Rediscovering What was Lost
By Seth Voorhees
In the Spring of 2016, two things were transpiring. First, I was approaching my fifth year of sobriety. The second was that The Walking Dead, along with its counterpart Fear the Walking Dead, had a firm grip on our country and was influencing our culture.
While watching an episode, I was inspired to write about zombies, just like many others. But I wasn’t sure how to start.
It had been years since I had written anything. My passion for creating began when I was younger. In 2004, my senior year of high school, I wrote my first short Novel titled “The Chronicles of Clark,” inspired, of course, by reading a multitude of Stephen King and R.L Stine.
As I paced around my one-bedroom apartment, I felt unsure of where to start. I wondered if finding that old story would spark an idea. I located the flash drive in a forgotten box in the back of my closet. I read my story and discovered that it was an endless sea of run-on sentences, a confusing soup of past and present tense, and the chapters incorporated every character’s perspective. An editor would have been disgusted.
To clear my mind, as I typically do, I went for a walk. The urge to write rode my back, and I didn’t want to let it go. But I also didn’t want to write a zombie book similar to the rest. I knew I was coming to the Zombie party late. I desired to be original.
Thank God for the simplicity of walking through nature. To this day, it is like the mechanic to the engine that is my imagination.
I experience what many would call a racing mind. I joke that I have a head full of monkeys always fighting each other for dominance. During this walk, one of those monkeys found an old box from 2009 and pulled out a thought that I had during the Swine Flu pandemic. Not as rough as Covid, but still scary. During that crisis, I recalled having the idea about my blood type (A+), and what if somehow it was immune to catching the virus. Then I wondered what it would be like to live through a global pandemic with the confidence of knowing you will be unharmed, while being forced to watch those around you perish. I created a not-so-brilliant pitch, used to extend into more ideas that became my first Novel, Immune, Rise of the Inflicted.,
I’ve heard that there are two types of writers: Those who plot everything and those who write by the seat of their pants. For me, I’m eighty percent seat of my pants, and twenty percent plotter. After the walk, I sat down at my laptop and started creating the first draft. Inspiration walks continued long after the first draft was published in December 2019, marking the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through Immune, my newly sober spirit was reintroduced to the craft of writing fiction and the passion that I had long abandoned. It’s been a long journey of re-learning all that I had forgotten about the craft, but I’m grateful for having rediscovered it. I’m always looking forward to my next creation.
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Seth Voorhees is a Black Hills author who lives in Rapid City, South Dakota. He describes himself as a writer of dark fiction. He draws on his experience as a counselor and educator in adolescent development and mental health to develop his characters and their journeys through morality and life’s challenges. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Sociology and Psychology from Black Hills State University. He lives with his partner and stepdaughter.
