At the risk of repeating what I just said in that wholly unimaginative title, my zombie story Twitcher is now up at the world's favourite horror podcast site, Pseudopod, introduced by the marvelous Alasdair Stuart and read in fine style by Roberto Suarez.
When Pseudopod asked me for a fact to share with their listeners, I mentioned that the title was a fortuitous gift. I'd recently finished the story and was having lunch with my then-manager, who asked me why I was staring out of the window. Not wanting to point out that I found his conversation deathly dull, I told him I'd been watching a bird hopping about, at which point he asked me, "you're not a twitcher, are you?" I replied that I wasn't, and indeed hadn't a clue what a twitcher was. When he explained that it was another word for bird-watcher, brain-gears clicked satisfyingly into place. My story, then called "Little Red Wing" in a nod to one of my favourite Tanya Donelly songs, had a new name, and it was perfect.
What I didn't mention, because it was something I'd forgotten until I listened to the story just now, was that Twitcher started life as a dream. In the dream, it was vampires and not zombies, but the basic elements - a bird-watcher guarding over rare red birds whilst the world went all to hell around him - were all there. True fact: for all the hundred times that dreams are weird and disturbing and generally horrible mind-vomit, there's always one you can recycle into a short story.
You can listen to Twitcher here. It's positively, absolutely the last zombie story I'm going to write, because we're all bored sick of zombies by now, right? And this makes three now, one of which was my first sale to Pseudopod, thinking about it. But hey, if you're going to listen to one David Tallerman zombie story this year, make it this one, because it's weird and catastrophically bleak and I'm rather proud of it.
When Pseudopod asked me for a fact to share with their listeners, I mentioned that the title was a fortuitous gift. I'd recently finished the story and was having lunch with my then-manager, who asked me why I was staring out of the window. Not wanting to point out that I found his conversation deathly dull, I told him I'd been watching a bird hopping about, at which point he asked me, "you're not a twitcher, are you?" I replied that I wasn't, and indeed hadn't a clue what a twitcher was. When he explained that it was another word for bird-watcher, brain-gears clicked satisfyingly into place. My story, then called "Little Red Wing" in a nod to one of my favourite Tanya Donelly songs, had a new name, and it was perfect.
What I didn't mention, because it was something I'd forgotten until I listened to the story just now, was that Twitcher started life as a dream. In the dream, it was vampires and not zombies, but the basic elements - a bird-watcher guarding over rare red birds whilst the world went all to hell around him - were all there. True fact: for all the hundred times that dreams are weird and disturbing and generally horrible mind-vomit, there's always one you can recycle into a short story.
You can listen to Twitcher here. It's positively, absolutely the last zombie story I'm going to write, because we're all bored sick of zombies by now, right? And this makes three now, one of which was my first sale to Pseudopod, thinking about it. But hey, if you're going to listen to one David Tallerman zombie story this year, make it this one, because it's weird and catastrophically bleak and I'm rather proud of it.
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