking about education and how most people think of it as the academic process. I did too at some point.  I went to a boarding school for gifted children on a different continent.  It was my Hogwarts.  Then I came to North America and went to university for two years.  Crazy circumstances led to my scholarship being pulled (I was a good student, I swear!) and I found myself having to work crappy jobs for minimum wage.  I had always loved to read so I kept on reading everything that I could find at the library sales.

I read about psychology, sociology, language, astrophysics (as much as I could wrap my head around it), anthropology, archeology, history, politics, genetics.  You name it, I read a book, article or blog about it online.  I am a self-taught graphic designer and I have been educating myself every day by reading, writing and practicing that, but not the rest of the stuff I read about.  The more I learn, the more I forget. Knowledge is slippery:  If you don't think about it or apply it, you will forget it or just file it away somewhere out of reach in your brain.  That's why they make us write essays and take exams in school; to make sure we've learned.  I don't want to get into the exam subject as I disagree with the way this is done in general.

Blogs are the essays and exams of the virtual education platform that some of us spend hours in.  We are no longer only educated in schools, but online (via blogs, tutorials, etc.), and by our own efforts.  School is a formality that employers want to see on a resume, but if you want to write an award-winning book, make a living at blogging or even become a great graphic designer, you now compete with a ton of peeps who have gone far and above what the academic system can offer them. Their minds have been opened by exploring many different points of view.  They have been blogucated.

Why is being an all around well-educated person important?

For me it's because I want to understand as much as I can of the world, its people and its cultures and of the universe and its secrets.  For you, it might be something else, but it's clear that knowing more won't hurt your writing.  Life experience also helps (essential if you don't want your characters all to start sounding like you and your best friend/spouse/boss), so don't spend all your time on the computer.  Go meet up some old friends.  Tell them you've been writing a book and going to school; that's why you haven't seen them in a year.