Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 13

How To Start Zombie Apocalypse Novel

A while ago, I did a post looking at the various ways you can successfully end a zombie novel. In this post, I want to look at how to start one. Here, the main issue is where along the time line of your particular zombie apocalypse do you drop into the lives of your character(s) and meet them for the first time?

There’s four broad possibilities here, three of which I think work quite well, each under different circumstances, and a fourth which doesn’t – or at least it’s very much harder to get it to work well. These are: 1. Finding the world has unexpectedly changed; 2. The descent from normality; 3. The zombie-filled world, and 4. The flashback. Each of these plays on slightly different aspects of the human psyche and will elicit different feelings and emotions in the reader.

1. Finding the world unexpectedly changed: In this option, a character, or group of characters, is somehow isolated from the world, and while they are no longer in touch with it, it changes in an unexpected manner (such as being over-run by zombies). Stories which start in this way feature the disconcertion and discombobulation of encountering a world which you both know and don’t know at the same time. Think, for example, of the start of 28 Days Later, where Jim wakes up to find himself in hospital, an unexpected enough event as the last thing he remembers is cycling along a road, but then as he progresses further and further from the bed he woke up in, he finds that he’s somehow been left alone in an apparently deserted city which should be teeming with life. The opening sequences are truly disconcerting for anyone familiar with London as they will never before have seen its streets so devoid of people. Indeed, this is the emotion which finding the world unexpectedly changed starts to play on, and indeed on the nagging worry in the back of people’s minds whenever they go to sleep that there’s no certainty that the world will be the same when they wake up. There is a similar nagging worry whenever you leave home, that there is a risk that it could all change in your absence. Really, I think that it boils down to humans struggling to deal with the fact that, in their absence, the world carries on without them and this means they are not the lead character – but rather just a bit player among millions on a larger stage.

The biggest problem with starting novels in this way is how you create a realistic and novel isolation scenario. The waking up in a hospital bed approach was done so well in 28 Days Later, it’s difficult now to use it without the reader instantly thinking you’ve copied the idea (even then, it wasn’t an original idea in that movie – it was ‘borrowed’ from the 1950s post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids). The Walking Dead also used this approach, and would invite further charges of plagiarism if you used it. Of course there are other possible scenarios which you could use: A prisoner being held in isolation, a group of people locked in a bunker for a military exercise, a spaceship returning to Earth after a long mission, or (and this was the scenario I used in For Those In Peril On The Sea), a boat coming back to shore after a long voyage. They key here is to make sure that your scenario can realistically explain why your character(s) don’t know what’s happened, such as a break down of some kind with the communication equipment.

If you do deploy this opening for a novel, you will need to fill in the back story as to exactly what happened at some point (because the reader will expect to be told). This is usually done through conversations with other survivors your main characters meet up with once they are over their initial shock at finding themselves in a world that’s suddenly changed. However, this has to be handled carefully and it cannot seem too much like a plot device to allow you to explain exactly what happened.

2. The descent from normality: In a descent from normality beginning to a story, you get a glimpse of what normal life is like for your character(s) before everything starts to fall apart. This can either be slowly (with little things just seeming a bit out of place at first, and then things getting progressively worse and worse – Max Brooks did this very well in the World War Z novel) or it can be very quickly, with everything going to hell pretty much in an instant (as occurred in the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead). Either way, the main emotion being played on here is the nagging worry that people have that, at some point , something will go wrong and their world will come crashing down around their ears. This means the reader can empathise with the characters as this happens, and wonder what they would do if they found themselves in a similar situation.

The descent from normality option is probably the easiest for the novice writer to attempt as it allows them to use a relatively linear narrative, and no need to have too much back story in conversation with others. However, care must be taken to make sure that you strike the right balance between having just enough of the non-action scenes before the start of the descent for the reader to get a handle on what the character’s normality is, and not so much that the reader is left wondering when the apocalypse is ever going to start (after all that is why they are reading a zombie apocalypse novel in the first place!).

