"Betting Living Through The Undead"

I have a twenty-page paper due on Thursday at 5:00. So far I have pounded out ten pages and within those pages is all that I have. My paper is concerned with the interest in the Infected zombie and the collapse of civilization that follows it. There was, believe it or not, scant research on this specific type of zombie (but a ton of research on the Haitian witch doctor zombie. It's too easy to make the connection to slavery with that one, and everyone and their mother did in the articles that I read).

Right now I'm having Jay read my paper and mark it up for me with suggestions, questions, rearrangements and so on. He's an art education major, but we both share the same love for the "zombie narrative" (a phrase I crafted in my paper). I'm hoping he'll have some valuable insights that can help me stretch it out a bit...in essence, double it.

Every November there is a writing contest called National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo for short). In this contest, participants write 50,000 words in one month. That averages out to around 1600 words per day. When you get around Thanksgiving, you start to get desperate to up your word count, so you throw in dream sequences, pages from Jack's typewriter in The Shining and really long-ass chapter titles that often involve a quote loosely related to whatever the hell your chapter is about.

I'm considering starting each section of my paper off with a center-aligned quote. I did start the entire paper off with something my roommate said:

“In a world where there are zombies, everything that you would like to do to people you don’t like, like with a chainsaw because of the law, you can do with reckless abandon.”

He responded with this when I started to bounce ideas off of him one afternoon before my paper really started to formulate. I credited him with it by including his name, and since no one knows who Garret is, it kind of holds some weight. It is directly relevant to the middle section of my paper where (in theory) I describe the survival-story part of the zombie narrative. Point being: It takes up two whole lines at the beginning of my paper and I'm down with that.