Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 10

‘The Outbreak’: The Follow-Up To ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’ Available From 21st July 2014

The Outbreak Cover Design

I received the edited and proof-read copy of my next novel, The Outbreak, from my editor (thanks Gale) earlier this week, and I spent yesterday and this morning going through all her edits (so I can avoid making the same mistakes in the future!) and dealing with her comments. This meant that by the lunchtime today, and after something like 18 months and 14 drafts, I had what is the final version of manuscript. This has now been sent off to create the galley proofs which will be independently read through by four or five people to catch any remaining typos before it will be ready for publication.

This means I’m finally in the home stretch for releasing what will be the second book in the For Those In Peril series, and I can finally announce the publication date, which will be the 21st of July 2014. This will be the date that both the paperback and the Kindle ebook will be released and so will be available for purchase. However, I should have advance copies which I will be sending out to potential reviewers and bookshops around the 21st of June. Once I know the exact date, I’ll be running a competition on this blog to giveaway some signed, advanced copies, so if you are interested in reading this book before its general release, watch this space.

While this book is set in the same post-apocalyptic world as For Those In Peril On The Sea, it features a new set of characters and explores what it’s like to be in a city as the Haitian Rabies Virus rips through it. Temporally, The Outbreak runs in parallel with the first part of For Those In Peril On The Sea and provides a different perspective on what is happening in this fictitious world. While I know many will be champing at the bit to find out what happens next to the characters in the first book, I felt I needed to tell this story before I could do that. This is because the characters in For Those In Peril On The Sea and The Outbreak will come together in the third book when their story lines finally collide.

To give you an idea of what The Outbreak is all about, here’s the blurb from the back of the book:

He was only in the city to meet an old friend, but within hours of his return, Ben’s running for his life …

As the world watches in horror, Miami falls to the infected, and with it America. Britain seals its borders hoping to prevent the newly-mutated Haitian Rabies Virus reaching its shores, but it’s too late. Somewhere in Glasgow is the man who started it all and coursing through his veins is the virus he accidentally created. When he finally turns, the city doesn’t stand a chance.

Minutes later, a small group of survivors find themselves trapped between the ever-increasing hordes of infected and the soldiers seeking to contain them. The roads are barricaded, the skies patrolled, and the only way out is the river which the leads from the heart of the city to the safety of the sea.

About The Author: In his debut novel, For Those In Peril On The Sea, Colin M. Drysdale focussed on four strangers thrown together by chance on a small boat with no hope of ever returning to land. In this, the second book in the For Those In Peril series, and starting in his native Glasgow, he explores how another group of survivors reacts as their world falls apart around them.

Now this book is finally out of the way, I’m starting to turn my attention to the third book in the series. This has the working title of The Island At The End Of The World, and I’m looking forward to revisiting Rob, CJ and the others from the first book, and seeing what happens to them when they finally reach their intended destination (if you’ve read For Those In Peril On The Sea, you’ll know where I’m meaning). I’m also looking forward to working with the characters from the second book again too. In fact, there’s a couple of the characters from this second book which I’ve really become quite attached to, and I really want to find out what they’re going to do next.

As well as starting work on the third book, the next couple of months will be spent creating a companion website for The Outbreak, doing some publicity and running a few promotions here and there so it will be a busy time. It doesn’t help that I’m also rolling out some merchandise for the For Those In Peril series which will consist of t shirts, hoodies and other clothing based on some custom designs I’ve been creating over the few weeks (the first ‘proofs’ of these designs arrived in the mail today and look great!), but more of that later.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Steadfast Stanley – A Short Animated Zombie Film About One Boy And His Dog

Every now and then, a short zombie film comes along that is truly different from anything that has come before. A year or so ago it was the rather brilliant Cargo (if you haven’t seen it, watch it now!), but now there’s a new one called Steadfast Stanley.

It’s a rather sweet animated short about a dog’s search for his owner after they become separated during a zombie outbreak. In my humble opinion, it’s fantastic in terms of the story, they way it’s told and in terms of the animation itself, and it represents that most difficult of things to do in the zombie genre – something that’s completely original! So with no further ado, enjoy!