As a general rule, the more normal the character(s) lives and situation is, the less you need to reveal of their normality before you can start in with the zombies. This is done really nicely in both Dawn of the Dead (someone returning from work and going to bed) and in Shaun of the Dead, where we get a brief glimpse into a normal day in his life (so we can see he’s stuck in a rut so big, it will take nothing less than the fall of civilisation to jolt him out of it). However, if you are setting your zombie apocalypse story in a quiet different from the real world (such as some alternative future version of Earth) or with characters whose daily lives are more unusual, you may need to provide a longer lead in so that the reader becomes familiar enough with their normality that they can understand the effect of the descent upon it, and those who live in it, when things start to change. Indeed, this is probably the biggest mistake that people make when using the descent from normality opening as there is a tendency to jump into the zombie action too quickly (e.g. having the opening line of: ‘It was a normal day for Bob, until he saw the zombies swarming up the street towards him’ – a good opening line to a short story, but probably not for a novel).

3. The zombie-filled world: In this type of start to a zombie novel, you drop in on your characters in a world already over-run (or being over-run) with zombies, usually at a point when something has changed in their life. For example, it might be a new character arriving in a group, a safe house being over-run, being force to move to a new location because of some threat, or something about the zombies changing (maybe getting more intelligent, or the disease which creates them spreading in a new way). The emotions you’re trying to elicit within the reader here is thinking about how they would survive in a world which is very different from the one they live in, and one which they don’t have the experience or the skills to handle, and you’re doing this by throwing them in at the deep end of just such a world.

The reason you need to have this start at a point of change in the characters’ lives is simply so that you have a fixed starting point to work from. From this point, you can then move forwards and backwards to fill the reader in on how the world came to be the way it is, and what’s then happening with the characters. Although not zombie stories, this is used very well in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road and the TV series Falling Skies.

The main difficulty which you will face if you wish to use this type of beginning is that you will have to make sure you build your world in your reader’s mind, and it can be quite difficult to explain the rules of how your world operates to them. In particular, you don’t have the luxury of having an essentially naive character who needs everything explained to them as you do in the first option.

4. The flashback: In a flashback beginning, you join a character during a tense scene or at a given point of action, often close to the end of your story arc, and have the character questioning how they ended up in that situation in the first place (this is also the emotional response which you are aiming to illicit in the reader, that of how someone can end up in a very bad place because of seemingly inconsequential decisions they have made in the past). This type of opening allows you to go back to the beginning and fill in everything that happened. This way you can show each of the decisions and why they lead the characters to end up where they did, hopefully with the reader screaming at them not to do something because they know that it will end up badly for the characters and they’d save if they just made a different decision.

This can be an effective ploy for a short story, but in general for a full length novel, it (in my opinion at any rate) can be very difficult to pull off successfully. This is because the reader will either have forgotten the flashback situation after a chapter or so, or will be aware that a specific point will be reached at sometime, and will be expecting it to be resolved with every turn of the page. This means it is difficult to integrate the reveal of what happens to end the flashback scene with the back story action. This can be done by moving back and forth between the character’s past and present, and it is often successfully done in movies. However, this is because you can use visual elements (clothes, hairstyles, locations etc.) to passively inform the viewer which time frame a given scene is in. When writing, you need some sort of similar ‘signpost’ for the time frame, but this often leads to the writing becoming rather clunky as it disrupts the flow.

So these are the basic options for starting a zombie apocalypse novel, but which one is right for you? Well this depends on your characters, your story arc, the world you’re aiming to create and what emotions you’re aiming to elicit from your readers. Really the key here is to pick one which works for your specific plot and fits with how you want to reveal your characters to your readers, but be aware that you shouldn’t try to shoe-horn a beginning to your novel which doesn’t fit with how the story will develop. Each type of opening promises the readers some very specific types of resolution and if they don’t get it, they will feel ripped off. For example, if you’re using the first option, you need to reveal to the reader at some point what happened to the world or they will quickly become frustrated at not being told. Similarly, with option 3, they will expect some back story to explain how the characters ended up in their new world and how they learned to cope with it, and if this is not done, they’ll feel cheated.

Personally, I like stories which start with the first type of opening, and that was one of the reasons why I chose it when writing For Those In Peril On The Sea. However, when I started work on the next book in the series (The Outbreak), which follows another group of survivors, I realised I could use this opening again without it feeling very same-y. For this reason, I’ve gone for a descent for normality option for this one, and it is likely that I’ll use the third option the for next book in the series because it will see the characters from the two books united in the pre-existing zombie-filled world. If I ever get round to a four book, I might be brave enough to try a flashback opening, but only because the rules of the world in which I’m writing should be firmly established by then in the readers’ minds, and it will use an existing character who is looking right back to the events which started my particular version of a zombie apocalypse. If I was starting a brand new series set in a very different world, I wouldn’t have these options and so wouldn’t even consider 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.

