I’ve been working heavily on writing a new series as of late, a revamped concept on a script I had thought up of while I was still in high school, carefully writing out the characters, rethinking major plot points, and trying to find some sort of reasoning behind the motivations for each and every one of the characters in the film. Unfortunately, it involves one of my biggest fears.
Zombies. Yeah, the living undead. I’m fucking SCARED of them. It doesn’t help that some of my best friends are absolutely fascinated with the subject. More often than not, regular conversation turns to the survival of the living during an outbreak. An oddly bleak subject, naturally, but it’s given me quite an amount of fodder to write with. Writing these series has proven to be the most stressful, crazy thing i’ve written in quite some time, and gives me nightmares. Most the nightmares involve the characters I wrote myself (with some scenarios I later incorporated into the series, thank you), but a lot of the times, I would find myself scared of the dark. I’ve started to stay up late to the wee hours of the morning, something I had never even considered on doing until about a year and a half ago. The relative calm that comes over my neighborhood (and family members sleeping) can be rather soothing, if you can block out the squaking parrots and the ghettobirds patrolling for the latest felon to wander only blocks from where i live. This opportunity has a large caveat- that same lull also brings forth the fear in the imaginary within myself. I fear sometimes for the imaginary things I had created in my mind- the zombies that once attacked a character in a script now has a slight chance to exist in reality, waiting for me on the other side of my door. It was a silly fear, but enough to give me certain amounts of stress when writing, and that stress would in turn affect said writing, to the point that it would be… unnerving. 
Talking to Primo’s brother, Andrew, I relayed to him my fears in such a case. He smiled, and gave me a solution- “come up with an imaginary weapon”. I was puzzled, but he explained it rather well- if you fear the imaginary, come with an imaginary weapon to fight it. As such, I’ve been carrying around a cheap little BB gun pistol, a PP9 replica that’s probably 1/2 (or even less!) scale replica of the actual gun. I know it isn’t real- i left the orange tip on there for safety, but it’s there to fight off the imaginary, to reinforce my own mind that I am the one in control. Oddly enough, it works. When I walk around my house, I’ll carry the gun in the pocket of my robe or my jeans, or if I have a particularly heavy scare, I’ll walk around the house toting the small pistol in my hand. The zombie nightmares have gone down to a minimum, thanks to this cheap gun i bought off of amazon.com (it was .99 cents, if i recall correctly. It was something I bought off of the site that was a simple joke). An odd way to explore the power of the mind and imagination, but there you go.