In the 7th and 8th grades - junior high school at Otsego - I was influenced by several pieces of fiction. Video games such as Forsaken on the PC and Resident Evil on the PlayStation caught my attention. I began to fully understand some of the more intense messages in films such as Jurassic Park and Tremors. In 1998 I combined my new perspectives on these media with my love of travel (along with adventure) and did something I never thought possible: I began to write my own fictional story.
New ideas spawned on a daily basis. These ideas flowed together, sometimes violently. I took notes all day at school and sat in front of the family computer every night to hash these ideas into something coherent. Over the course of six months, the first draft of a story called Meltdown came together. The story was short, characters were crude, the writing horribly amateur, yet I discovered something magical: people loved reading it. Granted these were peers, but the dozen or so people who read it sucked down. Written as short, high-digestible five-page episodes, Meltdown was an exciting endeavor for me at the age of fourteen.
This was the birth of my writing career.
Throughout high school I expanded my writing tremendously. I kept busy with creative essays, music reviews for a Toledo magazine, short stories, technical documents, and poems. Meltdown evolved with my writing style - it even had a tagline by this time: Meltdown: A Survivors' Story. The short, poorly written first drafts evolved into much longer and much more detailed episodes. This is when my hero and mentor of the time, Aaron Weisbrod, tempered my expectations and grandiose dreams of publication and helped me to understand that good writing was more than just action and characters. Meltdown was on hold for years to come, despite multiple attempts at a major rewrite.
Today Meltdown exists as an on-going stack of notes, rough drafts, outlines, character bios, and evolving tastes. In 2011 I rewrote the basic story altogether, reduced the character count (from an astonishing eight leads to just four), and gave it a new name: Children of the Meltdown. I now spend about four to six hours a week filling out story details, writing scene outlines, and reworking my characters.
So what is Children of the Meltdown?
From 1998 until about 2006, Meltdown was a story about a group of teenagers surviving a cross-country trip in an apocalyptic United States. Challenges were many, and zombies were plentiful.
Largely thanks to the influence of modern zombie fiction (I'm looking at you, The Walking Dead), Meltdown has become something a bit more personal. No longer a collection of fun scenes about shooting zombies; survival and basic human decency have become the norm. I asked myself this question: what would today's awkward teenager do when the world goes to shit?
I have the entire story outlined and about a third of it drafted. So far I have addressed a lot of issues: death of friends and family, teenage isolation, loss of innocence, lack of moral guidance, heartbreak, rape, and redemption. I know a lot of these sound like some heavy-hitting issues, but in all honesty, they have made for fantastic topics in the latest drafts.
If I should stick to this revision of the story, I plan to release the episodes a month apart beginning sometime in 2013 or 2014. Eventually I will bring the episodes together into a novella and self-publish the entire story.
At this point, Meltdown is like a child to me. I was there when it was born, I have watched it fall and recover, I helped it mature, and now I feel like it is finally coming into its own. Once the story is completed, it will almost certainly feel like the passing of a huge part of my life. But man, has the journey ever been a great one.
B3 out.
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