WiPpet Wednesday: A Peek at the Feral Diaries

Hey guys, it’s Wednesday again and you know what that means! WiPpet Wednesday. But first let’s have a bit of a catch up.

Everything else in life is going swimmingly, projects are getting worked on, blogs are getting prepared and clients are getting their orders. Things slowed down a little in comparison to how productive I was last week and I am a little sad about that but I knew that there was no way that I could keep working at that pace without a small break. I’m not used to it, I’d burn out. But I have to keep plugging away and no matter how much I’d love to just sit and do nothing I know that I’d end up bored and feeling guilty for not making the best use of my time. So I’m slowly chipping away at my To-Do list. But enough about that. Let’s move on to something that you’re actually interested in;

WiPpet Wednesday!

Now usually I go with something from the Autharium Project but this week I decided to give you a preview of one of my other Works in Progress. Now I’ve mentioned it several times and in fact if you go to my WiPpage here on the blog you can see exactly how many books there are in the series, or at least how many I intend there to be. That’s right, this week you get a look at the monstrosity that I’ve been working on for over a year, since 2012 in fact; Feral Diaries. Now the name’s not set yet but I do have a rough cover. It’s the editing that’s taking the longest but I’m slowly powering through and it should be ready for a rewrite by the end of the summer. In fact I’ve set that as a deadline right now in my little diary. 

As you can see I have no life in October

By 26^th October the edits and read through will be complete and I will be ready to begin the rewrite (which incidentally is already looking like it’s going to be a big one). 

So... where are we in the story? The ferals have begun to emerge, the violent aggressive and animalistic victims of a mutated vaccine, and the British government have no idea how to handle it. Our hero Hannah, isn’t too scared of the Ferals, at least not at first and then she meets one.

I saw two Ferals chase down this poor man. I hadn’t realised that they had spread this far but apparently I was wrong. As they were chasing this man they were snarling and growling at him and each other. I never thought that a human throat could make those sounds. It was like what I’d heard on the Animal Channel as lions and hyenas brought down a full grown elephant. The Ferals caught the man and seemed barely out of breath. As they brought him down and started eating him he was still alive and screaming. I could hear his bones crunching and the wet sounds of meat being pulled from his bones and chewed. I had trouble sleeping that night and for a few nights since. Nightmares have plagued me ever since. It was horrible to watch but I couldn’t turn away, like a car crash. Just thinking and remembering makes me shake and shiver. I’m not ashamed to admit that I lost my lunch, there and then, decorating the slabs of the town square with multi-coloured chunks of food. I went home quickly with the acidic tang of bile settled deep in the back of my throat. I barely saw the soldiers surround the Ferals and put them down. I heard the shots though. They aren’t so unusual now.

This is completely unedited, I’ve not even put in any of the notes that I made doing my read-through. It’s discombobulated and rambling and I know that it’s going to need work. This is just one small passage and you can see what’s needed, you can see how much editing and rewriting I have ahead of me. There are hundreds more passages, each as bad as this one, that I need to fix. If you want to see how much worse things are in some of the other entries you can check out the entire index of entries that I've put up so far over on Live Journal.

But what do you think of that passage? Does apocalyptic fiction draw you in? Is it nice to see a change from the usual zombie fiction? Should I focus more on the people than the Ferals? Can you think of a better name for human beings that have reverted to their basic animal instincts? As always let me know in the comments below and I’ll get back to each and every one of you.