Of Love And Zombies…

I’d be the first to admit that being a zombie author can sometimes be a bit all-consuming (pun intended!), especially when I’m deep in writing mode, or working up a new idea which has just come to me. In particular, when I’m writing an intense zombie set piece, I can disappear into my work for hours at a time, leaving my log-suffering girlfriend feeling like a bit of a laptop ‘widow’ as I hunker over the keys, tapping away like crazy (well more like thumping the keys as I don’t have the lightest touch, especially when lost in the action I’m writing!).

She also has to put up with me constantly running half-formed story ideas past her (some of which can be pretty weird and dark) and having to work her editing magic on what, even I would admit, can sometimes be quite poor first drafts, especially if I’m just trying to see if something works or not before writing a more complete version.

And then there’s the times when we’re out and about, and my eyes glaze of over, and she’ll give me a weary look and say, ‘You’re thinking about zombies again, aren’t you?‘ – and she’ll be right.

Luckily for me, she’s into the whole zombie thing, too, and also my rather dark sense of humour. How do I know this?

Well, this was the Valentine’s Day card she gave me this year, and I love her all the more for it!

It’s almost as good as last year’s one, where the strapline was: ‘I love you but if zombies chase us, I’m tripping you‘.

Both of them came from the same small craft company (), and while it might be a bit late for this year, remember them next year for the zombie-lover in your life. You can find their full range 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 Day A Zombie Came Into The Playground – A Dark Tale For Young Readers

‘Mrs MacKay, there’s a zombie in the playground!’

The teacher sitting at the front of the classroom didn’t even look up, let alone turn so she could see out of the windows behind her desk; she just kept scribbling away with her red pen.

Donald tried again, ‘Mrs MacKay …’

She cleared her throat. ‘I heard you the first time, Donald.’ She spoke with a dismissive and condescending tone. ‘You’re already being kept in for telling tall tales; don’t make it any worse for yourself!’

Beyond the teacher, Donald could see into the sunny school yard where a rotting figure was shambling around, chasing the children who, only moments earlier, had been enjoying the lunch break he’d lost as a punishment. He didn’t know where the zombie had come from, but he knew this was no figment of his imagination, it was definitely there now. ‘But Mrs MacKay, there really is a zombie in the playground. It’s chasing people; it’s trying to catch them and eat their brains.’

Still the teacher didn’t look up from her marking. ‘On Monday, you said you saw a werewolf, and that wasn’t true, was it?’ Her hair was tied up in a tight bun which wobbled ever so slightly as she spoke.

Remembering his mistake, Donald felt his cheeks turn a deep crimson. ‘But Miss, I wasn’t lying; when I shouted out, I really did think it was a werewolf.’

The teacher drew a large red cross at the bottom of the page she’d been reading and turned it over. ‘And what did it turn out to be?’

Donald shifted uncomfortably in his seat and mumbled, ‘It was just Mr Smith, the sports teacher.’

She turned another page. ‘And why did you think he was a werewolf?’

Donald let out a resigned sigh, ‘he’d grown a beard over the summer holidays.’ As he spoke, he watched what was happening in the playground. He knew he wasn’t wrong this time: this really was a zombie. As it continued to stagger around, Donald could see it was too slow to catch any of the kids. In fact, it was moving so slowly that the only way it was going to catch anyone was if they didn’t see it coming until it was too late.

The teacher closed the jotter she’d been marking and leant backwards. ‘And on Tuesday, you saw a pterodactyl swooping down into the playground, trying to snatch one of the kindergarteners from the sand pit.’

Donald kept his eyes fixed on the zombie. ‘I was sure it was a pterodactyl, I thought they were in danger; I had to say something.’

‘And what was it really?’

Donald started to answer, but the teacher interrupted him, ‘Look at me when you’re talking to me.’

Donald shifted his gaze towards the teacher’s narrow, pointy face which always looked like she’d just sucked on a lemon. ‘A black plastic bag the wind had blown into the air.’ As soon as he’d answered, his eyes shot back towards zombie as it stumbled around the now empty school yard, all the children having fled to safety.

‘And remind me what you thought you saw on Wednesday?’ There was a scraping noise as the teacher pushed her chair away from the desk and stood up. She paced back and forth, never taking her eyes off Donald as she waited for him to answer. The sudden movement caught the zombie’s attention and he started to lumber towards the windows, his arms reaching out in front of him.

