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Adding “-punk” to the end of words to describe a setting and design aesthetic is a staple of speculative fiction. It began (as a language construct, anyway) with cyberpunk, a type of fiction which suggests a dystopian future dominated by cybernetics, virtual reality and people running around in tight black things one minute and poorly rendered green 3d wireframe graphics the next.

Steampunk, despite having highly disputed origins, has a very consistent aesthetic involving high technology powered by steam and mechanical means. The dress code is all about brown leather, tweed, brass accents and anything else that looks vaguely Victorian.

While cyberpunk and steampunk have become widely understood, there is, in my mind, a third x-punk aesthetic. While it’s equally as prevalent, codified and overused as its brethren, it has not, until I named it just now, had a name. Its name is “Zombiepunk”. It just is. Because I said so.

Zombiepunk fiction is based on the idea that some event has effectively ended modern civilization, leaving the survivors to fight over the scraps. The name comes from the fact that this event is often the outbreak of a disease which turns most of the population into a horde of murderous zombies. This isn’t always the case, sometimes the event is a nuclear war or an alien invasion. It creates a world where the events of Sex and the City could not take place, or at the very least, they would become watchable televison. As far as design sense goes, it is effectively an a kind of “un-aesthetic”. Its technology is cobbled together from the remains of a dead civilization. As far as fashion goes, there’s a lot of denim, canvas and inexplicably, bondage gear.

In the service of clarity, I have prepared this handy chart:

Just to be thorough, let’s look at some examples. (Mouse over each for alt-text.)

Cyberpunk – Dress Code

Cyberpunk – Vehicles

Steampunk – Dress Code

Steampunk – Vehicles

Zombiepunk – Dress Code

Zombiepunk – Vehicles

You may wonder why I’ve suddenly become obsessed with this, and you would be right to do so. (I even did a pretty major overhaul of my website visuals.) I’m not sure, really, other than I am not-so-secretly planning for a zombie apocalypse. It’s by far the most plausible speculative fiction there is. Sure, you can wait until it actually happens and then figure out what to wear. Me? I’m already stockpiling canned food and ammo and warming up my welding gear.

It’s day three of NaNoWriMo. I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed to crap out over three thousand words in such a short time. One thing is that’s becoming readily apparent, though, is how much I suck at writing compelling descriptions of things. Not having any idea what I’m doing, I’ve sort of been approaching this novel like I might approach a screenplay (which I have written before) in that I’m trying to weave a thread of narrative through a series of set pieces. Granted, no one is going to win a Nobel prize in literature using this method, but it’s how Michael Bay approaches a story, and that motherf@#ker is rich.

The problem arises from the fact that my set piece ideas are visual. I can see them clearly in my head. This would be fine, you see, if I were writing this thing just for myself. It would seem, though, that any potential reader needs me to describe that which I see in my head. This has been harder than it initially appeared for me. I had been handling it like I handle all difficult problems, which is to say that I simply avoided them in the hopes that I’d figure something out later. This was going well until last night, when I read the first few paragraphs of my girlfriend Sarah’s NaNoWriMo efforts. Sarah has a degree in English from the prestigious Smith College in western Massachusetts. She is an unqualified genius and an absolute painter when it comes to words. In less than two hundred words, she was able to evoke an utterly compelling sense of place and a whole set of emotional responses to go with it. She’s painting the Sistine Chapel whilst I lay on the floor of the den with a box of crayons, drawing stick figures next to a two-dimensional house with a sun in the sky.

I knew full well what my set pieces and characters made me feel like, but I was having trouble describing them. Then it hit me. What I’m trying to do is paint a picture. What I simply called out places in my text where I wanted to paint those pictures and pasted in a photograph of what I wanted to describe? Once my description matches the picture to my satisfaction, I can simply delete the picture. I tried a test with a road through a forest I wanted to describe, and to my amazement, it worked really well.

I spent the first part of today finding the right pictures of people and places I want to describe and inserting them into my text. I’ve got around twenty right now. If a picture is worth a thousand words, describing these pictures should get me twenty thousand more words! At least I think that’s how the math for that works out. I’ll let you know.

Crap. Here’s 489 words that aren’t in my effing novel. Back to work!

Apparently I don’t have enough to do. Also, when I fail, I like to fail big (and publicly, if at all possible.) That’s why I’ve decided to participate in this years National Novel Writing Month. Crazy, you say? No crazier than any of the other “creative efforts” I’ve attempted in the past ten years. Hell, this one doesn’t require any more resources than the time it will take and a modest laptop. I wish I could say that of my film career. My credit rating wishes I could say that of my film career as well.

If you’re not familiar with National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it has come to be known), it’s an organized effort to get people to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. While it might seem a bit ambitious to try and write 50,000 words in a month and even more ambitious to have those words form something like a story, the organizers (and several friends who’ve done it before) say it’s totally possible.

Speaking of friends, I have conscripted a few to participate in the event with me and write their own terrible novels. I really did conscript them rather than ask them. This is one of those things where you just have to tell people to “get in the car” and don’t really let them worry about the destination. Really, it’s motivation for me, as I’m going to look like quite an idiot if I encourage people to do this and fail to do it myself. Two of these people live in my house, so we’ll be able to “support” (read: mock) each other as we go.

Interestingly, I just noticed that Wordpress here counts words as you type. I just managed to crap out 250 words in a little over fifteen minutes. Considering that one needs to average 1667 words per day to write 50,000 words in 30 days, I really only need to write for around one to three hours a day to make this happen.

Like many people, I’ve started writing several novels. I’ve never finished one, though I did get pretty far along with my last attempt.  My hope is that by tearing through this one in a month, I’ll have a reasonable piece of work (or crap) to start editing.

I’ve also decided to write this novel using only open source software. I was going to use a Mac emulator running System 7 and Word 5 (the best word processor ever written, im my opinion), but once I got it running I felt like the whole setup was a little dodgy, even for me. Instead, I installed a relatively recent laptop I had with Ubuntu 9.10 and AbiWord. I wanted a machine that would be dedicated to this process, so when I sit down at it to write I don’t flail about and do anything else. I’m even going to disable the wireless during designated writing time so I don’t fall into a lolcat pit whilst doing “research”.

I’ll be updating my wordcount on my NaNoWriMo page, but I’ll also be updating it here, in the sidebar. Oh, and please, do me a huge favor: Do NOT encourage me. It has been my experience that encouragement does nothing for me. If you want to help, what I need now is cold, hard derision. Feel free to tell me how much I suck if my daily word count falls below 1667. Tell me I’ll never amount to anything. Ridicule my efforts as much as you can. This is the only effective motivation you can provide. The more you ride me, the more likely I am to defy you and succeed.