Interestingly enough, my current Work in Progress has zombies in it. If you have read other entries in this blog, you know how much I insist on hating zombie stories, and I do.

So, I wouldn't call this a zombie story in the ideological sense. As we learned in the third episode of Life: Narrated, our podcast, zombies are used to complain about social woes with impunity. Anything from capitalism, to immigration, to kids spending too much time on their smart phones. (if you haven't listened already, you should! It's interesting.)

But this story brings the zombie back to the basics, I guess. Where there's a necromancer whose in control and the zombie - in life a very important person who died under unclear circumstances - is used as a political pawn more than anything.

I'm halfway through my second pass at editing and as much as I love the story, there is going to have to be some serious structural edits in the next pass.

For instance. In the original, the necromancer is picked up by the army and they hitchhike to a secret military installation.

They hitchhike.

How secret could this military installation be if everyone keeps hitchhiking to it? Why would a seriously outfitted government agency not invest in a car? What kind of two-bit operation is this, anyway?

I honestly have no idea what I was thinking.

No, I do know what I was thinking, because I wrote that scene after hitchhiking on the back on an oil tanker - I was sitting literally on top of the tank - and thought, wow, this would be an awesome scene in a book.

But some things that happen in real life shouldn't go in novels because the details just stand out too much. Instead of focusing on the main point - which would be the military being interested in the necromancer - the reader will be like... but why are they hitchhiking? And why are they on an oil tanker?

All that aside, I haven't reached the 'Oh god why am I doing this? Is this terrible or awesome?' stage of editing, so I'm still feeling pretty chipper.

Hey guys!

Episode Three of Life Narrated is out! I know what you're thinking. Where is episode two? Episode two has been stricken form the record and will, from now on, be referred to as: NOPE.

 But Episode Three is bangin', ya'll.

In this episode, we talk about zombie narratives!

I like this episode for two reasons:

1) before I started researching zombies, I was very uninterested in the genre as a whole. I didn't understand why people like zombie movies and why they were so popular.

But after researching quite a bit, I started to see deeper meaning in it. I started to see the lines of connection between the African zombi, to the Haitian zombi, to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, to all the iterations of the theme since. I couldn't believe they were all connected.

This is why I find anthropology so fascinating, because you find connections where you don't expect there to be one.

2) We had a guest star on the show! Even though we were using a crappy Skype setup, we still managed to have the lovely and talented @Loolabette on to talk about zombies! It was fun!

I am very encouraged by our progress on the technology front and I'm hoping to have more guest stars in the future. Unfortunately, she's kind of hard to hear, but we're still working out the kinks. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Now, without further ado, here is Episode Three of Life: Narrated:  https://soundcloud.com/lifenarrated/life-narrated-3-zombie

PS - Every time we say Boris Karloff, pretend we're saying Bela Lugosi.