Donald could barely tear his eyes away from the approaching monster. ‘I saw a mummy.’

‘No, you saw Miss Walker, the maths teacher; she’d had a car accident and had a bandage round her head. I’m telling you, Donald, you’ve got to stop letting your imagination run away with itself. It’ll only get you into trouble.’

Mrs Mackay rested her bony bottom on the window sill, keeping her back to the yard. Behind her, the zombie moved ever nearer. Donald could now make out its dull lifeless eyes, its sallow, sunken cheeks, the way its skin was peeling away from its left forearms. ‘But Mrs MacKay, I’m not making it up and I’m not mistaken this time; there really is a zombie in the playground!’

She folded her arms, a stern look on her face. ‘Just like you were sure there were aliens trying to land on the playing fields yesterday?’

The zombie was getting closer and closer with each faltering step, and Donald was becoming more and more agitated at his teacher’s refusal to believe him. ‘That’s different, I just got confused. I really thought it was aliens.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you did, yet it was only a helicopter flying over the school to take some pictures for the local newspaper. And what about the vampire you saw this morning? The one you were shouting about and disrupting everyone else in the class in the middle of a very important test; remember? The reason you’re in this room right now rather than getting to play outside with your friends. What did that turn out to be?’

‘The headmaster.’ Donald knew he’d been wrong, but he tried to defend his actions. ‘But the way his gown was blowing in the wind, he looked like a vampire.’

The zombie was now only a few feet from Mrs Mackay, its rotting fingers almost touching the thin pane of glass that was all that separated the classroom from the school yard. Its head loomed over the teacher’s shoulder, its jaws open, revealing blackened and blood-stained teeth.

‘And now, you’re saying there’s a zombie in the playground?’ The teacher leaned back against the window, shaking her head and tutting loudly. ‘Tell me, why should I believe you, this time?’

‘Because you have to, Miss, it’ll get you if you don’t. I know I was wrong about the werewolf, and the pterodactyl, and the mummy, and about the aliens landing on the playing fields, and the vampire, but I’m right about the zombie. Just turn round and you’ll see for yourself!’

Mrs MacKay narrowed her beady little eyes and stared at Donald over the top of her half-moon glasses. ‘Have you ever heard of the story about the boy who cried wolf?’

‘Yes, Miss, but that’s different. I wasn’t doing it for fun, I really did think the monsters were there.’ Donald sprang to his feet, unable to see why his teacher couldn’t understand the difference. ‘I really did think we were in danger. All I was trying to do was to warn everyone, to keep them safe.’

‘You know, I almost believe you, but when are you going to grow up and realise that monsters don’t exist? The dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, didn’t they? So there can’t be pterodactyls flying around now, can there?’ She’d uncrossed her arms and was now leaning forward, waggling a finger tipped with a claw-like nail at Donald. ‘You need not get it into your head, there’s no such thing as werewolves, or vampires, or aliens.’ Misses MacKay drew her skinny frame up to its full five foot eleven inches, trying to appear as intimidating as possible. ‘And there’s certainly no such thing as zombies!’

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the zombie smashed through the glass and dragged her, kicking and screaming, from the classroom. Donald had done all he could to warn her, and he couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t his fault that she was now zombie food. All she needed to do was give him the benefit of the doubt this time rather than assuming he must be lying because he’d got things wrong before. Teachers were always doing that, judging children from their past mistakes, not realising that they could change. After this morning, Donald had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t shout out again, not unless he was sure he was right. It just so happened that a real monster had turned up a few hours later and she had assumed that, yet again, he was seeing things that weren’t really there. Well, she was the one who’d ended up dead because of it and Donald felt she only had herself to blame.

At that moment, the classroom door flew open. There stood the headmaster, his black gown billowing out behind him, again bearing a striking resemblance to the vampire in the film Donald had watched the night before when he should have been tucked up in bed.

‘What’s all this racket?’ The headmaster spotted the broken glass littering the floor and turned towards where Donald was still standing in the middle of the room. ‘Did you break that window, boy?’

‘It wasn’t me, Sir, I didn’t do it.’ Donald saw the headmaster roll his eyes in response as he strode over to shattered window. Glass crunched under his size twelve shoes as he turned to face Donald, and his voice boomed out accusingly. ‘But there’s no one else here, boy, it must have been you!’

