Not all writers bemoan the existence of television as a corrosive force inevitably at odds with book reading. I’m not afraid to admit that I love television! Well, let me restate that. I love good television. There certainly is an overwhelming amount of junk food programming out there. I’ve never been able to stomach most reality shows (though Wipeout cracks me up and Project Runway is creative). I can no longer sit through serialized crime dramas. They’re all the same thing now. They use the old formula but throw in some of the disturbing imagery that was once groundbreaking when we saw it in Millennium. So when I find a show that pulls me in, I become pretty loyal and greatly frustrated when typically, it gets cancelled.
Invasion was one such show. The series aired at the time I was writing Zombie Blondes and it was far and away my favorite new show of the season that year. It was one of several shows that got the green light after the initial success of Lost. There was a whole wave of these continuous story type programs to hit the networks that fall. Most of them weren’t any good, but I thought Invasion was extremely well done. I sort of forgot how good it was, but thanks to the Chiller cable channel, which has been re-running the show the past few weeks, I’m remembering.
Is there anybody out that truly believes they don’t judge books by their covers? In our visually dominated culture, it’s sort of impossible not to make some flash judgments. The use of images is the primary way to get a consumer’s attention and has been for a long time. We scan, we search, we browse, we flip through, we glance over and only pause when something catches our eye. Non-visual art forms such as literature and music are not immune to it. Everyone in the industry knows the cover can make or break a book.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the brand of horror found in most American films. They tend to rely on fast cuts and spooky soundtracks to startle the viewer. I don’t particularly find this device effective in creating fear...the kind of real paralyzing, can’t turn away, fear that I wanted anyway. There’s a big difference between being scared and being startled. I recently went to see Drag Me Off to Hell and it’s a perfect example of what I mean. As viewers, we’ve become so used to this device that it no longer has the impact it did in say, the shower scene in Psycho. At most it gives us one or two cheap scares. In some cases, like in Drag Me Off to Hell, it can’t even achieve that because every startling moment is so telegraphed and we anticipate it. When this approach is taken in books, I find it even less effective regardless of how many exclamation points the author uses.
When I’d talk to anyone above a certain age (who doesn’t happen to be associated with the publishing world) about what I do, I used to always get the same question. “What’s a YA book?” Rather than have to explain that YA stands for young adult, I decided it was easier to just say I wrote teen novels. Though I’ve discovered that has its own set of problems. Images of Sweet Valley High covers dance through their heads and then they’ll usually ask me if I ever plan on writing any real novels, at which I point I’m torn between the urge to educate and the urge to insult them using the word skills I normally apply to said fake novels.
At the beginning of the writing process for each book, I like to familiarize myself with the subject matter. I want to get to know the kind of people that I’m writing about, see firsthand how they live and talk and what interests them. For obvious reasons, I debated skipping this step when I started work on Zombie Blondes. I asked myself if I really wanted to get up close and personal to flesh eaters. What if I were tasty? Or worse, what if I wasn’t? What would that do to my self-esteem? After all, us writers are notoriously fragile when it comes to our sense of worth. But in the end, I knew what I had to do. So regardless of my own personal safety, I set out in search of zombies.