Steadfast Stanley from John Cody Kim on Vimeo.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Why I Write First Person Narratives

Those familiar with my writing style will have noticed that I almost always write in the first person, rather than the more usual third person. That is, I tend to write from the point of a single person as if they telling someone about the events they were experiencing. In this post, I want to go into some of the reasons why this is.

First and foremost, it’s because I primarily write what would be considered post-apocalyptic fiction (mostly with a strong leaning towards zombies, but every now and then I’ll do a zombie-free piece). As a fan of the writing of John Wyndham, and particularly his two most famous post-apocalyptic books, The Day Of The Triffids (which is basically a zombie story without the zombies) and The Kraken Wakes (which is about an alien invasion of sorts), I’m of the opinion that post-apocalyptic stories are best told from the first person perspective. This is because it allows the reader to live the events directly through the eyes of narrator, and know exactly what they are feeling about it. This isn’t to say that I think that it’s impossible to write a great post-apocalyptic novel from the third person perspective, just that I prefer ones written from the first person. Since this is what I prefer to read, then it’s perhaps unsurprising that this is the style I have chosen to primarily work in myself.

Secondly, for me, post-apocalyptic fiction is all about the emotions and reactions of those who find their world suddenly turned upside down, and the best way to experience this by viewing it from inside the main character’s head. That way, you can feel their panic, live their tragedies, ride the emotional roller-coaster with them as they swing from despair to hope and back again. For me, it always seems a little wrong when you read about the emotions someone is feeling from a third person perspective because it leaves me wondering how someone looking at the situation from the outside would be able to know this. It’s like when you hear someone talk about themselves in the third person, it’s not technically wrong, but you know instantly that this is probably someone you don’t want to get cornered by at a social gathering.

Thirdly, I like the idea that different people, even if they go through the same events, will have very different experiences and responses. With the first person perspective, it leaves open the option of revisiting the same events and looking at them from another point of view. This is something which I did in two connected short stories, Rendezvous and The Need To know, each of which told the opposite sides of the same story about two people who become separated during a zombie apocalypse. This is also something which is going to be an important element in the For Those In Peril series of books which I’m currently working on. Each individual book will be narrated by a different individual, so that the world will be seen and experienced through different eyes in each one (even when they are following the same groups of characters). The common theme which connects them, and makes them a series, is, therefore, the world in which the events take place, and the common timeline experienced by each individual as they struggle to survive within it, rather than necessarily the characters themselves (although they will all come together eventually).

Finally, and this is probably quite an important point, I, personally, find the first person perspective much easier to write in. It allows me to keep the story line more linear, and I don’t have to worry about keeping track of who know what. The narrator will only know what he has seen or been told in the story, and nothing more. In addition, I find it easier to work out emotional reactions and responses if I can put myself in the place of the main character, and that is easier when working in the first person.

This having been said, writing from the first person perspective is not necessarily straight-forward and it’s easy to get it wrong. In particular, it’s easy to fall into the ‘we’ trap, especially when talking about the actions of a group of individuals. This trap is where you simply refer to an action as ‘we did this’ and ‘we did that’, rather than describing exactly what went on, and falling in to this trap will leave your story feeling flat and underwhelming. However, handled properly, the first person perspective can be absolutely gripping, more so than almost anything written in the third person.

So, hopefully this provides, for those who might be interested, some insight as to why I write so much from the first person perspective. If you’re a budding writer and want to try working from this point of view for yourself, you can find some handy tips (including how to avoid falling into the ‘we’ trap) can be found in an earlier post on this blog, which you can read here.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

The Official Zombie Cook Book

While the follow-up to For Those In Peril On The Sea is off with my editor for a final proof-reading, I’ve had some free time, and I’ve been putting this to good use developing some designs for a range of quirky zombie-themed t-shirts to promote the companion website to my books (www.ForThoseInPeril.net).

