Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 15

The Need To Know – A Short Story Set In A Post-apocalyptic World

It’s taken me almost ten years to reach this point, but soon I’ll have the answer to the question which has been eating away at me ever since the farm house was over-run. That was the last time I’d seen him, and I needed to know whether he, like me, was somehow still alive, even after all this time. I crave for certainty; I yearn for the knowledge of what happened to him; I need to know one way or the other. I know this is something few people ever get now the world has changed, but I know something they don’t. I know that if he’s still alive, he’ll be here on this beach today at sunset, just as he promised he would if we ever got split up. If I find him waiting for me there, we’ll finally be re-united, if only for a brief moment before it’s all over; and if I don’t, I’ll know for sure he’s dead. Then, at last, I can die knowing he too is gone. Well, I won’t actually die, but I’ll stop being me, and that will mean I’m as good as dead.

***

We met at university, where he was doing an engineering degree, and I was studying English literature. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. We were united by a common sense of humour, indie music, and a liking for original series Star Trek. I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight, but it was close enough to make no difference, and for the next eight years we spent barely more than the occasional day apart. Even when the outbreak started, our first instinct wasn’t to flee, but rather to find each other.

I think this is what made it so difficult when we finally got separated. We were holed up in a remote farm house which overlooked Loch Ness, trying to work out what we should do next. We figured it was safe enough there for the time being, but we still had to be constantly on our guard because even there the occasional infected turned up. Then, one evening, we were over-run. It happened almost without warning, and there was no time for me to find John before I had to turn and flee into the night. All I could do was hope that he had made it out too, and that we’d find each other again.

Those first few days apart were gut-wrenchingly difficult, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, or perhaps worse, but there was little time to dwell on it. Instead, I spent my time running from the infected which seemed to dog my every step. The only thing which kept me going was the knowledge that I had a way to find out what had happened to him. Well, perhaps not exactly what had happened, but at least whether he was still alive or not. You see, we’d made plans for what we would do if we ever became separated. Rather than wandering around aimlessly searching for each other, we were both to head for a certain beach on the west coast. It was remote, but this meant there would be little chance of there being large numbers of infected there so it would be relatively safe. Yet, try as I might, I couldn’t get far enough ahead of the infected that were pursuing me to be able to start making my way west. Instead, I was forced further and further north, and with each passing day, I found myself wondering if John was already there, waiting for me, and the thought started to gnaw at me. I longed to go there, to find out once and for all, but the infected just wouldn’t let me.

Eventually, I found a place of safety where I could get time to think. It was right up at the northern tip of Scotland and was the last toe-hold of the remnants of the army units which had been sent in to try to contain the outbreak when it had first started. Even from the start, it had been obvious to these men and women that the disease wasn’t something they could hold back, but they fought it none-the-less. Now, as the infected started to mass around their defences, the last few hundred of them were preparing to evacuate in the hope of finding somewhere safer. They knew Britain was lost and they knew their only hope of survival was to get out. I, however, wanted to stay; I needed to stay; I needed to find out whether John was still alive and waiting for me on that remote beach, but again the infected gave me no choice and the only way I could keep myself alive was to leave with the soldiers in the last of the helicopters.

We made the short hop to Norway, but found things were little better there so we pressed on eastward into Russia. We went first to Murmansk, then Omsk, then just north into the Siberian wilderness until we ran out of fuel. Yet, still the infected found us, and we had to keep moving. All the time, I was wondering whether John was waiting for me or not. It wasn’t the fact that I might have lost him forever which was eating away at me, but rather the fact that I didn’t know for certain and yet there was a way for me to find out.

Eventually, I realised this uncertainty would drive me mad if I didn’t do something about it, and that was when I set off. I felt my body change almost immediately. Instead of running from the infected, I was running towards something; it gave me strength and my life purpose. I knew the chances of me making it all the way back were minimal, and that even if I did, I might not find him there, but I would know what that would mean, and I’d finally be able to move on.

