This is excerpted and adapted from a short story I’ve written called “Survivors.” I’m not sure if or when or where it will be published.

Fucking A. The voice is totally true, the language has that right mix of natural speech and confidence you need for good first-person action. I want to see the rest of this thing.

And this is exactly what I’m afraid I’d be like in the end. Well, this and THE ROAD.

Hah, I’m gonna roll with it and make my own. :D

I was REALLY tempted to write a one word prequel. “Boom.” But I didn’t want that to be my first story on here.

I like it. Are the Survivors going to end up on Alcatraz? ;)

Good stuff sir. I, for one, hope to see the full short story in published form someday.

Forgive me, for I have ficlet’d your story. :P

Good stuff.

Great story Will – it amazes me how much you can say with so few words…

Love the voice; I’m inspired to start my own!

Truly awesome.. I read it out loud to my wife with every bit of frustration and anger that I could muster and it felt real!

Great emotion!

Very nice; very powerful start. Picked it up and ran with it; would like to see it continue.

True fact: my father-in-law was in the movie The Day After.

Hey, you’re pretty good! You might even be able to do this stuff for a living.

Awesome. The voice of the character is so strong from the get-go. Nice work!

I love the emotion here, and how it’s portrayed through his swearing, realistic thoughts.
Fantastic!

Very nice! I enjoyed it!

This is great!

Voice is confident and will engender trust from your reader, e.g “It’s not like I have to know when American Fucking Idol is going to start. Ever again.” Talking about sentence structure here. You earn the fragment. Nicely done. That itch in the palm of your hand is the reader.

I think I have a sense of how important the freedom of “potty mouth” is to Wil, but Will is not the narrator. Just check. Narrator or Wil?

Very nice flip on the standard frame for this context = Thankful for surviving? Not necessarily. This then is narrative momentum. Excellent.

Finally, something unique…as they say, I have not seen that before:

“If the world is going to end, you want to end with it.”

Just look at it as a stand-alone statement. It’s a little piece of poetry. You can’t do this for the whole story because the reader has to breathe but the fact that it can be pulled out and identified by someone who has a little insight (i.e. me) is a good sign, I think.

Wil, I’ve followed your blog on and off over the years. Glad I found it again, after recently discovering twitter and seeing you there. A lot.

About your story, I found it inspirational. Literally. I hadn’t heard of Ficly before. But after reading your story I signed up and wrote and published one myself.

So, thanks for the inspiration.

But I digress. It would be great to see where your story goes. It does remind me of the Day After. Wondering if you’ll do a Red Dawn take. Or Legend. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

What I like about your story: The reader is sucked in within the first paragraph. I like wanting to know more. I also like wanting to know WTF happened in the first place. And, the character, despite being a complete unknown, is someone we can sympathize with.

Please write more!

I saw The Day After when I was in seventh grade and it scared the crap out of me. To this day I freak out when I think about that movie. Great voice in this ficly… so much fun reading. I might just have to write yet another prequel.

Nice job, Wil! (As always from you.)

Loved The Day After ref. Fabulous movie that scared the hell out of me. Not quite as good as Threads, but, still…

Absolutely brilliant!

I love the cynicism and anger in this.

lovee

Nice stuff.

I hope you get “Survivors” published in some way since it seems like it would be really interesting.

very cool crisp narrator voice.. I love zombies and its not the end of the end of the world i fear its what happens after that…

But aren’t zombies a little (tremendously) played out?

Did like the jab at American Idol, though; that, if anything, would seem to produce the brainless legions this chap finds himself at odds with.

Bleak, but probably realistic. I mean, consider how many people are all depressed and down in the dumps now. We don’t even have any zombies, and they find reasons to be all dark and pessimistic. I can’t imagine the incidence rates of clinical depression if there were actual undead brain-eaters mucking about.

Don’t rely on gratuitous swearing to convey a character. As far as this excerpt goes, he’s one-track and completely uninteresting.

As Damon said, zombies are definitely played out, and this story doesn’t bring anything new to the table. The prose eschews pacing and rhythm for the sake of forcefully impressing itself upon the reader, the pop culture references are entirely unnecessary. Overall, a very weak story.

It could stand to be a little more subtle, especially the whole “Ever again.” thing. You also give the plot away way to early and, to be perfectly honest, the zombie thing feels tacked on. The nature of the disaster has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the story. The title is awkward and sort of condescending to the reader, gives everything away.

You definitely hit the “feel” of an angry rant, though.

so lame

It was ok. Fun little read, but the zombie bit does seem tacked on and the title could be better. It’s not terrible, but it’s not the work of art the first page of comments would have you believe.

A good read. I find it ironic how your character so bent on living in the moment forgets to die. And while he resents that, the extreme emotion/reaction to that only emphasizes how he’s moved on to live in the next moment completely immersed and feeling everything.

Wow, nice to see this stuff is still rolling :)

Nice! Great voice.

Oh this is great, Wil! Or a great start to what I suspect is a great story. I already want to read more of it, but the stupid VoD are cockblocking it. And since I can’t seem to reach you by reasoning with you by conventional means, I’ll just sum it up with a poker reference. You have a royal flush, now it’s time to go all in!

Excellent start for a story, Wil.

But when are you gonna ficlet some more, huh? C’mon, only three ficlets in months and months? I know you’re very busy, but can’t you write something every now and then? :)

I love this, and obviously it spurred some pretty serious continuations, so good work!

The pacing feels a little off in your middle two paragraphs and I think it’s just my own lame preference for a word choice tweak at “These fucking people here,” and “goddamn fucking zombie apocalypse” but that’s pretty subjective.

This tone scene is perfectly hopeless and I particularly enjoyed the character’s own rejection of familiar things, like time… and disaster movies… on top of the world coming to an end. Self destructive dude.

Looks like most people on here are ridin your di… divisive story all the way to 5 pencil town. Honestly, I am a peripheral fan of yours, but 5 pencils is too nice for this one. You have talent, but this one didn’t do it for me, that’s all.

That was fantastic, simply brilliant. I just discovered this site and this is rather encouraging to my future participation.

Your writing voice is strong and this clearly deserves a 5 in my view.

You had me at “The Day After,” which I remember watching with my family on broadcast television, and then being terrified by for good week (hey, adolescent brains have pretty short attention spans…as do those of us post-forty. Ahem.).

I think I have to record this one. Yep. Gonna happen.

This, with two of the related pieces made a great progression. Seeing as it’s Zombie Awareness Month, thought this and two of it’s companion ficlys would made a great bit of voice work. Created: A Zombie Apocalypse, In Three Acts.

Hope you like where I went with yours.
http://soundcloud.com/xe_sands/zombie-apocalypse-in-3-acts