Board game fan fiction time! This is for the excellent Dead of Winter board game. Some notes about it:<br /><br />1. I really enjoyed putting in little references to a few other zombie games, including the direct "I put the title of the game in the story" references in Day 1, the Evil Resident in Day 3, fighting zombies with plants in Day 16, and the zombie eating the narrator's neighbor in Day 23.<br /><br />2. Initially, I wanted to write a Dead of Winter story from the perspective of Sparky the dog, but IDW already kind of did that in their comics, so I went in the other direction and tried to figure out who would <i>really hate</i>&nbsp;Sparky. I arrived at "a helpless survivor who can't do anything as well as <i>that dog</i>&nbsp;can," and here we are.<br /><br />3. I tried to make this journal, to a certain extent, describe things that could actually happen in the game, so I pulled quite a bit from the game's Crossroads cards. I really recommend, if you don't buy the game, taking a look at what's on those cards, because it's a really interesting mechanism for sudden events during the play of a board game, and the stories on some of the cards is quite interesting. One even tells you about the source for the horse meat.<br /><br />Last, but certainly not least, I want to bring back Thomas's words to the survivor in Day 37, because I wrote them both to me and to anyone else who might be struggling in this, the dead of Earth's astronomical winter and what sometimes feels like the dead of life's winter. It's <i>not</i>&nbsp;useless or helpless just to endure, and you <i>are</i>&nbsp;still worthy of love if all you can do is keep your head above water.<br /><br />I promise.