Behind the headmaster, Donald saw the zombie rise up, his teacher’s blood dripping from its face. He smiled at the headmaster, knowing what was going to happen next if the headmaster didn’t believe was he was about to say and thinking that it would serve him right.

‘No, Sir, it was the zombie in the playground …’

***

This is my first attempt at writing something in the zombie genre specifically aimed at children (late primary school age perhaps? or maybe early secondary school? I’m not really too sure). It’s a long time since I was a child, so I’m not too sure how well it would actually go down with younger readers these days, but it’s certainly the type of story I would have liked to read as a kid.

If you happen to be able to get your hands on a young reader or two who might be interested in this dark little tale, I’d be keen to get some feedback on what they think of it (after all, children are the best judges of what writing for children should be like). If you want a copy you can easily print out (or indeed put on an eReader), you can download a PDF of the story from here. I’m aware that this story probably has a particularly British slant (do school kids in other countries write in jotters?), but hopefully most of it is fairly cross-cultural.

In case there is anyone out there wondering about the title, it seems that one of the strongest memories almost every British kid has of being in primary school is the day a dog wandered into the playground, and the fuss it caused (this might just be a British thing, but then again, maybe it’s not). My own memories of an event like this was, indeed, the starting point for this story, and what might happen if it had been a zombie rather than just a stray dog.

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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.

Death From Above: Will It Be The Humble Bat Which Finally Start The Zombie Apocalypse?

Most of us probably don’t spend much of our time thinking about bats. We might see them flitting around from time to time in the growing darkness, or occasionally encounter one which strays, mistakenly into our house, but beyond that, bats don’t really make much of a dent in the collective consciousness of humans except as stereotypes in B list horror movies and around Halloween.

Yet, it turns out that bats have a much darker side than anyone ever suspected, and it is this dark side which means that it could be them, rather than some mad scientist hunched over his test-tubes and giggling maniacally, that triggers the zombie apocalypse. Well, okay, I’m taking things a bit too far there, but they could certainly trigger a worldwide pandemic which could bring civilisation crashing to its knees.

Why do I say this? Well, because it almost happened once already. How many of you remember the global panic triggered by the SARS outbreak in 2003? If not, here’s a quick reminder. SARS or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome sprang out of nowhere and spread rapidly from Hong Kong to 37 countries across its nine month reign of terror. It killed almost 800 people, but more frighteningly it had a death rate of almost 10% (so one in ten people infected ended up dead). It also went airborne and leapt easily from person to person, and it was only a prompt worldwide response which finally brought it under control. When scientists started looking into where it came from, it quickly became clear that it was a zoonotic disease (that is one which leapt to humans from another animal species), and eventually the source was traced back to bats.

Now, you might think that this was a one-off, but it is far from it. If you want another example of a disease outbreak which originated from bats you need look no further than the much feared Ebola virus. Here’s a true nightmare disease that in some forms is 100% fatal and that basically causes your insides to turn to liquid and pour out through every orifice in your body.

Then there’s MERS or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. That’s a new disease which is doing the rounds at the moment, killing a large proportion of people it infects, although it doesn’t seem to have gone airborne yet. It, too, is thought to have come from bats (albeit via camels).

This is just the start. There’s also the Hendra Virus (killed two in Australia), the Australian Lyssa Virus (a relative of rabies), the Nipah Viruus (it killed 50% of the 229 people it infected) and possibly the Marburg virus (a cousin of Ebola). Thus, bats are often the prime suspect when an emergent virus suddenly appears out of nowhere to devastate human populations large and small. And of course, bats are also a regular source of that old favourite of zombie authors – Rabies, so maybe the title of this article isn’t quite as far-fetched as it might at first seem.

So far these would-be epidemics have flared up and then died, some burning more brightly than others, but there are likely to be many other viruses out there lurking in bats, ready to jump to humans, and we never know when one of these viruses might have the killer combination of being highly contagious, kill a high proportion of those it infects and have airborne transmission from person to person and the luck to make it into our inter-connected system of flights and airports.

Normally, diseases have to trade-off virulence with the risk of extinction, because it they kill off too many of their hosts they risk killing themselves off too, but not zoonotic diseases. This is because they will continue to thrive in their primary hosts (non-human animals often referred to as the disease reservoir), so they can afford to wipe out any secondary hosts they leap into (like humans).