That was when I realised our plan was both my saving grace and an albatross around my neck. You see, we’d arranged that if we didn’t make it there immediately after we’d become separated, then he’d be on that beach at sunset on the longest day of the year, every year, without fail, as long as he was still alive. This meant I was continually left wondering whether he might be there waiting for me on that day of each year which past. Yet, even though it tormented me almost constantly, it also gave me hope, and more importantly, it gave me something to live for. That kept me going, even on the darkest days, and there were so many of them in the world of the infected that I quickly lost count.

***

I can feel myself flagging as I drag my feet through the sand. It’s only a couple of hundred more yards, but it’s taking every ounce of what little strength I have left to keep going. Under the sleeve of my jacket, I can feel the bite I got this morning burning as if it’s on fire. It might just be my imagination, but I swear I can feel the virus rushing through my veins, infecting every part of my body, starting to take it over. Yet, my body’s fighting back, trying to halt the unstoppable tide or at least slow the inevitable down long enough for me to find out if he’s there or not, to get the closure I so desperately yearn for.

I curse myself again for being so stupid. After all these years and all the miles I’d travelled, I’d let my guard down. I hadn’t seen an infected in days and I figured that there probably wasn’t any around here, not somewhere so remote and not after all this time. There had been a small wooden shack just above the southern end of the beach which looked so decayed that the next gust of wind might send it crashing to the ground. Its door swung gently on hinges that were threatening to break free at any moment. Still, I wondered if it might give me some shelter while I waited for sunset. I should have been more cautious, but I was so tired and so near the end, and just I wasn’t thinking straight.

I’d barely touched the door before the infected shot out of the darkness within. It was so emaciated that I couldn’t tell if it had once been a man or a woman, and while the anger still burned in its eyes, its body was weak and wasted. That didn’t stop it from knocking me to the ground and biting the arm which I instinctively threw up to protect my face. If I’d still been wearing the old motorcycle jacket I’d picked up in somewhere during my travels, it wouldn’t have mattered because its teeth couldn’t have punctured the thick leather, but I’d taken it off a few hours before so I could feel the warmth of the mid-summer sun on my skin. I can’t believe I was so stupid.

I managed to struggle free and crush the side of its skull with the heavy club I used as a walking stick. Once it stopped moving, I stood there staring at it, trying to work out whether it could have once been John. Its features were sunken, and its skin sallow, making it hard to tell. Given the shape it was in I doubted it would have survived much longer even if I hadn’t killed it. I wondered how it had survived so long all the way out here with no one to feed on. Maybe the rumours were true and the infected would eat other animals if they really had to to stay alive, or maybe this one had only turned quite recently. That got me back to wondering whether it had once been John. Using the toe of my boot, I turned it onto its back and was relieved to see it lacked the distinctive Pictish Beast tattoo John had had done when he was drunk at music festival the summer before he started university. Yet, there was a hint of sadness too.

I understood why I felt relieved it wasn’t him, but the sadness was harder to explain. Maybe it was because part of me wanted it to be him so that I’d finally know what had happened to him; maybe it was because I knew I didn’t have much time left and I feared that I was never going to find out before I turned. I looked down at the bite on arm. It wasn’t deep, but it had broken the skin and there was a trickle of blood running towards my hand. Even though I knew it was pointless, I raced down to the sea and scrubbed the wound with the salty water. It stung like crazy, but it did little more than distract me from what would be happening inside me. I’d seen numerous people turn over the years and it was never the same twice. Some changed pretty much instantly, almost as if just the knowledge they’d been bitten was enough to make them start acting like the infected; others took hours, as if their bodies were somehow able to slow the infection down. Not knowing how long I would have, I pulled on my jacket and set off along the beach, yet almost immediately I could feel the virus starting to act.

***

The sun’s starting to go down, and I’m almost at the far end of the beach. I can barely keep moving, but I know I must go on. I must find out if he’s alive or not before I turn. I hear a shout and look up. For a moment, I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing, but then I realise it really is him. He’s thinner and weather-beaten, but it’s definitely him. I feel a smile spread across my face and I try to run to him, but I don’t have the energy left in my legs and I fall forward onto the sand. I lie there for a moment, scared to look up again in case it turns out that I’d only imagined seeing him there; then I feel a shadow fall across me, and I turn my head to see him standing over me, holding out his hand. My heart leaps. I take his outstretched hand and pull myself to my feet. For a moment, we just stare at each other, then he throws his arms around me and I do the same to him. We hug for what seems like forever. As we do, I feel his shoulders heaving up and down, and I realise he’s crying. This sets me off too and we just stand there holding each other, the tears streaming down our faces.