I’ll be launching these officially in the autumn, but here’s a sneak preview of one of the draft designs I’ve put together so far:

The t-shirts will all feature a white design printed on a black/dark background and once they are finished, they should look something like this:

I’m still working on the logistics of this, but once I have that sorted out, I’ll launch the t-shirts through this blog (with a free give-away of a few special customised limited editions). There should be around 12 different designs in the final range, all of which will hopefully provide something a little different from what’s already out there. I’ll post more on this as things progress, so if you’re interested, watch this space.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

The Indie Author Manifesto

cmdrysdale:

I don’t ususally re-blog the posts of others (in fact I don’t think I ever have before), but this one seemed to fit within the spirit of this blog, and it seems like a worthy set of ideals for those who self-publish to try to live up to (especially numbers 8 and 10).

Originally posted on Indie Hero:

Indie Authors.

Each and every one of us should post this on our websites, blogs, etc.

THE INDIE AUTHOR MANIFESTO by Mark Coker @ Smashwords:

THE INDIE AUTHOR MANIFESTO


We indie authors believe all writers are created equal, that all writers are endowed with natural creative potential, and that writers have an unalienable right to exercise, explore and realize their potential through the freedom of publication. 

I hold these truths to be self-evident:

I am an indie author
I have experienced the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from self-publishing
I have a right to publish
My creative control is important to me.  I decide when, where and how my writing graduates to become a published book.
Indie does not mean “alone.”  I choose my partners.
I shall not bow beholden or subservient to any publisher. In my business relationships, I seek partnership, fairness, equity and mutually aligned interests.
We indie…

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If Civilisation Collapsed Tomorrow, Would You Know How To Make Your Own Electricity?

Much of our modern world runs on electricity. Yet, if for some reason the currents suddenly stopped flowing through the wires into your house, whether it’s due to the dead rising from their graves or just an unexpected blackout, would you know how to make your own? If you don’t, you’d not only have to give up the little luxuries of life, such as hair-straighteners and ipods, but the essentials like light and refrigeration. You’d also have to give up things which could make your life easier, such as power tools and electric cookers.

At first glance, you might think making your own electricity would be difficult, after all few of us really understand what electricity is, but it’s not. In fact, using the few simple household items shown on the picture on the right (pennies, zinc washers, vinegar, cardboard and some twist ties), you can create enough electricity to run an LED bulb, as shown in the lower picture. Believe it or not, this is all you need to build your own fully-functioning and fully-charged battery.

If don’t believe me, you can try it yourself by following the instructions in the video below (it also explains how and why this works).

If you can light an LED bulb, you can also make enough electricity to re-charge a mobile phone, or even an ipad or laptop. If have enough of the raw materials, you could even make a trickle charger to recharge a car battery. Basically, you can run anything which runs off a direct current (DC) using the exactly same principles.

Of course, a lot of the everyday items we use don’t run on a direct current. Instead, they run off alternating current (AC). This means that it’s a little harder to run your entire house off electricity you make yourself. You could do it, but you’d need would be something called an inverter. You can make your own, but you’d probably be better to try to find one from somewhere. If you had to try to scrounge one up from somewhere, raiding an RV or a boat would be a good place to start as many of these will have built-in inverters which you can salvage.

You’ll need a lot of power to run an entire house, more than you could probably get from even the biggest stack of pennies you could find. What would you do then? Well, you could try to find a petrol or diesel generator from somewhere, but you’re still going to need fuel to run it, and, depending on your emergency, that might be in short supply. However, you could always turn to renewables, and start looking around for solar panels or a small-scale wind turbine. A few years ago, these would have been difficult to find, but now they are relatively common in many communities.

If you can’t find an existing power generator to power your house, then you could always build your own. This might sound difficult, but it’s not. All you would need is an alternator, of the type you can find in almost any vehicle, and a way to turn it fast enough to generate a sufficiently large current. You could hook it up to a bicycle and use pedal power, but I would probably recommend using water power, just like old-fashioned water mills. It might take a few hours, but it is relatively easy to make a water-wheel.