But, you may ask, why are bats so often the source of these outbreaks? First, and I must stress this, this is not because bats are some kind of disease-ridden pest. They are far from it. They probably carry no more diseases that humans do, it’s just that they are diseases we have not evolved to cope with. Similarly, they carry diseases which are no more inherently dangerous than those in many other animals, but they are ones we’ve never been exposed to before and this means we have no defences against them. In fact, the real risks comes from the actions of humans and not bats. Humans are impinging ever further into what was once pristine forests and wild lands all over the world and are destroying it at an ever-increasing rate. While many species perish, some bats can actually thrive quite well in or around human habitations. Indeed, many will quite happily roost in the buildings we construct, and this can bring humans and bats into ever-increasing levels of contact, an in ways which simply doesn’t happen with other animals.

Even then, many of the leaps of diseases from bats to humans come through accidental contamination, for example from farm animals eating fruit dropped by foraging bats, or getting infected from droppings of bats roosting over their heads in barns, and it is these animals which actually pass them onto humans. Occasionally, you get infections from direct contact. A few of these will be when someone, often a child, picks up a sick bat they find on the ground and are either scratched or bitten; more often, though, it comes from humans hunting and eating bats.

So how can we reduce the risk of diseases leaping from bats to humans? The answer is not in culling bats or trying to wipe them out, that would wrong on so many levels and it has been shown not to work. Instead, it is about modifying our behaviour and our buildings. We need to stop our continued destruction of untouched wilderness which brings us into contact with bats with new and frightening diseases in the first place. We also need to stop hunting and eating them for food. We need to make small changes to our farming methods to stop bats and farm animals coming into contact, and we need to educate people not to pick up sick or injured bats which they find on the ground. With these changes, we need not live in fear of bats, and instead we can live quite happily alongside them, and even share our homes with them.

So that’s it. while you might never suspect it to look at them, bats may carry within them the power to bring down humanity by infecting us with some terrifying new disease, but it is only our actions that will make it happen. This means that if there’s a zombie virus out there lurking in an unknown bat population in some as yet unexplored and unexploited rainforest, and it makes a leap into the human population, bringing the world as we know it to its knees, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

For more information on bats and human diseases, click 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.

Why Should You Try To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse?

Most zombie stories are about the fight for survival in a world filled with the undead, but suppose a zombie apocalypse were ever to happen, should you try to survive, or should you just give in and let the walking dead win? If you were to look at the situation logically, you’d see that you’d be vastly out-numbered by a terrifying, and, some might say, unbeatable foe, and you would know there’s no way you could win. If that were the case, you might as well give up there and then. After all, struggling to survive would only be delaying the inevitable, and possibly making it an awful lot more painful and frightening into the bargain.

However, that’s only what logic says, and, despite what you might think, we humans are far from logical creatures. Instead, we are hard-wired to keep ourselves alive for as long as possible, regardless of the odds we’re facing or the chances that we might not succeed. As long as we think there is even a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel, we’ll carry on, and it is this innate instinct that will push us on and keep us going, even on the darkest days of a zombie apocalypse.

I think this is a quality which we can all relate to, and I think this is one of the reasons that we find post-apocalyptic literature so appealing. We can empathise with the characters as they do all they can to keep themselves alive; and we can think about whether we’d have done the same, or whether we’d have done it differently when faced with the same situation.

Of course, there’s another innate instinct which most of us have, and this can cause a conflict with the drive to survive, no matter what. This is our natural inclination not to harm those we know and love. And, again, this conflict is part of the attraction of post-apocalyptic stories. We can be shocked when someone choses their own life over that of another, even when it means condemning them to certain death; or we can think someone stupid for risking their own life to save someone we might deem less worthy. We can also recognise when a character makes the ultimate sacrifice for the benefit of the group, and while we would wish that we would do the same if faced with the same situation, we shift uncomfortably in our seats, knowing that in reality, most of us would put our own survival first and this would stop us doing anything so heroic and altruistic.

This, then, lies at the heart of surviving in a zombie apocalypse. We would find ourselves pulled in different ways by our instincts, and our conscious mind would become frozen as it tries to decide between the two. However, in end, for almost all of us, the desire to survive would win, and we would do whatever it takes, no matter who we’d end up hurting. Of course afterwards, we would do our best to justify our actions to ourselves, and claim that it was the only thing we could do, but deep down, we’d always know we could have done more, if only we hadn’t put ourselves first.

Or am I being too pessimistic about true nature of the human spirit?

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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.

