A few years back, I was at our friends place having barbecue, and Lloyd’s friend Dale talked about ‘Gravity’ and how that would be an awesome setting for a horror story.  I’m pretty sure he meant something like space zombies swarming the station, but I liked the idea of delving more into something like ‘Lord of the Flies’.  There seemed to be a lot more interesting potential in psychological horror than a ‘jump in your face’ kind.

The idea was intriguing and it took a few days to come up with the concept.  The general idea is that while the astronauts were in space, a crisis occurred on earth that started a nuclear exchange.  All communication to earth was lost, and now the crew must figure out how to survive, and find a way home before their resources on the station run out.

It was hard finding information on the space station other than the wikipedia stuff.  There are live feeds from the station, so that was easy to observe and get a good feel for the station itself in terms of rooms, corridors, equipment, living spaces, etc.  The trouble was finding out what else was there.  Talking to one of Lloyd’s friends who actually worked at NASA was fun, but ultimately non-informational.  That in itself was information because a neutral response, at least for writers, is a kind of backhanded confirmation of the question.  So I had to go from factual to conceptual and somehow try to make my ideas ‘logical’ enough to feel real.

After that, the idea actually sat for a year before I picked it up again.  By then it had percolated in the subconscious long enough to have a good feel to it.  And here we are, 14 posts in.  I’ll be adding new posts every Tuesday, and doing a more generic blog entry on Thursdays.  Thanks for reading and if you have questions or comments, please leave them.  Commentary is a writer’s best friend  🙂