What if you can’t find a ready-made alternator? Well, rather surprisingly, almost any electrical item which spins when you plug it in, will also work in reverse. That is, if you spin it yourself, it will generate electricity. This is because electrical motors are reversible and will work in both directions, so either electricity goes in one end and mechanical power comes out the other, or mechanical power goes in and electricity comes out. If you want to see this principle working, look at this video, where a top-loading washing machine is turned into a water-powered electricity generator.

You can do something similar with a ceiling fan to create your own wind turbine, as shown in this video:

However, if you’re generating your own electricity using some sort of renewable set up, you need a way of ironing out the peaks and troughs in the power you generate. This is because renewable power generation tends to be intermittent rather than continuous (the main exception to this is hydro and tidal power). This means you need a bank of batteries to save the power when you generate more than you need so you can use it when you’re not generating enough. Luckily, in a post-apocalyptic environment, you can easily scrounge all the batteries you’d need from abandoned cars, or even better, golf carts.

Of course, rather than waiting until the lights go out, and trying to cobble something together then, you’d be better off getting prepared in advance. This can mean getting your own generator to take you through short power outages, and having some sort of renewable system in place for longer ones. This won’t just help you survive in a world where the dead have come back to life, it will also benefit you now, through lower household bills and the fact that you’ll be reducing you carbon footprint on the planet.

This is something I did a few years ago with solar panels, and even in Scotland, the system I have is enough to run almost everything in my house during daylight hours on sunny days. I’m not living completely off the grid, and still use mains power on cloudy days and at night, but I do have a system which, if I ever needed to, I could convert into a completely off-grid system within a couple of hours by setting up a bank of batteries to handle the times when the sun doesn’t shine. Even if that never happens, I can live happily knowing that I’m doing my bit to reduce my environmental impact on the world.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’ Wins A Gold Medal In The Next Generation Indie Book Awards

The now award-winning ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’

No sooner had I posted yesterday’s article about the importance of book awards for independently published books, inspired by this article on the San Francisco Book Review blog, than I received some rather exciting news. This was that my debut novel, For Those In Peril On The Sea , had been selected as a gold medal winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

I’d entered this competition on a bit of a whim last summer and, having sent my book off, had pretty much forgotten about it. Then out of the blue in February, I got an email saying that they’d lost my entry and could I send a PDF copy as a replacement. I hummed and hawed about this because I’m always wary about sending out unprotected electronic copies of books in case they somehow end up getting posted online, but I decided I’d do it anyway. As it happened, there were a few missed typos in the original first edition I submitted, and it was actually quite good to have the opportunity to send in a new version where these had been corrected.

So, I sent in the new copy, as requested, and promptly forgot about it again, that was until yesterday when I got an email which looked, from the subject, very much like spam. Now, I’ll be the first to say I’m a bit weird because while I usually delete spam straight away, if it looks like it’s some new scam, I’ll open and read it just to see what’s going on. This is in part so that I can deal with the phone calls I occasionally get from my mum asking whether a request from a bank to follow a link and enter her password is real or not. Despite the fact I always tell her never to click on any links in emails supposedly from banks, I still get the phone calls from time to time so I like to keep up with whatever new trick the spammers have started doing.

Anyway, just out of curiosity about the latest scam, I opened what I thought was a spam email to be greeted by the following text:

‘Hello,

‘I am writing with some fabulous news! Your book has been named the Winner in the FIRST NOVEL (Over 80,000 words) category of the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Congratulations!’

I had to read it a couple of times before the news finally sank it, but needless to say I was both amazed and delighted. As someone who grew up being told by their teachers at school (especially my English teachers) that I couldn’t write anything properly, I still bear some of the psychological scars, and it took me a long time to realise that proper writing isn’t about getting the grammar exactly right, or spelling things perfectly, but rather that it’s about being able to craft a compelling story (after all, editors are there to sort out any of the boring bits you might have missed!). Now, many years after I left school, it’s nice to get some recognition for a skill I was always told I lacked, but that I knew was buried somewhere deep inside me. It just took several decades to finally uncover it.

