"Fantasy Zombie Apocalypse Audience Participation". A bit of a mouthful, isn't it.
Well, it's a literal description, and was supposed to be discarded in favor of some better title. But some folks started calling it FZAAP, and after the story fragmented, it seemed like a good enough term to encompass all of the related stories.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
As the name implies, FZAAP started as an Audience Participation story. Folks would give me little profiles to describe characters they wanted in the story, and then I would weave that into a story. It was a bit of a craze back in... September 2010?
Well, I was pressured into starting one, and so I cast around, and hit upon the idea of using the content from the DnD 4E Zombie Apocalypse module I had been designing as the basis of the story. They had characters, I had a plot, everything was good.
Besides, I hadn't seen a lot of Fantasy + Zombie + Apocalypse. My zombie research for the DnD Module had assured me of that. (Pretty fun research, too.) So it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Except... all of the other APs were writing a thousand words a day for a week. I figured my story might be a little bit longer, but not by much. A little bit longer.
Well, that fall I got to 27k words (the part of the story that is currently FZAAP: The Conspiracy), which was only 20k words more. THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE FIRST HALF OF THE FIRST CHAPTER.
Evidently, I was doing it wrong.
The next fall (I spent a year fruitlessly looking for work in Arizona), I returned to the story, and finished the second arc of what was supposed to be the first chapter. Wandered past 50k words near the end of November, amusingly enough.
Now, I realized that there were two arcs to the first chapter. Which is silly. So maybe that was two chapters. But wait, what kind of lousy chapter is 27k words long? FZAAP was ~70k words long at that point, and could have been a respectable novel, length-wise.
So dramatic changes. I ripped out a side thread about Rae Varnya (you'll notice her complete absence in FZAAP: The Fall of Archimeridies), and did a bunch of editing (with a lot of help), eventually turning the first two arcs into their own little stories.
And thus FZAAP in it's current incarnation. Since then I wrote a relative short story (FZAAP: The Forest) and then I wrote another novella: FZAAP: Parveno.
But during the editing process of Parveno, my real-life situation changed considerably, and I no longer had the time-slot in my schedule when I would write this story.
Editing on Parveno stalled, and I decided to move on to other projects - after writing ~80,000 of this story (more than everything I had ever written previously combined), I decided to look to greener pastures. Played around with a fantasy story, then started writing a computer game, as alternative hobbies.
FZAAP starts out a bit funny, as I had to have the spotlight on 6 audience characters simultaneously, and I didn't have enough time to get a great sense of what was going on. Eventually I do hit my stride, though, honestly, having ~6 main characters is a pretty big intrinsic problem.
If you think there's anything else that I should write here, or if you have further questions, ask me at featherless@gmail.com