After a while, we stop hugging quite so tightly and slip down onto the sand. We still hold each other as I tell him all that has happened to me since the farm house was over-run all those years before. I tell him about how I knew that if he were alive, he’d be here waiting for me, and how this had kept me going all these years. He, in his turn, tells me about the island where he’s been living, about the cottage he’s built, about how he never gave up hope that one day we might find each other again. He sounds so happy and I want that happiness to last forever, but I know it can’t. I know I need to tell him about the bite, about the infection which I can feel taking over my body. I start crying again, this time not from joy but from sadness and pain. He stops speaking and he stares down at me with a confused look on his face, and I know I need to explain.

I wipe my face, ‘I can’t go with you …’ I can’t bring myself to say the next words I need to say and my voice simply fades out.

‘Don’t be stupid.’ He strokes my hair like he always used to. ‘Of course you can. You’ve made it all this way. Finally, we’re back together again. It’s completely safe, I promise you. I haven’t seen an infected on the island in the whole time I’ve been there. It’s got to be one of the safest places in the world …’

I caress the side of his face and I notice my hand is shaking. He must have noticed it too because he stops speaking again.

‘No. I can’t.’ My voice sounds odd, almost distant and he pulls away from me.

‘Why?’

‘Because of this.‘ I pull back the sleeve of my jacket, revealing the ragged red wound. The teeth marks clearly visible against my pale skin. I can seen from the look of horror on his face that he knows what it means. For a moment I think he might run away, but instead he holds me tight, ‘When did that happen?’

‘This morning. I was surprised by one of them. I got it, but not before it got me.’

He says nothing, but I can see the heartbreak in his eyes. I know it will only hurt him further, but I need to ask him something. ‘John, I want you to do something for me …’

Again, I can’t seem to get the words out, but he seems to know what it is even before I ask. He kisses me and whispers in my ear, ‘Yes. When it’s time, I’ll do it. I promise. But it’s not time yet, is it?’

‘No, but it will be soon. I can feel the virus burning through my body. I’ve been fighting it all day just so I could get here. Just so I’d know for sure if you were still alive or not before I went.’ I pause for a moment, leaning my head on his shoulder and staring out to where the last of the sun is just dipping below the horizon. I know I don’t have long left, maybe just seconds, yet for the first time in years I’m free of that gnawing thought which kept driving me onwards: I know what happened to the only man I ever truly loved. I’m just happy that he’s alive, and that he seems to have found a way of not just surviving, but living in the world of the infected. His island home sounds idyllic and I wish I could live there with him, but I can’t. A wave of sadness washes over me and I start to cry again. I fight back the tears, ‘I’m glad I finally found you again, that I’ll get to say goodbye to you this time, that I got to hold you one last time, that …’

I feel my head slip from his shoulder, and even though I know I’m falling, I can’t seem to do anything about it. I lie there, feeling the warm sand against my face, my eyes taking in the yellows and reds of the sunset. It starts to fade as the virus finally wins, yet the last thought which runs through my head is that I can die happy because I finally got to find out what happened to him. I just wish it didn’t have to end this way. I just wish it wasn’t John who was going to have to kill me before I turned into one of them.

***

Author’s Note: This is the second version of the story titled Rendezvous which I posted last week. Rendezvous tells the story of a couple who become separated during a zombie apocalypse. It focusses on John’s hope that he would find his girlfriend, Sam, again. In contrast, The Need To Know tells the same story from Sam’s point of view and focusses not on hope, but on another primeval human desire – the need for closure, to know what happened to those you love after the world falls apart. Between them, these two stories explore how events like natural disasters and war not only kill people, but tear them apart, and this can cause psychological scars which are as deep and painful as any physical ones.

A PDF of this story can be downloaded from 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.

