Because backstory is important.

I am a newly minted zombie. I was in the hospital recovering from surgery on my hand, chilling in my pajamas when the outbreak came. And as you know, hospitals are ground zero for zombie outbreaks. I haven't been a zombie long, but I find it unpleasant so far. I just spent all this money and time on surgery and then some asshole goes and removes a piece of my neck with his nasty teeth. That's a great way to spread stds, zombies, all that indiscriminate biting. We probably all have herpes.

Some nurse started to wrap my wound, but then I ate her. Now I'm off to see if this eating people thing is all there is to being a zombie. If we're taking over the world, I feel like we should have a more cerebral objective. But first, I'm hungry. Who here still has brains?

Update on the great class zombie project

Since it became clear we had neither the resources nor the time to make a solid short film out of any of the scripts the kids wrote for their screenplay projects, I assigned it to them as a final exam. Each group was to take their script and somehow present their story to the class. They could make a video or a play or a comic book or a puppet show or anything in between.

First of all, the screenplay have been great. This started as a zombie project, so most of the kids did exactly that, although there were a couple of exceptions. So you'd think, given how many zombie stories are out there, that I'd see pretty much the same shit over and over. Not so. Sure, some of them went the traditional route of people being chased across the city. Some of those were well done, some not so much. But some totally surprised me. I had zombie love stories, intelligent zombie comedies, and one story that was supposed to be serious but the kid who wrote it was so unintentionally funny I laughed my way through the damn thing.

My favorite line: "Guy bites her skin off, which appears to have caught her off guard." Always a joyous surprise to laugh that hard when you're grading papers. She did not understand what I thought was so goddamn funny.

Anyway, today they started presenting their projects. One group used Photoshop to turn pictures they took into a comic book that they then showed in a PowerPoint presentation. That was super cool.

The best part of all this is how some of the kids who did the most amazing work on this thing were some of my laziest kids. It's like they came alive as soon as I showed them the literary value of film. Hopefully that will carry over into their classes next year and they'll realize that what they learned applies to all the stories, not matter what the genre.

I'm definitely doing this next year.

Today in school we learned about zombies

Last week the eleventh grade English students all finished the same novel, and I was in charge of organizing the whole thing, including a culminating event where we screened the movie in the theater and ate Chinese food and whatnot, so I am tired.

I was so busy working on this that I failed to plan for the future, so Friday I told my kids "Now that we're done with this, I have no idea what we're doing on Monday."

And one of my kids says "Talk about zombies."

They know how much I love zombies. That class has thoroughly discussed our plan of action should the school be swarmed with zombies at any moment. We know where all the weapons and exits are.

So the kid says "Talk about zombies," and I say sure. Why not?

I brought in all my zombie books and asked the class why zombies are so popular. We discussed how they are empty vessels for metaphor, and how they represent so easily who we could be if we made poor decisions. Then I showed parts of Bella Lugosi's White Zombie, the first zombie film, and parts of Night of the Living Dead to show the evolution of zombies as a film creature. They're all mad today because they want to keep watching Night of the Living Dead. We talked about Fido and 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland and Zombie Strippers and Dead Snow. I told them about Maggie and Zombie Baby. I showed them World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide and Zombie Haiku.

So now their assignment is to get into groups and write a script for a zombie short film. Today they're just brainstorming, but tomorrow I'm going to show them how to write a script. One group doesn't like zombies, so I'm allowing them to write about werewolves. One group immediately wanted to write about Jacob from Twilight but I nixed that because then they're not inventing anything. Then they wanted to write about Zombie Osama bin Laden but I nixed that too because it would just be a series of Osama jokes. Now they're getting more creative.

In addition to being a story that includes a protagonist and antagonist and rising action and all that, they must have some kind of metaphor. The zombies must symbolize some issue in our world. One kid came up with the idea of using them to symbolize our obsession with texting. One group wants to use them to represent what it's like to go to high school.

They are all over this thing. I've never seen kids so stoked about a project before. Clearly this was an excellent idea. Right now I'm just getting them to write the script, but if they're up to it I might get them to make the movies. Some days my job is really fun.

The Zombie badwagon

I wrote my zombie script after World War Z came out, but before Zombieland. I wrote it to be a writing sample, because it requires a huge budget, and at the time nobody was making zombie movies with huge budgets except Resident Evil, and Resident Evil doesn't count because it's a video game.

I'm not saying I invented zombies, just that I wrote big budget zombies when nobody was writing big budget zombies. Except the guys from Zombieland, I guess. They probably thought up that script before I wrote mine. But whatever, I still wrote my first draft before I even knew about that script.

So anyway I wrote Not Dead Yet and it got me the attention it was supposed to. Some cool industry people read it, or at least got the opportunity to read it. Two of the people who could have done something with it may never have cracked it open, or if they did I never heard about it. But anyway, it made the rounds and got me a little attention. So I thought that was pretty good for a big budget zombie movie.

Then came Zombieland. And then Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now Boyscouts vs Zombies and Zombies Vs Gladiators are making the rounds, and despite wanting to read those things, I also have been annoyed that I made my script have too high a budget even for big budget movies.

I was riding this wave before there was a damn wave. Which makes me think that although I am happy to have a great writing sample, I wish I had made a great writing sample that also could double as something I could sell.

To be a zombie

You know, the life of a zombie is not that bad, really. You get plenty to eat, you get to travel, you have lots of friends. Nobody makes you brush your teeth. If you feel tired and want to take a nap, cool. You don't have to pay rent or think about politics. There's no more social order so if you want to look at something you just smash a window and go look at it. Hell, you don't even have to keep up a conversation.

The downside is that people will try to kill you and you may end up having to hobble on a busted ankle for eternity, but sometimes I think it beats having to deal with the world around us.