Anyway, I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank all those who helped make For Those In Peril On The Sea the success it has been so far. This includes Stephen, Michele, Gregor, Barry, Jennifer, Emily, my editor Gale Winskill, and of course my long-suffering girlfriend, Sarah, who has to put up with my ongoing zombie obsession on a daily basis, as well as reading through early drafts of all my work and providing editorial advice.

For those of you who are interested to see what happens next in the world of For Those In Peril On The Sea, the follow-up book (The Outbreak) is scheduled to be published towards the end of July of this year. While it follows a new cast of characters, it builds the overall story so that the people in both books can finally be brought together in the third book in the series. I’ll post more about this in a few weeks time, including how you can have the opportunity to win a preview copy so you can read it before anyone else gets the chance, once I have a definite publication date.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

The Importance Of Book Awards For Independently Published Books And Writers

The digital age has made it dramatically easier to publish high quality books and authors no longer need to seek publication by one of the big six publishing houses to get their work out there for anyone to purchase and read. This has led to a rapid expansion of small, independent publishing houses and also to the self-publishing revolution which is currently going on around us. Indeed, self-publishing, once seen as the last resort of those who couldn’t string two words together, is now being seen as a savvy business move by many authors. After all, why give away 90% of the money your book earns to publishing houses who seem to be doing less and less to promote their books (and be expecting the writers to do more and more), unless they have been written by a well-established author with a pre-existing fan base?

However, this publishing revolution has a down side. There are now a phenomenal number of books available, and the numbers are expanding rapidly with each and every passing day. For example, there’s apparently over 40 million books in Amazon’s catalogue, rankings of as low as 5 – 10 million (books only get a ranking once they’ve had at least one sale), and almost 300,000 books are officially published in the US each – not including those self-published digitally on things like Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords). This means that it can be difficult to make even the best book stand out from the crowd so that people are willing to part with their hard-earned money to purchase it. This is particularly true for new authors who, almost by definition, don’t have an existing fan base out there. Think about it for a minute, when was the last time you took a gamble and brought a book by a complete unknown?

Of course, you can build a reputation through the reviews section on Amazon, or on sites for avid readers, such as Goodreads, but you still have to get people to buy a copy of your book before they will post a review. In addition, until there as a reasonable number of reviews, there is always the worry in the back of the would-be purchaser’s mind that the single glowing five-star review might have been written by the author’s mother and so might not be completely unbiased (whether this is true or not is irrelevant, it’s just how people view such individual reviews).

So, how do you get round this? This is where book awards come in. Book awards are competitions which are run, usually by an organisation of some kind, which you can enter a book into, and have it critically evaluated and compared to other similar books. There are a wide range of book awards out there, some of which are specifically aimed at independently and self-published books. Yes, it usually costs money to enter a book (typically around $25 – $100 dollars), so there is some outlay, but the returns can be phenomenal if you are selected as a finalist, given an honourable mention or, even better, win. This is because receiving such awards gives your book and your writing credibility, and you can use it to help advertise and sell your book. For example, on Amazon, there is a specific section for editorial reviews, which allow you to add statements about awards and other plaudits that your book has won. In addition, those who run the competition will often post information about your book on their own websites, put out press releases, promote it in their own advertising and international book fairs, and so on. This can give you a level of publicity which you simply couldn’t afford to pay for on your own.

Of course, if you do well, there’s also the nice happy feeling of being able to describe yourself as an award-winning writer, and if you win something for one book, it can help promote not just it, but any others that you write. After all, readers are much more likely to take a chance on a book which is described as ‘written by the award-winning author of …’ than if is just says ‘written by the author of …’

So, what book awards are out there? Well, in short, loads. This means you need to be quite careful about which you choose to enter, otherwise you could end up spending a lot of money. You need to read the rules and make sure you’re eligible, and you need to make sure you complete all the paperwork properly. Finally, many awards will have multiple categories, so you need to make sure you enter your book into the right one.

