By E. Van Lowe

It amazes me where the inspiration for our stories comes from: a dream, a song, a fleeting image—and sometimes failure. That’s how it was for me. The inspiration for Never Slow Dance With a Zombie came out of a failed pitch.

In Hollywood we sell TV shows by pitching them. In 2004, when I was hot off the success of writing Even Stevens for the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon invited me to pitch a show idea. The idea I came up with was about a girl whose father had become a whistle-blower and the family suddenly found itself in the witness protection program. Yeah, I know. Where are the zombies? Bear with me.

The twist in the show was that my fifteen-year-old protagonist, Destiny, actually loved the idea of starting over in a small town where nobody knew her. I created a first person diary in Destiny’s own words for the pitch. When I went to Nickelodeon on a rainy day in November, the two executives in the room—one male, one female—laughed; they ah-ha’d, they clapped. But they didn’t buy it. Why? Who knows? Development executives rarely tell us why. I was pretty bummed when I heard they weren’t going to pick up the pilot. That’s when I decided it was time for me to get back to writing prose. (I’d written prose since I was a child. TV was actually a side-track for me.) I would write AKA Destiny as a YA novel, and show the folks at Nick they’d made a huge mistake.

I started an outline. Here’s where it gets strange. When I sat down to write a sample chapter, a zombie story jumped into my head. I have no idea where it came from. Maybe I’d been watching 28 Days Later again. I don’t know. The idea was simple: two girlfriends in a high school overrun by zombies decide to have the time of their lives. It was a silly idea. Not enough there for a book. I was certain it was one of those tricks your mind plays on you to keep you from the work you’re supposed to be doing. You know, like instead of writing chapter one of your seminal work you decide to clean your entire apartment—and you have never cleaned your apartment. I was sure it was one of those things.

But as I wrote the first few chapters of AKA Destiny, the silly idea kept developing. She’s jealous of her best friend—stop it. She wants a zombie for her boyfriend—STOP IT! You have work to do.

One day, just to kill off the idea, I wrote chapter one. And the snarky, self-possessed voice of Margot Jean Johnson was born. Where did it come from? I honestly don’t know. She sounded nothing like Destiny. It was totally unplanned…and perfect.

Chapter one of Never Slow Dance With a Zombie is pretty much as it was that day I dashed it off the top of my head. And that voice is still with me. Never Slow Dance With a Zombie is now available in a bookstore near you, and that other book—nothing.

That’s how it is with inspiration. You can’t plan it. When it comes along, all you can hope is that there are zombies.

(from the Tor/Forge September 2009 newsletter)