Wayback Wednesday #10: 2009

Happy early birthday to my beloved Brian!  For this week’s Wayback Wednesday, we’re going back to 2009, to a story that features my favorite fictional version of Brian… Song for the Undead!

Title: Song for the Undead

Written: February 2009 – August 2015

Straightforward synopsis: It’s like The Walking Dead, but with the Backstreet Boys!

The story behind the story:
Song for the Undead literally started as a joke. Back in the summer of 2008, when Yahoo Messenger was still a thing, I was having a late-night chat with a couple of my 00Carter co-writers and friends, Rose and Dee. We had gotten quiet, so Dee joked, “Is everyone dead?” and I replied, “Yes.” She said I must be a ghost, and I said I’d rather be a zombie, which got us talking about zombies. You can read the transcript of the chat to see how the conversation turned into a brainstorming session for a hypothetical fanfic about the Boys as survivors of a zombie apocalypse. We were just joking at first, but the more fun it started to sound, the more we were like, “We should really write this!”

To put it into context, zombies weren’t really trendy at the time. Vampires had been done in BSB fanfic and were about to become the next big thing in pop culture, with True Blood and Twilight set to come out that fall, but the zombie craze of this past decade wouldn’t begin for another couple of years. The Walking Dead existed as a comic none of the three of us had even heard of, but the TV show didn’t premiere until October 2010. As far as we knew, no one had done a BSB fic about zombies.

In fact, we were so worried no one would want to read a BSB fic about zombies that we originally posted it under an alternate title, 4.15.12. This is a date, April 15, 2012, known as “The Day of Unholy Resurrection” in the story, or the day on which the dead rose as zombies. Although we started writing the story in 2008, we set it a few years into the future because, if you’ll remember, the world was supposed to end in 2012, according to the Mayan calendar. We figured a zombie apocalypse was a great way to go out. We didn’t reveal the real title, Song for the Undead, until the first zombies appeared in Chapter 31 of the story. For the first thirty chapters, it just read like another post-apocalyptic story similar to Stephen King’s The Stand, in which a virus wipes out the majority of the population. Ours just happened to be the zombie virus.

We called it the Osiris Virus, named for the Egyptian God of the Underworld, who was brought back from the dead by his wife, Isis. It originated as a biochemical weapon created by a team of scientists in North Korea. Filled with regret upon realizing what the virus had the potential to do, two of the scientists fled the country after injecting themselves with the vaccine they had developed, which gave them immunity. In a last-ditch effort to save mankind from the zombie pandemic that would arise should the virus be unleashed, they donated blood as far and wide as they could in hopes that a small population on each country would receive their antibodies, become immune, and survive. This is probably pretty far-fetched, but we needed an explanation as to how such a small percentage of the population would be immune to the virus.

This meant all of our survivors must have received a blood transfusion not long before the apocalypse, so we had to come up with a tragic back story for each character. That’s how “Hemophilia Howie” came to be. It just made sense that at least one of the survivors would be a hemophiliac, and the beauty of writing an alternate universe is that you don’t have to stick to what’s “canon” or real life. Honestly, the hemophilia made Howie a more interesting character than he would have been otherwise, especially for medical drama-loving me. It added an element of suspense, knowing even a minor injury could prove fatal for Howie. Yet, somehow, he survived to the end of the story!

I don’t think we ever seriously considered killing any of the Boys, although we sure had fun almost killing them. Of course, Howie had to have at least one bad bleed in the story. There was also AJ’s zombie bite and, later, his broken leg. We did throw around the idea of having them amputate his leg after that, but for whatever reason, we decided against it – I don’t remember why. Then there was Nick’s head injury and the resulting seizures – and the plane crash that almost killed Kevin. Oddly enough, Brian’s the only one of the guys who never suffered any major injuries or medical problems, but that’s probably because we tortured him the most emotionally.

