I took a month-long break from Lauren Dane’s Snippet Saturday project to tear through some projects, but now I’m back and on it…sort of. Well, as “on it” as I can be at 7:00 on a Saturday morning.  This week is all about world building, which I kind of know stuff about–I should since I’ve taught classes on it, right?  So I think I’ll just throw up a few pieces and then talk a bit about them afterward. Sound good? Here we go (from Happy Hour of the Damned)…

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            Two blondes stuck to the ice bar like wet tongues, their hipbones jutting, as if in an attempt to escape their skin.  They ground their respective pelvises against a pair of horny ghouls, one of whom being only slightly more hideous than the other.  The girls were human and under some kind of trance, drunk, or just not at all particular.

            “Thank God for necrophilia,” I said.  “Those rotting corpses wouldn’t stand a chance of getting laid without it.

            Gil nodded, adding, “Here’s to celebrity blood donors.”  He raised his glass for the toast and took a deep slug of warm blood from the Riedel Syrah glass in his hand.  “This, for instance.”  Another swallow.   “…Is a lovely Square Pegs era Jami Gertz.  It’s Jami-licious.”

            “Sound’s yummy.”  Come to think of it, it probably was a good year.  Square Pegs was fabulous and Ms. Gertz’s Muffy Tepperman was a spot on caricature of the preppy bitch.  Brings back memories.

            Wendy arrived with flourish[1], tossing her purse into the booth and flopping down with a bounce.  “Cheers to mortuaries with fully-stocked cosmetic inventory.”  She spoke with the ease of indifference, as is apparently common among the dead.  She slathered crimson stained lips with a fresh coat of gloss.  Snapped a gold compact shut with a click like a castanet.

 

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[1] Is there any other way?

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This piece is an example of worldbuilding at the micro-level. While I don’t explain the process of celebrity blood donation, clearly there is a system in place on some level.  Because my characters are apathetic of “how things work” they don’t question much, their world is about reactions not analysis.

Here’s another (from Happy Hour of the Damned)…

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             Convent empties its crowd into a hall resembling the Paris catacombs, its walls embedded with dusty vacant skulls and stacks of femurs, tibias and assorted ribs, each set cramped into wall crypts like a Japanese capsule hotel.  There was a low rattle in the bones, their reaction to the reverberation of darkwave music shouting from the speakers.  A macabre chandelier of antlers blazed overhead in faux candlelight, dried heads hung from it, horns pierced through eye sockets, mouths.  A cossacked concierge was embroiled in a conversation with a burly man whose neck shared its collar with hair tufts resembling a cravat.  A step closer and I could hear the topic—werebear hunting grounds.

            “You should try Les Toilettes.”  The grim attendant said.  He stood on a raised pulpit, surrounded by an intricately carved Victorian gothic rail.  He was referring to the club, not the john, but the advice was helpful either way.

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Because the world in the Amanda Feral books is closed, or hidden from human awareness (but at the same time occurs within a large city), I decided to use interior spaces to create the fantasy world. Rather than tell the reader that the ghoul’s world only exists behind closed doors, I showed a variety of nightclubs and bizarre homes hidden in between the espresso shops and 7-Elevens. The tricky part was pricing the clubs out of the realm of possibility. The scale is either so over-the-top as to be financially impossible to construct or populated by such an odd mix of supernatural characters that the reader is consistently embedded in weirdness (if that makes any sense).

One more. This one introduces the reader to the fact that my protagonist and her friends are not “safe” (again from Happy Hour)…

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The knock on the door was light, almost inaudible.

“Who is it?” I said, countering their hesitance with a conspiratorial whisper.

“Is this where we go for the – um – gang bang?”

Wendy nearly shook apart with laughter.  “Shut up.” I threw open the door and took in the view of the most pathetic creatures to cross my path in months.  “Steve” and “Lou” looked far more suited to the type of role-playing that was done over a game board with their wizard friends than the handcuffs and butt plugs shit they’d been promised, a real couple of blue-ballers.  These boys had definitely reached the crescendo of their lives.  It was never going to get any better than the idea of this moment, and isn’t it comforting to know that?

“Absolutely, this is the gang bang,” I whispered into one’s ear, an unfamiliar thickness of breath crawled out past my lips.  “Oops.”  If I crossed my eyes, I could see the change in temperature floating briefly between us, a pale white wisp of smoke, curled and hung, for a moment.  My mind drifted to another time, a small, enclosed space. 

I was not alone.

The boy’s eyes ballooned.  He gasped, slurping my solid breath from the air like a hit of linguine.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” I said.

“Huh?”  The boy’s teeth filled up half his face in an overly eager grin.  His eyes bounced from my face to my chest, to Wendy’s chest, to the sad bulge in his jeans.  “No, no.  It’s okay.  You can blow in my ear.”

“What’s up,” asked Wendy, disregarding the boys’ presence.  The fun had left.  Her face was slack with concern.

“The breath,” I told her. 

Wendy puzzled a look from me to “Lou” or “Steve” or whoever he was, back to me, and then to him she said, “You’re fucked.”  To me her eyes bulged, they beseeched, and seemed to say ‘eat quick, bitch!’

He turned to his friend, a question dangling.  In the time it took to move his head, Wendy pulled the other one into the room, slammed the door, and unhinged her jaw like a living Pez dispenser.  Her mouth opened with a slew of ratcheting clicks.  She shook and twitched with each transformative widening.  The boy’s face registered terror, for only the second before that shark mouth clamped down.  Wendy caught a stray spurt of blood ejecting from a large whole at the base of his neck, and moaned.   My boy’s head jerked back to look at me, and I took off half of his face, while pinching his windpipe closed.  He struggled for a moment and then went still.

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There are three things going on here that stray from the standard mythos of zombies. One, obviously my zombies are sentient–well some of them are–and self conscious enough to do what it takes to cover up their corpse-iness. Two, the virus has mutated–to steal a line from Resident Evil–into a milky white cloud than can be expressed from the lungs. And finally, I decided to give these “speshul” zombies a little bit of a cartoonish attribute in their ability to open their mouths wide enough to snap off limbs, heads, all in one chomp. The idea of ratcheting jaw bones really stuck with me and I think that’s where that piece started.

Anyways. 

I didn’t plan on doing this like a worldbuilding course, mostly because I’m heading out to our State Fair today, but if you’ve got questions about the subject, I’d be happy to get you some answers. So feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll get back to you later.

In the meantime, why not stop by the other Snippet Saturday author’s blogs and see what they’re up to!

Michelle Pillow
Kelly Maher
Jody Wallace
Jaci Burton
Elisabeth Naughton
Ashley Ladd
Moira Rogers
Taige Crenshaw
Lauren Dane
Victoria Janssen
Vivian Arend
TJ Michaels
Juliana Stone
Anya Bast
Lacey Savage
Eliza Gayle