So if it wasn't manifestly obvious before the handles were revealed, I wrote the story about escaping from the zombie hordes on a bicycle. It was a cheap premise, but involved roads and places so fit the requirements. I even added some death (other than zombies) for some easy tear-jerking (who kills a cat in a story anyway?) I then made it even cheaper by arranging the formatting such that suspense could be created not by my skill as a writer but by whitespace.

Note none of this was done intentionally for cheapness, but the premise seemed to demand straightforward and obvious ways of jerking the reader around. It seemed to have worked. The cat imagined is my cat. "I" am the bicyclist. And so forth. And as I have this huge phobia about zombies (coming from a father who let me watch the original Dawn of the Dead when I was like eight or nine), it was pretty easy to scare myself with my own story. But, humor makes it less scary. Note also that I regularly expose myself to zombies as therapy (by going to zombie movies primarily), so this is just more therapy. And because I had no idea how to write them, you'll note that I didn't put any direct fights with zombies in (just lots of running away), although it is certainly implied that the "heroine" had to shoot zombies pretty frequently. It probably worked better that way anyway to not tell the fights directly.

Compared to everyone else, I didn't really take this that seriously. But then, I was convinced into it about five minutes after I thought about it (on the first postponed Sunday due date, which was then extended). And finished it about an hour later (modulo the formatting which took me a bit bit more as I went down the path of clever javascript page turning and realized that just wasn't such a good idea).

Sadly this is probably the first "completed" story I've written since college, maybe high school. Once I got into math and computers, it seemed like the creative stuff went by the wayside. I have in the past written poetry and stories. At least one poem I wrote in high school I don't read now and laugh. I should probably start up again, but it always seems like such a bother when I can't get something down I like. Although I liked this, silly as it was.