Brian was my favorite character to write in this story. Nick may have become my favorite Backstreet Boy to torture, but Brian will always be a close second. I sometimes forget that in between Nick cancer stories, I was pretty brutal to Brian. I made him stab himself in the heart in one story and jam a towel bar through zombie Leighanne’s eye socket in another. Good times. I had fun killing his beautiful family and forcing him to kill them again after they came back as zombies, making him lose his faith in God, and then slowly letting him regain it as life went on and he eventually fell in love again. I loved every step of the emotional journey he took.

Of course, we couldn’t have the five guys be the sole survivors of the zombie apocalypse – we needed some female characters in there, too, to solve the problem of repopulating the earth and all that. Rose, Dee, and I each created a character – Riley was Rose’s, Kayleigh was Dee’s, and of course Gretchen was mine. Then we created Jo and Gabby together so we would have an older woman and a child among our survivors. Along with Brian and Gretchen, I ended up writing most of Jo and Gabby’s chapters. Rose wrote Riley, Nick, and AJ. Dee wrote Kayleigh, Kevin, and Howie in the beginning, but she dropped out of the project pretty early on, after Rose and I kept pestering her about writing her parts in a timely manner. By the Day of Unholy Resurrection, we had taken over her characters. I wrote the majority of the Howie parts from that point on, and Rose wrote most of the Kevin and Kayleigh ones.

The way we wrote Kayleigh as the weak, pathetic damsel in distress probably wasn’t what Dee had intended for her, but I actually like her character’s arc. The way she reacts to the zombie apocalypse is believable – not everyone’s going to be a brave, badass fighter from the beginning. Personally, I’d probably be the one cowering in the corner like Kayleigh. I couldn’t relate to her as the rich sorority girl, but I could relate to her being sad and scared. Of course, just when she came out of her shell and started to contribute, we promptly killed her off – our first casualty among the main characters. Sorry, Dee.

Dee was a great writer, and we were sad to see her go, but as I had learned from Code Blue, three can be a crowd when it comes to collaborations. I doubt we would have ever finished Song for the Undead if we had waited weeks/months for her to write each of her chapters. We may never have even gotten to the point of posting it. As it was, it took us six months from when we started it in August 2008 to when we finally started posting it in February 2009. That wasn’t all Dee’s fault, though; part of the reason we waited so long to post the story was because we got the idea to post the first of the “Infernal Friday” parts (which took place on a Friday the 13th) on a Friday the 13th… and the first one of those was February 13, 2009.

Once it was just Rose and me, the writing went a lot faster. We had developed a close friendship that lent itself well to writing together. Rose and I have a similar, dark, twisted sense of humor and like a lot of the same things, so we usually loved each other’s ideas. We are also both pretty laid back and not easily offended, so we had no problem being honest with each other and vetoing ideas we didn’t like. In that way, we were able to keep each other in check. As writers, we brought out the best in each other.

That’s not to say we didn’t have setbacks. 2013-2014, in particular, was a rough time period for Song for the Undead. We both had a lot going on in our personal lives, and fanfic was lower on the priority list than it had been in past years, so we would sometimes go months between updates. But through it all, we never had any doubt in our minds that we would finish this story one day. Still, the fact that we actually did, seven years and 120 chapters later, was a huge accomplishment for both of us.

The length of Undead has a lot to do with its structure, which is based in tens. After creating our ten main characters, we decided we would keep it balanced between them by giving each character one chapter within a ten-chapter part. That’s why it takes awhile to get to the action, as the first ten chapters, or “Decalogue,” introduce each character and show what their lives are like just before the apocalypse begins. From there, each part has its own little storyline, as told by the ten characters. Once we started killing off characters, some got multiple chapters within a part to keep the ten-chapter structure. It worked well to have ten parts, although, technically, there are twelve. While the Decalogue acts as a prologue to the real story, the “Decennium” (which means “decade”) acts as an epilogue, taking place ten years after the apocalypse and showing how the survivors have rebuilt.

