Feeling like death warmed over.

     Everyone knows that writers use their own personal experiences to enhance their stories.  With that in mind, I would like to give you a little insight into a particular scene.  I had launched into a rewrite of my first book at the end of last year.  I felt that it really needed more zombie action while the main characters were being introduced so I added in a parallel storyline.  Just around the time I was working on the zombies that would eventually migrate to Littleville, I got sick. 
     When I get sick, I really do it right.  I had bronchitis, the flu and a touch of pneumonia all at the same time.  I really did feel like "death warmed over".  The end result was writing a scene where one of the characters goes through the transformation from sickly human to reanimated corpse.  Because most of the time I felt so rotten, it was not hard to imagine my body's inevitable decline.  In writing, I embraced every horrible symptom I had endured and poured them onto the page.  Eventually, my character's immune system was no longer able to fight off the infection and he succumbs to his unavoidable death. 
     Of course, this is not the end of our new friend.  Shortly after he draws his last breath, his corpse reanimates and he begins his new life as a flesh-eating monster.  I really had fun, not only describing his transformation, but explaining his new perspective on the world around him.  I described the way things looked, how his transformed body moves, and the impulses that replaced his human thought processes.  I will forever look at illnesses in a different light.  Perhaps, after reading the series, you will too.