And The Winners Are …

Thanks for all of you who entered the competition I posted a couple of weeks ago to win signed copies of For Those In Peril On The Sea and Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales Of The Undead.

I’m pleased to announce the following winners (who should have received an email confirming this by now). They are:

1. mtnfeath

2. Lance Mohesky

3. Jonas Waldenström

So congratulations to those three winners. For those who didn’t win, I’ll be running another competition in a few months.

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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.

Draft Cover Design For ‘The Outbreak’

Draft Front Cover Design

With the writing of the second book in the For Those In Peril series going well, I’ve been turning some of my attention to other aspects of the finished volume. I’ve changed the title (it was originally On The Edge Of The World, but it’s now The Outbreak – which is much snappier), and I’ve put together a draft cover design, which I’m quite pleased with.

In keeping with the cover of the first book (For Those In Peril on The Sea), this is a composite image I’ve put together. The main background is a rather wonderfully post-apocalyptic sky I encountered a few years ago (the picture was taken out my living room window!), while in front of this are silhouettes of a number of most distinctive buildings and structures in Glasgow (where the story starts).

If you have any thoughts, or comments, on this cover design (or, indeed, the title or the draft of the blurb for the back of the book), I would be happy to hear them.

Draft Back Cover Design

Here’s the draft of the blurb for 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.

Finally, here’s the full wrap-around view of the draft cover design:

Draft Full Wrap-around Cover design

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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.

Vertical Farming: Could This Help You Survive A Zombie Apocalypse?

In any zombie apocalypse survival situation, one of the biggest issues you will face is getting enough food. Indeed, if you can survive the initial outbreak and find yourself somewhere safe to hole up, it’s the need to find food which will most likely cause you the biggest problems. This is because you’re most likely to encounter the undead when you’re out and about looking for supplies. So what’s the answer? Well, you could try to build up a big enough stockpile that you rarely have to go outside, but this is always going to prove difficult and in may ways it’s only delaying the inevitable.

An alternative is to try to grow your own food. In principle, this is a great idea, but in practice, at least using traditional techniques, it will prove difficult to implement. This is because you will not only need to find a suitable place to grow your crops, you will also need to be able to protect it, and enclosing a sufficiently large area of land with zombie-proof defences to grow enough food to keep you alive will be a mammoth task.

This is where vertical farming comes in. What, I hear you ask, is vertical farming? Well, it’s where you grow crops not in large flat fields out in the countryside, but instead grow them in buildings, often in the middle of cities. With the right set up, you could simply wall yourself into a skyscraper or other large building, and never have to venture outside again.

So how do you set up a vertical farm? Well, there’s many different ways, but the one which would be of most use in a zombie apocalypse would be some kind of hydroponic system combined with a passive system for ducting light into all the dark little corners. The water within the system can be recycled, making it highly efficient, and, while you might not like the sound of it, human waste can be used as your fertiliser. Done right, and if you choose the right crops, you can have a continuous supply of fresh food. And of course, if you fancy a bit off meat too, it would be easy enough to add chickens, fish, and possibly even the occasional cow into your set up, feeding these animals on the left-overs of whatever you grow.

Of course, this is all idle speculation, but there is a serious side to this too. With each passing year, more and more of us are flocking to live in cities, and getting enough food into these cities to feed everyone is a becoming an ever more difficult task which soaks up more and more of our rapidly diminishing resources just to transport the food from where it’s grown to where it’s eaten. Vertical farming promises to revolutionise this outmoded food supply chain. With vertical farming, food can be grown right where it’s needed, with no need to waste resources on transporting it half way across the planet. In fact, within many cities, there’s more than enough space to grow vast amounts of crops simply by giving over the upper floors of each skyscraper over to vertical farming.

This, therefore, is the future, and while it might seem unnatural first, it is potentially a lot more environmentally friendly than traditional farming. The food miles vanish, the need for expensive fertilisers is eliminated, and, since it’s all done inside under carefully-controlled conditions, there’s no need for pesticides or any other chemicals. It may take a little time for us to shift our perception of what a farm actually is, but in the end, we’ll need to accept it as a suitable, and environmentally sound, way forward. And of course, if there was ever a zombie apocalypse, having a few ready-made vertical farms at your disposal might prove advantageous to your long-term survival!