In terms of ones I’d recommend, here’s a few:

First, there’s the ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Award, which is open to all independently published books and offers a wide range of categories. I’m not recommending this just because I happen to be a finalist in the horror section of this year’s competition, but also because it’s a genuinely influential award to win.

Second, there’s the Independent Book Publishers Award, or IPPY for short. Again, this is an award specifically for independently published books.

Thirdly, there the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, which offers as part of its prizes that the winners in every category (and there’s some 60 of them, including ones specifically for first novels) will be passed onto a New York literary agent for consideration. There’s no guarantee this will come to anything, but it could lead to potentially valuable representation, connections and deals. And it’s way better than having your book languishing in some slush pile somewhere. Interestingly, this competition is described on Wikipedia as the ‘Sundance’ of the book publishing world (a reference to the renowned Sundance film festival. I have not idea of how true this is, but it certainly would be a nice thing to be able to describe your book as having won.

The final award I’m going to consider here is the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. This is run by Createspace, Amazon’s self-publishing arm, and the grand prize winner will receive a publishing contract and a $50,000 advance. Book which have already been published aren’t eligible, but if you have an unpublished manuscript waiting in the wings, then it might be the one for you.

This is just a sample of the awards that are out there, but there are many others too. One useful list of book awards you might want to consider, which also provides more information about why it is good to enter and win such competitions, can be found here on the pages of the San Francisco Book Review.

Of course, all this talk of book awards and what they can do for your reputation as an author, and indeed sales of your books, doesn’t change the fact that to be in with a chance of winning, you first need to write a really good book, complete with a great premise, realistic, likeable characters and a good plot filled with gripping drama. You also need to ensure that your book is properly edited and proof-read to ensure that it is of as high quality as possible. Finally, if you are self-publishing, many of these competitions require that you don’t just have an electronic edition, but also a printed edition of some kind (although this is rapidly changing) which can mean more effort on your part to typeset a printed edition, create a cover etc, and you need to find somewhere to print it (Amazon’s CreateSpace is something I’d recommend for doing this quickly and cheaply – It’s a good service, although there’s still something about Amazon’s business model that leaves me feeling a little queasy). In short, book awards are great for publicity, but it doesn’t mean that you can skimp on the writing and production process as you won’t win if you don’t have a good book in the first place.

Of course, there is also the flip side. If you don’t enter, then no matter how good your books it, it isn’t going to win anything, is it?




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

How To Start A Fire Without A Match: A Key Post-apocalyptic Survival Skill

Fire. It’s one of man’s oldest accomplishments predating art, clothes, politics, MTV, One Direction and the possibility of nuclear annihilation leading to the rise of radioactive mutant zombies that want nothing better than to chow down on your brains. You can use fire to cook food, heat water, provide warmth and light on the darkest, coldest night and, of course, destroy the undead, but have you ever given any thought to how you’d start a fire without a match? After all, when civilisation collapses, it’s likely you’ll run out of matches pretty damn quickly. What will you do then? I know there’ll be some smart alec out there who’s brandishing a lighter and saying ‘I’d just use my trusty Zippo!’, but that will soon run out of fuel and flints, and when that happens it’ll be about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

So, when your back’s really up against it, how do you start a fire without a match? Well, it’s actually surprisingly easy. All you need is a bit of sun (just a few seconds will do) and some imagination.

The first way is to use something called a solar lighter. This is a nifty little gadget made of polished metal which can be used to concentrate the sun’s rays onto a flammable object, and as the video below shows, if you happen to have one, like I do, you can start a fire in seconds.

