Tell me a story

This past November I wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo, an annual month-long attempt for novelists to complete a draft of a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It began in 1999 with just 21 aspiring novelists who “didn’t have anything better to do” and who just “wanted to make noise.” They wrote and partied together and had a lot of fun and invited others to join them the next year. By 2011 they had 256,618 participants and 36,843 reached the 50,000 word goal.

Last month was my first time trying it, and I didn’t have a solid idea to turn into a novel (I’d had the starts of other novels saved on my laptop, but you have to start a brand new novel to participate), so I discussed it with my girlfriend. She suggested a teenage love story between a girl and a male zombie. After some of my other ideas went nowhere, I decided to give the zombie love story a shot.

A couple weeks later I gave up on it. I’d liked the story so far, but I didn’t really feel invested in it yet. My mind kept going back to a novel I had started years ago. So I gave up on NaNoWriMo and went back to my old novel, thinking I’d probably revisit the zombie story in the future.

Then yesterday I saw this movie preview:

It’s not exactly like what I was writing, but I too had my zombie character narrating, and he too could think like a regular human, and he too had little to no control over his body’s continuous efforts to eat people.

Maybe I still will revisit my story one day, although if I were to finish it I’d now be accused of copying. It just goes to show you, being first is everything.

Oh and my girlfriend’s response to the preview? A loud “Oh no! They took my idea!”