KRIS ASHTON

While most stories are triggered by two intersecting thoughts, or one thought that leads to another more unusual thought, sometimes a story can germinate from a single image that just pops into the author’s head. In the case of ‘Howling Mad’, it was a crow perched on a zombie’s shoulder, plucking out its eyes.

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From that came the idea of the zombie giving up once its eyes had been removed, the same way a chicken becomes paralysed when it is held and caressed in a certain fashion. That was pretty cool, I thought, but it was just a vivid image and I didn’t know what to do with it. It sat inert in my brain for nearly two months and I had begun to wonder if it would just decompose in there, like old newspaper, when it hit me: the body lying on the road wasn’t a zombie at all. And this wasn’t a zombie story, per se, but a peculiar little town story.

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The first draft of the story came in at a little over 2,000 words, which I knocked out in single sitting. ‘Crows’, as it was called then, had an unhappy ending in the vein of Stephen King’s ‘The Children of the Corn’ or my own ‘Unreal Estate’. I shopped it around for a while, but when I received a total lack of interest from markets that were usually sympathetic to my work, I realised there was something wrong with it.

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I ignored the story for months before returning to it on a whim one morning. I read it over and, as if by magic, a better storyline materialised in my head*. I added nearly 2,000 words and my pulpy ‘peculiar little town’ vignette matured into something richer and more original.

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It was turned down at Andromeda Spaceways, where I had thought it would be a shoo-in, so I sent it next to Aurealis; partly because it’s an Australian story and Aurealis is an Australian market, but mainly for shits and giggles – I didn’t think it would be their cup of tea at all. So I was more than a mite surprised when it had the best slush reader feedback I’d seen in nearly 20 years of submitting stories there. And as the shortlist rejection didn’t come and didn’t come, and I began to get excited. When the acceptance arrived, it was almost surreal.

 

* Initially I thought I might play it for laughs – Billy would return as a zombie, then as a werewolf, then as a ghost – but once the mirth at my own silly humour had subsided, I realised the story would go nowhere. Only during composition did the ‘I Am Legend’-style ending occur to me; more evidence that excessive plotting (at least in my case) hampers creativity.

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