Pretty cool, right? But what do you do if you don’t have one of these to hand? Well, go and get one now so that you’re prepared. If you happen to be watching this and the apocalypse has already happened (I’m not going to ask how you’re still managing to get online so you can read this!), then you’ll need another option. How about using an old soda can? You read that correctly, you can start a fire with a soda can. This works on exactly the same principle, and you can see how to do it here:

What happens if you can’t find a soda can? How about using a bottle of water? I know what you’re thinking, how on Earth do you start a fire with water? Actually, it’s quite simple. Do you remember as a kid when that horrible little boy down the street used to fry ants with a magnifying glass just for fun? Well, it turns out he was onto something. Using exactly the same principle, you can use the water in a water bottle to create a lens which can be used to focus sunlight so it can be used to set things on fire. You don’t believe me? Just watch this video:

But what do you do if you don’t have any water? Believe it or not, you can use urine! You heard that right, you can start a fire with your own pee. Watch and learn, you never know, one day it might save your life. Or more likely, let you win a few bets by demonstrating how it can be done:

Ahhh, I hear you say, but what happens if there isn’t any sun, you know, like at night, or in the middle of summer in Aberdeen (if you’ve ever lived in Aberdeen in Scotland, you’ll know what I’m talking about!). Well, remember that old Boy Scout trick of rubbing two sticks together? This actually works, and it’s all based on the fact that when you rub things together you generate friction and friction generates heat. Here’s how:

This is just one way to generate fire through friction, and there are many other approaches, including fire bows and fire drills. You can find a comparison of all these different techniques here (although, as you will see, you need to be a bit of an expert to actually get these techniques to work):

Any if you don’t have any sticks? How about rubbing two stones together? Well, not really rubbing, more like striking one against the other. This is the most primitive way to produce fire and is probably the first one that humans ever used. You can see someone using this method here:

Of course, all these methods will only give you the initial spark. If you actually want to create a fire, you’ll need to know how to select the right tinder, kindling and wood, and how to build your fire so it won’t simply smoke for a few minutes before fizzling out, but that’s a whole different article altogether!

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Growing Your Own: Is Gardening The Answer To Getting Fresh Food In A Zombie Apocalypse?

My humble vegetable patch, where each year I aim to try to develop my gardening skills, by growing at least some of my own food. Yet, even in my most successful years, it’s never going to provide more than a few meals.

Last weekend, I started my annual attempt at being at least a little bit self-sufficient by growing my own fruit and vegetables in my little vegetable patch. It’s not much, but over the last four years (when I’ve been doing this), I’ve learned a few things that I could apply if I ever ended up having to try to survive in a zombie-filled world.

In zombie apocalypse scenarios, many people assume that if you could somehow find a secure location (such as a prison – as was the case in The Walking Dead, or as I’ve suggested elsewhere, vertical farms housed in multi-storey buildings), it would be a relatively easy to grow all the food you’d need to survive.

I can see why this idea is so attractive, since there’d be little need to venture beyond the safety of your perimeter to search for supplies, but my own experiences suggest that, for the inexperienced, things are not going to be as straight-forward as you might otherwise think. There’s four basic reasons for this. The first is that you need good soil in order to grow enough high quality food to keep you alive. This means that you cannot simply grow food anywhere. For example, a prison yard is unlikely to have the types of soil you’d need to grow food, not unless you could add things like compost and fertiliser to improve it, and where are you going to get that from?

The second is where you get the seeds from, after all you can’t grow food if you don’t have any seeds to plant in the first place. In the first year, you might get lucky and be able to find a suitable stash in a farm store or garden centre, but after that you’d need to collect and store your seeds from your own plants in order to have more to plant the next year. While this has been the way that both large and small scale farmers have operated for millenia, now-a-days, both commercial farming and backyard gardening simply don’t work this way. This is because most seeds sold are either what are known as F1 hybrids, or have been genetically modified (at least in many parts of the world, like the US – the situation is rather different in Europe). While this gives better yields in any individual year, it has the disadvantage that you cannot use the seeds from one year’s crop to grow the next. This is inconvenient not only when trying to feed yourself during a zombie apocalypse, but also for small farmers in the real world who are now tied into a system where they have to buy expensive seeds from commercial growers each and every year rather than being able to produce their own from their previous year’s crop.

