43 Afterword
The earliest file creation date I can find for Hungry New World is October 16, 2015. That makes sense, because it's five days after season six of Walking Dead aired its first episode. I don't remember the episode, and I haven't bothered to look it up, but I remember exactly what I was thinking when I wrote the first pages of "my little zombie story".
Why haven't they solved this problem by now?
Think about it. Walkers are slow. Most of their behavior is predictable. True, they have numerical superiority and they're implacable, but they're stupid. I was frustrated by all the times people went mano a mano with a shuffle of zombie-kind, when there was a perfectly good chain link fence nearby. Get behind the fence and use a sharpened stick.You idiots!
There is a mini-arc during season six, where Rick and company discover walkers have been falling into a nearby quarry, and they realize that's why Alexandria doesn't get overrun. Do they capitalize on this remarkable discovery? Does it occur to them to burn the critters up one hot, dry day to make room for more? Of course not! They lure the walkers out of the quarry to get them away from Alexandria. They do this at great personal risk to themselves. It never occurs to them, ever, to replicate the quarry's success. Fences and walls and weapons are as far as their thinking goes, and it's just so, so frustrating.
The entire Walking Dead franchise is predicated on one idea: that you can't kill all the walkers. You can't even kill enough of them to make yourself safe. And I just couldn't let it rest.
The initial burst of writing on HNW gave me the prologue, a bit of The Hermitage, Crush Manor, and most of Sojourners, HuSH Labs, and the first machines. There were two paragraphs about Zee Muncher. At that point I had a bunch of stuff that happened, but no story. The usual story structure says Bad Things have to start happening to my characters after their big victory with Zee. They have to descend into more and more trouble, until their usual limits are far exceeded, so they can triumph and everyone can be happy. That's the usual way, and I'm happy with it except for one problem: I like my characters, and I hate for them to suffer. I procrastinated writing the second half for eight years.
Stolen novel; please report.
There were multiple forces that pushed me to finish HNW. The most important was my wife, who reads most of what I write, even when it isn't very good. She has asked me, more times than I can count, "when are you going to finish your zombie story?" Once in a great while I would pop out a new chapter for her as a special gift, a feat of giving she claims now not to remember. That's how Damned Codgers came to be, and parts of what is now Victory Lap: as gifts. At least thrice each year, usually while I was typing out some new and unrelated story, she would ask again, "when are you going to finish your zombie story?"
Then came 2022 and 2023. A "break" from work turned into semi-retirement when the software industry shed tens of thousands of jobs. For the first time in my coding career, I couldn't get a new job. After five months of searching, and several final-round interviews, I was still unemployed. I needed at least a little money, so I went to work at Whole Foods as an in-store shopper at the small but friendly outpost in Sebastopol, California. It was a strange sensation, working on the opposite side of the kinds of cloud algorithms I used to write. I discovered I liked most things about the job, excepting the pay of course. With so much of my brain freed from code, hardware specs, and RFQs, I had more time to write. Some of my stories began to take shape and by November 2023 I had self published three books in a series called The Tenobre Cycle.
As I was finishing book three (Heretic) and preparing to embark on my fourth in the series, my wife asked me a simple question. "Isn't it about time you finish your zombie story?" In deference to her long patience with me, including but not limited to the deferred production of my zombie story, I resolved to finish this book before starting Exile.
Then I discovered Royal Road's Writeathon challenge. It seemed tailor made to drive me to finish the story. The word counts, the deadline, and the slight rewards gave me marks to hit. Most of all, knowing I had readers pushed me through the chapters I had dreaded for so long. I added significant material to the font of the book, heavily edited the middle, and wrote the long-delayed second half. It was done-ish, but the ending didn't satisfy my most important audience.
Throughout February 2024, I rewrote the end and made tweaks to the rest of the story for consistency. Finally, I have an answer for my wife when she asks about the zombie book. The final work will be available in March of 2024, on Amazon and everywhere paperbacks are sold.
To everyone who made it to the end, thank you so much for reading!