Best. Zombie. Reading. Ever.

You know I had mixed feelings about the hopelessness of Forest of Hands and Teeth--the deaths, the ending, the zombies.

But after meeting Carrie Ryan--one of those authors who exudes effortless friendliness, wit, warmth and writerliness--I'm won over. (Plus, The Wind-Tossed Waves sounds more sophisticated and very nifty. Her reading was pleasing; she described the zombies and their bloodshed in a manner almost cute.)

Ryan spent much of her life terrified of horror films, and never thought of FOHaT as horror--just a book that happented to be scary.

She was in law school--or, perhaps at that point, working as a lawyer--writing women's fiction and feeling stuck. (But, looking back, her early works involved a good dose of darkness.)

She had a sentence appear in her mind--the sentence that begins FOHaT, about a mother telling a story of the ocean--whipped out her blackberry, and sent it to herself. Within a matter of weeks, she had 20,000 words.

She always--when dragged to horror films--wondered about the characters that--after the initial three weeks or so--still have the energy to keep fighting to stay alive, even if the world, as they knew it, was over. You could burrow into an attached home, perhaps, hope your neighbors had been hoarders--but what do you do when you're out of canned tuna?

I never ask questions at these things, but I coudn't help it: I asked about finding the enery to keep writing, after the initial three weeks or so, what to do after the (tuna or) chocolate-covered espresso beans are gone.

She gave a really good answer: five years out of college, one of her friends got dream book deal--the quit your job and stay home and write deal. And all she could think was--if she'd been writing instead of studying law--could she have be at that point in her career, too? She simply didn't want to waste five more years.

But when she finished FOHaT, she was convinced it was just too weird--that no one would ever want a book about zombies, ever.

So, convinced no one would want a book about zombies--and this is an excellent point: when you are writing something at the very beginning of a trend, you won't see any evidence that you're on the right track, as the other books on the topic won't be out yet--Ryan sent her manuscript to the only agent she knew of that had a zombie book. And, luckily, it worked out.

She had the contract, and her boss at her law job--she was working on high-end estates and trusts, exactly what she would want to do, if she wasn't writing--told her to either give up her book contract, or she was fired.
(She enjoys the fact that he's most likely aware that she was on the NY Times bestseller list.)

Anyway, this--just after taking this leap--was her period of canned tuna (and frozen dinners). Happily, she had a great fiance who was, as she put it, great with a vacuum--while she was too engrossed in her writing to notice the enormity of the dust bunnies.

But it wasn't always easy. She spent--it sounded like weeks--unsure of what twith her characters when they were seemingly safe in their treehouse. She went out and sat on her stoop one day, and just thought: what is the worst thing that could happen in a treehouse? And then she thought of it: fire!

So, in other words, power through.
 
"And [since we aren't in the middle of a zombie apocalypse,] there are more chocolate espresso beans at Whole Foods," she finished. Hee.

--From Gatekeeper Mobile