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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 Working With An Editor Can Improve Your Writing

Writers write. This is hardly Earth-shattering news, but it can led to challenges. In particular, as a writer, you will often be too close to a piece you are working on to be able to look at it in an objective manner. Yet, this is important if you are to be able to refine your early drafts into the final polished article. This is where an editor comes in. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a trained professional, it can be fellow writer, or a friend you trust to give an honest opinion. Their job is simply to give that objective opinion which you cannot give yourself.

However, working with an editor can be difficult, especially for the uninitiated. This is because you need to give up some of the control you have over you piece, and this is something most writers will fight against. After all, you’ll have poured your heart and soul into your work, and you will often feel as protective of it as if it were your own child. While this is understandable, this is something you need to get over if you’re going to succeed as a writer. This is because, in almost all cases, the editor, with their more objective frame of mind, will be right. If they say that a character has to go, them it’s almost certain they will have to go. If they say a scene isn’t working, or isn’t needed, the chances are they’re right. If they say the dialogue isn’t working or the plot is flawed, then this is what others are likely to think too. In short, while the editor’s job is to give an objective opinion, yours as the writer, is to listen to them.

There will be many times you will want to disagree with them, often vehemently (and occasionally even violently!), but you should bite your tongue. Pick your battles and only go into bat for the one or two suggestions you really feel you cannot live with. Even then, you’ll still have to work out why a specific scene isn’t working and then try to fix it; yet in the end, you’ll often find yourself coming round to the same opinion as the editor.

So, when should you use an editor? There’s probably three stages of any project where having input from an editor is most useful. The first is right after you’ve finished your first draft. Here, they can give you their thoughts on the broad outline: Does the plot work? What about the characters? Is the story arc complete and consistent with itself? The second is after you’ve fixed all the major problems with the first draft (and there will always be major problems with the first draft!). Here, they will concentrate more on the language your using, check that the dialogue is working, look at how the characters grow and develop throughout the story, make sure than you don’t use the same words and descriptions too frequently, and so on. As writers, it’s easy to slip into fixed patterns and continually pluck the same words or phrases out of the air, yet such repetition makes your text rather boring and flat. While you can go through and weed these out yourself, an editor will do it quicker and better.

The final point at which the input from an editor is extremely useful is right at the end, just before you publish or submit your manuscript. Here, they will concentrate on the nitty-gritty, ensuring that the grammar is correct and that all the commas are where they should be, that the spelling is right and that all the words are in the right tense.

While you might be able to write a complete novel without using an editor, it is almost certain that you will have a better final product if you work with an editor. In addition, you’ll often find that it’s quicker and easier to finish your book with an editor’s help. This is because they can often spot how to solve problems which you know are there, but that you can’t quite work out how to deal with on your own.

I suspect that some writers, especially those just starting out, feel that working with an editor is somehow cheating, since it can sometimes feel that a project is no longer all your own work. However, all writers need editors, and even the most famous authors need this type of external input in order to complete their work. They, too, will often find themselves arguing with their editors over decisions, and just like the rest of us, they’ll eventually realise that their editor is right and they are wrong.

So, working with an editor is a good thing, and it can only improve your writing, but one question remains: where do you find an editor to work with in the first place? This is a tricky question to answer. If you’re lucky, you will have friends or fellow writers you can turn to, especially for the first or second read-throughs (this is what I do, and I only use a professional editor for the final read through). If not, it can be a bit hit and miss. This is because there are many free-lance editors out there, and it can be difficult to find one you are happy to work with.

There are professional associations which you can use to help you find a reputable editor, and you can always ask for examples of pieces an editor has worked on before you take them on. Employing a free-lance editor will not necessarily be cheap, but it can make the difference between your novel popping and fizzing with action, or just coming across a little flat. This is particularly true for the final read through, where varying the punctuation marks can make all the difference to how the story comes across, and let’s face it, does anyone beyond a professional editor really know all the rules for the correct use of some of the more exotic punctuation marks that are out there?

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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.

Of Haikus And Zombies…

For those of you interested in the more quirky side of zombie fiction, there’s a new book just out called Haiku Of The Dead. As the title suggests, this slim volume (it’s 48 pages in length) contains zombie-based poems which follow the traditional Japanese Haiku format. This means each one is just 17 syllables in length set out in a 5, 7, 5 structure. I only received my contributor’s copy today (which I got because I wrote one of the haikus included in it), so I haven’t had a chance to do more than flick through it, but it looks like it would make an interesting, and different, addition to the book shelf of any zombie fan.

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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.