Rendezvous – A Short Story Set In A Post-apocalyptic World

This is the tenth time I’ve sat on this beach and waited for her. The first time was only a month after we got split up, the last was exactly three hundred and sixty five days ago. The small wooden boat I used to get here is pulled up onto the sand, its motor tilted up and sticking out behind. While I haven’t seen any infected this time round, the boat’s presence is the only thing that makes me feel safe on the mainland. The beach here is almost a mile long and its about seventy feet between the water line and the dunes at the back; and if any infected appear I know I can get the boat back into the water and away from the shore before even the fastest of them can reach me. The chances of any of them turning up somewhere quite so remote is small, but it’s not zero, and I know from experience that I need to keep my wits about me whenever I’m here.

***

We’d been on opposite sides of the city when the outbreak started, but somehow we’d still managed to find each other and get out before the military started dropping their bombs in a vain attempt to stop the infection spreading to the rest of the country. Needless to say, it didn’t work; if anything it made things worse. We spent the first couple of weeks almost constantly running from one hiding place to another before we found ourselves at a remote farm house set into the hills above Loch Ness. We weren’t the only ones to find our way there and gradually we grew into a loose community, each taking turns to do whatever needed to be done, including standing guard and taking out any infected which turned up.

At first they only did so in their ones and twos, and we could handle them, but gradually their numbers increased until one night we were over-run. Sam wasn’t in the same room as me when it happened, and in the scramble to get out alive I couldn’t find her before I finally had to flee into the night, hoping against hope that I didn’t run into any of the infected. As the darkness enveloped me, I heard screams echoing through the building, knowing it meant not everyone had got as lucky as I had. By then, it was too late to do anything other than keep on running and I just had to hope she’d also gotten out alive.

In the first few days after I lost her, the only thing that kept me going was the fact we’d made plans in case just such a thing were ever to happen. It was the first night after we’d reached the farm house, and we were discussing whether we would be safe there or not. I figured that while it would do for the time being, it was too near heavily populated areas, like Inverness, to be safe in the long term. That led us to start working out escape routes and plan what we’d do if it happened. This was when we realised we needed a rendezvous point in case we ever got split up.

Wracking my brains for somewhere suitable, I eventually settled on a beach on the west coast I’d known in my childhood. It could be reached by both land and sea, and was large enough and open enough that anyone waiting there couldn’t get ambushed by the infected, or, indeed, other survivors. It was also remote enough that it was likely there’d be few infected there, making it relatively safe. I told her that if we ever got separated, I’d do my best to find her, but if I didn’t, we’d meet on that beach. If she didn’t make it there in the first few months, and I had to move on, I’d be there every year at sunset on the summer solstice, waiting for her and never giving up hope.

When the sun rose the morning after the farmhouse was over-run, I tried to circle back, but there were infected everywhere and there was no way I could get close enough to see if she might be trapped inside. For the next few days, I traipsed back and forth across the hills, trying to find anyone else who might have made it out, but I found no one. After a week, I figured that even if she had gotten out alive, she’d be long gone and would probably be heading for the rendezvous point so I headed that way myself. I finally arrived after a week of dodging groups of infected, half expecting her to be there waiting for me, but I was disappointed to find she wasn’t. I set up a small camp nestled into the dunes, and waited, but she never came.

By autumn, I realised I couldn’t remain there forever, fighting off the infected which turned up every now and then, and I’d have to move on. That’s when I came up with my plan: out in the bay was an island which I knew was uninhabited and so would be free of infected. I also knew it could easily fulfil all the needs of one man as it had once been home to a small, but thriving community. The people had been cleared off during the Second World War so it could be used for testing biological weapons, giving it the local nickname of Anthrax Island, but now, some sixty years later, the island was almost completely uncontaminated and as long as I didn’t stray into the wrong areas it would be much safer there than being on the mainland where the infected now roamed. Setting up a base there would also allow me to stay close to the rendezvous point in case she ever turned up.

I scavenged around and eventually found a small wooden boat with an outboard engine anchored off a cluster of low stone houses. The community seemed deserted, and there was no one to object when I swam out to it and started the motor. I brought it back to shore and rummaged through the houses, finding a pistol and some bullets, as well as food and various tools which might come in handy. I loaded them into the boat and took off towards the island. I took a couple of days to carefully check it out, and once I’d decided it really was infected-free and would make a good home, I headed back to the beach. I set up a sign telling her where I’d gone and also telling her if she started a signal fire on the beach, I’d be able to see the smoke and would come and get her, but no matter how often I checked, I never saw anything to suggest she had arrived and was waiting for me.

