'Til Death Do Us (A)Part: Love (and Sex) In the Zombie Apocalypse

Are you still here? I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t. I haven’t been around, so it would be the height of hypocrisy to expect otherwise out of my readers. But I’m back now, and if you’re still around, I promise to make things up to you. I haven’t figured out how yet, but I will. I hope.

So that was a very long and unexcused hiatus. I’m not usually a procrastinor, and I didn’t actually intend to go so long between chapters, it just…happened. Let’s break it down.

August 24th: Oh shit, the chapter is due today. But it’s not done! I don’t know how to end it! I can wait another week. They’re used to me being a slack-ass by now.

August 31st: Still not done. Now it’s two weeks late. Okay, maybe I can write that post about things I’ve learned in the last year instead, and get them the chapter next week. They’ll forgive me.

September 7th: Now I’m really, really late. This chapter has to be super awesome, to make up for how late I am. It is not super awesome. In fact, it’s terrible. I’m terrible. Everything in the world is terrible. Let’s go buy boots.

September 14th: Fuck. Me.

September 28th: Where is the line between “Not too late to salvage things” and “Should probably just fake my own death”?

SIGH. And the worst part is I still don’t have the fucking chapter finished, because I STILL don’t know how to end it.

When this happens to me with other work, I jump past it – just move on to the next piece of the story that I have a crystal clear view of, and make plans to come back and fill in the gaps later. That’s my general writing process; I’m not a linear writer, by nature. What I often find is that 1) I have a better idea of how those gaps should be filled once I’ve written around them, or 2) They aren’t gaps that needed to be filled after all, whatever I was trying to force in there wasn’t an organic progression of the story. Either way, it works out.

I’ve resisted jumping, even in my drafts, because I’m trying to teach myself to write in a linear fashion. I think I might have to accept that it’s a lost cause, though. If I’d just done it six weeks ago I’d probably have this damn chapter finished, plus a bunch of other chapters already in the hole. At this moment I have nothing except the draft in my head, which has been gone over so many times I could stand up and recite it word-for-word. Which is fucking USELESS for our purposes here.

So that’s where we’re at. I swear to god, there WILL be a chapter on Sunday, and we will all just have to accept the possibility that it will end in mid-sentence. We’ll pretend it’s artsy. PRETEND WITH ME.

I love you.