The next issue is the quantity you’d need to grow. For those, like me, who dabble in a bit of home-grown veg from time to time, you’ll find that you can make the occasional meal or two, or maybe be self-sufficient a few specific items. However, when you can’t simply nip down to the nearest store to top up your fridge when you run low on supplies from your own plot, then you need to make sure you actually manage to grow enough to feed you.

Now, think about how much fruit and vegetables you might have to get through in a single year. Look through your weekly shop and start adding it up: If you get through a pound of potatoes a week, that would make it 52 pounds a year, and that’s just for you. What if there were 20 of you? To feed all those hungry mouths, you’d need to grow roughly 1,000 pounds of potatoes a year. Now, you get about 10 pounds of potatoes from each pound of seed potatoes planted. That’s probably in the region of almost 500 or more plants, and you’d need about 500 square feet of land to grow them. This means it’s not something you could do in your average back yard.

This is all assuming that you don’t lose any of your crop to pests and blight, and this is just the potatoes. What about all the other crops you’d need to remain fit and healthy? Where are you going to find somewhere that’s safe but still has enough space to grow all this? Then there’s all the time you’d need to spend tilling the ground, tending the crops and harvesting them once they’re ready. Basically, it’d be a pretty much full-time job, leaving you little time to do anything else, such as maintaining your walls and fences to ensure your crops aren’t over-run by the undead that would most certainly be gathering at your defences from the end of day one.

Tomatoes are easy to grow – but these plants will all bear their fruit at once sometime in late August. Anyone know how to store tomatoes for the winter?

Finally, there’s the issue of when your crops are ready for you to eat. In the western world, we’ve become so used to having fresh food being flown in from all over the planet that we’ve forgotten that fruits and vegetables are by their very nature seasonal. This means that when growing your own, if you can’t work out a way to store the fruits of your labour, you’re going to be faced with a glut of produce at some times of year and a virtual famine at others. I know this from my own experiences, where I have more strawberries than I know what to do with in June (there’s only so many home-made strawbery daiquiris you can drink before you get fed up with them!), followed by a wealth of peas in July and then tomatoes in August, and in mid-winter there’s nothing beyond a few straggling Brussel sprouts, which I’m really not too sure why I grow in the first place as I don’t like them anyway.

Of course, if you know what you’re doing, then you can store your food quite easily by drying, pickling and turning it into jams and chutneys, but there’s two problems here. Firstly, you need to know how to do this, and secondly, you’ll need other ingredients, such as sugar and vinegar if you’re to be able to do this, and where are you going to get that?

A hundred years ago, many more people would have had all the knowledge that they’d need to grow all their own food and store it in times of plenty so that it was there for them when they really needed it, but in the modern world, this is something that few people now know. And I can only think it leaves us more vulnerable, both to fictional disasters, such as zombie apocalypses, and to real world ones, such as disruptions to our over-interconnected and corporate-driven world. After all, we live in a world where traders bet on crop failures by hording staples, such as wheat, just to make a profit by artificially driving up prices. This is something they wouldn’t be able to do if more of us retained the knowledge and skills to grow our own food, yet we’ve blindly handed over the production of the very food we need to survive to people who want to exploit it for commercial gain, and, even if the dead don’t rise up and bring civilisation to its knees, surely that can’t be good, can it?

So is growing your own the answer to getting fresh food in a zombie apocalypse? Yes, but only if you actually know what you’re doing, have access to seeds, have a way to store the excess and have a sufficiently large area which you can zombie-proof with relative ease. If you can’t do this, rather than trying farming, perhaps you’d be better off resorting to more ancient human strategy of the hunter-gatherer. That is, you don’t tie yourself to a specific point in space, but instead move around the local landscape exploiting whatever local bounty is available at any time of year.

As I’ve previously posted, Autumn will be a particularly fruitful time of year, but if you know where to look, there’s plenty of food out there, just waiting for you to come along and pick it up. There is the down side to this, and that’s that you’ll be exposed to attacks by the undead whenever you go out to search for it, but as long as you’re careful, you’ll probably eat much better than if you try to grow things yourself.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.