The next year, on the longest day, I returned to the beach for the first time and waited, my heart filled with hope and trepidation. To keep myself occupied, I repainted the sign, but I should’ve known better. On hearing a noise, I looked up and saw an infected running towards me at full speed. I only just had enough time to pull out my pistol and shoot it before it reach me. Even then, it took three shots to bring it down and it was only a foot away from me when it finally stopped moving. Glancing round, I saw more infected off in the distance, racing towards me, and I figured they’d been attracted by the sound of the shots. I quickly scrambled into the boat and pushed it away from the shore before they got close enough to cause me problems. I waited until long after the sun went down before finally heading back to the safety of the island, weighed down by the sense of loneliness and loss – I felt as if I’d lost her all over again.

And so it was as each year passed. I’d return to the beach to wait for her on the longest day of the year, with hope in my heart that this would be the year she’d finally turn up, and each time I’d return alone, the scar left by her loss opened up once again and feeling as painful and raw as the night we’d first become separated.

***

Off in the distance, a movement catches my eye. I can’t work out what it is at first, even with the binoculars, but something’s coming this way through the gathering darkness. After a few minutes, I work out it’s definitely a figure, but I can’t yet tell whether it’s her or not. I can, however, tell by the way they’re walking that they’re not infected. The infected either race towards you or just shuffle around slowly. They certainly don’t trudge, and this figure is definitely trudging. A sense of joy starts to grow in my heart, but I do my best not to let it get too out of hand in case it’s not her. I think about running towards her, but I don’t want to get too far from the boat, just in case we need to make a sharp exit. I catch myself, already thinking of us as we again when I didn’t yet know if it was her or not. A minute after that and the figure’s close enough for me to see that it’s definitely a woman. She’s the right height; a bit thinner than she was when I last saw her, but then again so am I. I wave and shout. She looks up, as if seeing me for the first time, and I recognise her face. It’s aged a lifetime, but it’s definitely her. I can see she recognises me too, and a smile spreads across her face. She tries to run towards me but she stumbles and falls onto the sand. I go to her and help her up. We hug each other like we’re never going to let each other go. Suddenly, I realise I’m crying as the waves of loneliness which I’ve kept bottled up for so long finally crash over me, but now I’ll be alone no more.

We sit on the sand, holding each other, while she tells me what happened to her. She’d gotten out of the farm house, but the infected had forced her to keep on the move for the next few days. Eventually, she ended up at the northeast tip of Scotland where the last remnants of the troops which had tried to contain the outbreak had been making a final stand, but they were preparing to evacuate. She hadn’t intended to go with them but the infected finally over-ran the compound and she’d been forced into the last of the helicopters. Before she knew it, she was in Norway, and, shortly after, Murmansk, Omsk and finally somewhere so deep into the Siberian wilderness she didn’t even know its name. Even then there were infected there, and they’d had to be on the move almost constantly. All the time, the knowledge that I might be on a distant beach waiting for her had gnawed away at her, eating at her very soul, and finally she decided she needed to know one way or the other. Travelling through a land now ruled by infected was never quick, and without the help of modern transport options, it had taken her eight years just to get back to Britain, and a further two to travel north to the beach, driven on by the need to know whether I was somehow still alive.

I, in my turn, tell her about the island and how it’s safe there. I tell her about the cottage I’ve built out of the ruins of old buildings, about how we’d never have to set foot on the mainland again. I tell her that I’d never lost hope that we’d find each other again, and that each year I’d been here, just in case that was she year she finally turned up. I know I’m babbling, but I can’t help it; it’s been so long since I had someone else to speak to. I look down at her and realise she’s crying, but it’s not tears of joy; instead, they’re of pain and sadness.

She wipes her face, ‘I can’t go with you …’ Her voice fades out.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I stroke her hair like I always used to, ‘Of course you can. You’ve made it all this way. Finally, we’re back together again. It’s completely safe, I promise you. I haven’t seen an infected on the island in the whole time I’ve been there. It’s got to be one of the safest places in the world …’ She caresses the side of my face and I notice her hand is shaking, and it stops me in my tracks.

