Rhi Axtell – Writer

Only one day left until Halloween and the end of Blogtober – what a journey it has been. But I won’t get too reflective yet (that’s tomorrow’s post).

Today, I’m going to muse about a writing project I had back in sixth-form college. It was the height of ‘zombie fever’ – The Walking Dead comics had just started (the TV show but a glint in someone’s eye), Left 4 Dead the video game had just come out, and I was obsessed.

I watched all the George A Romero zombie films. I would regularly go to Blockbuster with my girlfriend and rent out whatever gross, zombie-infested DVD I could lay my hands on. We would watch them together under a blanket, after eating beans on toast (yes, we are English) and then discuss what we would do in a zombie apocalypse.

I had a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks which I carried around in my backpack every day – a book I still have.

My friends and I were zombie-crazy. You probably have guessed that by now.

So we decided we were going to write the first zombie television show (imagine that!). We named it BrainDead and we used to gather in the sixth-form cafeteria to have long meetings about the characters, the story arcs, and future ideas. We had one character each that we were responsible for creating, based on each of us. It was a very ambitious project.

Then we started writing.

We used a collaborative screen-writing website called Plotbot. We wrote and stored everything on that website.

I remember logging in almost every day to read what my friends wrote and adding my own parts to it. We powered through episode one. It was a silly horror comedy, but it wasn’t afraid to get dark. In brief, the story line was that our characters accidentally triggered the zombie apocalypse in the Pilot episode and had to spend the rest of the season trying to save as many people as they could.

Then, like a lot of my artistic projects (especially ones with friends), it all fell apart. About halfway through episode 2, in fact.

Everyone moved on. The initial excitement dropped (a serious project-killer). I had to restart sixth-form college for stupid reasons. My friends set off to university.

But I kept writing. I thought if I could get episodes 2 and 3 done, I could reignite the fire. I even wrote short stories based on all of the characters, set in season five, season eight of our imagined TV show (because it would be renewed for multiple seasons, obviously, and we had arcs planned out for each season).

As my friends left home, and I was left behind, I was stuck with the screenplay. I wrote and I wrote. It became therapeutic. I poured my loneliness into that stupid zombie comedy about me and my friends. Whenever I felt really alone, I opened up Plotbot and wrote some more.

The screenplay propped me up in a very difficult time in my life. I’m actually really thankful for it.

I wrote 4, very long and very bad, episodes of that TV show. I presented them to my friends later but beyond some small congratulations, they didn’t say much more. They were busy living their lives. I couldn’t blame them.

I tried to start a new TV show (Brain UNdead – really mixed up the title there) later, but that one flopped too.

Oh and among all that, Plotbot shut down and we lost everything. All those words, all those episodes, gone.

I was really sad about that for a long time.

Remember to keep multiple copies of your writing, writer friends!

Why am I writing about this?

I think I just wanted to reflect on projects abandoned. On how, even though they might be perceived as a failure at the time, just playing around with words, playing around with an artistic project can give you so much.

Sure, no one will ever see it, and sure the writing was awful and cliche, but BrainDead taught me an important lesson: that writing is so much more than just words. It is friendship. It is support. It’s an exploration of life. It’s magic.

And if there was a zombie apocalypse, I would be the first to die because I really don’t exercise enough. I also need snacks every half an hour.

See you tomorrow!