Our determination to maintain a balance between the main characters and not just write about Brian, Nick, Gretchen, and Riley meant that we actually had to come up with stuff for each character to do in each part, which was sometimes tough. There are definitely some fluff scenes that we wrote just for fun or to fill some of those chapters, but I like those more light-hearted moments in an otherwise very dark story. The romance and comic relief were a nice contrast from the horror and drama. I love when The Walking Dead includes these little breaks from the fighting, so I hope our readers appreciated them too.

Speaking of The Walking Dead… it’s crazy to me how zombies became cool again just a couple of years after we started writing Song for the Undead. We were just ahead of the curve, and we couldn’t have timed it more perfectly. Before we got the idea for Undead, I really wasn’t that well-versed in zombie stories. I’ve always loved horror, but I really hadn’t seen that many zombie movies or read many books about them. That changed as soon as we started planning and writing Undead. I started reading books about zombies. The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, both by Max Brooks, were most helpful, but I drew a lot of inspiration from Stephen King’s The Stand and Cell as well. I also watched as many zombie movies as I could find, everything from the George Romero classics to zombie comedies, including some pretty bad B-movies about zombie strippers and zombie sheep, even a foreign film featuring Nazi zombies. 2009 gave us Zombieland, which was so Rose and me, right down to the Code Red Mountain Dew reference. And then, in 2010, we got the greatest gift of all: The Walking Dead. From the moment we heard AMC was making a zombie TV show, we were on board. We both watched the premiere episode on Halloween night, and we were hooked. As both our story and the show (and the comic it was based on, which we both eventually read) went on, it was interesting to see the similarities and differences between the two. Sometimes we would watch and say, “Wow, why didn’t we think of that?” and other times, we would go, “Wow, we totally did think of that!” Nick’s boyband zombie movie Dead 7 was just the cherry on top of all the delightful zombie stuff we were blessed with during the last decade.

We tried to pay homage to some of the sources we drew inspiration from. Of course, there are plenty of “Thriller” references throughout Undead, but there are also characters based on or even borrowed from other zombie stories in the group of survivors our main characters meet in England. Selena was essentially the same Selena from 28 Days Later. Alistair was supposed to be the brother of Frank from 28 Days Later, played by Brendan Gleeson, who also played Mad-Eye Moody in Harry Potter. Shaun and Liz were straight out of Shaun of the Dead. Martin was a med student who cut off his own arm after being bitten by a zombie in Dead Snow. Abby was from a British miniseries called Survivors, about the survivors of a flu pandemic that wipes out most of the population. The Italian guys, Giorgio and Lucio, were named for George Romero and Lucio Fulci, both known for making zombie movies. Dr. Kwak In-Su, on the other hand, was an original character we created. “Kwak” is a real Korean surname, and “In-Su” is a real Korean masculine given name, but of course, it made a funny name for a doctor because it sounds like “Dr. Quack and Sue.”

In spite of the fact that zombies aren’t real, we did a ton of research for this story to try to make it seem as realistic as possible. We researched locations, zombie lore, and hypothetical post-apocalyptic scenarios. The documentary and later TV series Life After People debuted during the early years of writing this story, and I watched it religiously to get ideas for how the infrastructure would fall apart over time. For years, I had a detailed map of MacDill Air Force Base sitting on my computer desk that I would refer to when writing scenes at the base. After we finished the story, I couldn’t bear to throw the thing away. I don’t delete bookmarks or story outlines for the same reason. I’m a very nostalgic person (and perhaps a bit of an organized hoarder), and all of that brings back memories, which comes in handy when writing retrospective blogs like this.

Song for the Undead means a lot to me. Like 00Carter before it, this collab was completely different from anything I’d ever written before. I had done suspense and supernatural stuff, even a survival story before, but never a true horror story like this one. It’s actually surprising it took me eight years to try horror, as I’ve always loved watching and reading in that genre. Turns out, I love writing in it, too.

Rose and I have always said we’ll collaborate again, and we have a couple of ideas floating around that we have yet to tackle. Real life has a tendency to get in the way of writing, but hopefully someday we’ll get at it… if we don’t go back to 00Carter first. But whether we ever write together or again or not, at least we’ll always have Undead.