‘No. I can’t.’ There’s a steely certainty in her voice and I pull away from her.

‘Why?’

‘Because of this.‘ She pulls back the sleeve of her jacket, revealing a ragged red wound. The teeth marks clearly visible against her pale skin. I recognise it immediately and it’s as if my whole world has suddenly exploded. I hold her tight, ‘When did that happen?’

‘This morning. I was surprised by one of them. I got it, but not before it got me.’

I can’t believe it: after all this time I’d finally found her, only to lose her once more. I’m crying again, but this time with sorrow and not joy.

She looks up at me. ‘John, I want you to do something for me…’

I know what it is even before she asks. It was the only thing I could do for her now. I kiss her and whisper in her ear, ‘Yes. When it’s time, I’ll do it. I promise. But it’s not time yet, is it?’

‘No, but it will be soon. I can feel the virus burning through my body. I’ve been fighting it all day just so I could get here. Just so I’d know for sure if you were still alive or not before I went.’ She pauses for a moment, leaning her head on my shoulder and staring out to where the last of the sun is just dipping below the horizon. ‘I’m glad I finally found you again, that I’ll get to say goodbye to you this time, that I got to hold you one last time, that …’

I feel her head slip off my shoulder and she slumps onto the sand. The time has come for me to do what I promised only seconds before. I pull out my pistol and check the bullets. There’re two rounds left and I know what I need to do. She twitches as I put the pistol to her head and turn away, the tears streaming down my face; I realise that it’s the hope of finding her again, of being reunited with her, of holding her once more that’s been keeping me going all these years, but now it’s been taken away from me in the cruellest possible way. I realise I have nothing left to live for and that I no longer want to be part of a world where such things can happen. She stirs again, this time more vigorously, and I know she’s coming back as one of them. I pull the trigger, knowing once I’ve fulfilled my final promise to her, I’ll only have one bullet left, but that’s all I’ll need.

***

Author’s Note: This is one of a series of short stories I’ve written which are set in the same world as For Those In Peril On The Sea. Even amongst my usually rather dark writing in this world, this is probably one of the bleakest short stories I’ve written, but I think it explores an interesting point about life in a post-apocalyptic world: if there is no hope, would people be able to carry on? At some point, I’ll write another version of this story which tells it from Sam’s point of view, rather than John’s, which will focus not on hope, but on another primeval human desire – the need for closure, to know what happened to those you love after the world falls apart.

A PDF of this story can be downloaded from 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.

Living In The Now…

It’s only mid-November and I’m fed up of Christmas already. This is because, if I’m to believe all the adverts on the television, it’s already been happening for at least a month. I heard the first Christmas song being played in a shop on the 1st of this month, and Christmas decorations started to make their appearance not long after.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m a traditionalist and I like my Christmases to be in December, when the trees are bare and there’s a hint of snow in the air, rather than when the leaves have yet to even start their annual change into their autumnal wardrobe. Yet, this seems to be increasingly out of step with modern society, or at least the one the advertisers and businesses tell us we should be living in. Nothing can be kept as special any more and we’re continually bombarded with messages telling us we need to start concentrating on the next big, money-spinning calendar event even before we’ve finished enjoying the current one. We’re told we must start getting into Christmas mode even before Hallowe’en, Bonfire Night (if you’re British) and (if you live in North America) Thanksgiving have come, let alone gone.

The moment Christmas is over, they start telling us we need to be planning our summer holidays. Easter eggs start creeping into the shops while we still have our hangovers from New Year’s Eve (or Hogmanay as it’s known in these parts). Spring fashion lines appear on the first of February when we still haven’t seen the last of the snow. The barbecue displays come out at the vernal Equinox despite the fact it won’t be hot enough for one until at least the summer solstice. As soon as the kids start their summer beak, it seems that every business goes into full ‘back to school’ mode with adverts and sales. How can they possibly enjoy their time away from the classroom when they’re continually being reminded that soon they’ll be going back?

And if you question this continual push to be thinking about tomorrow rather than enjoying today, you’re called a kill joy, a misanthrope or, in the case of Christmas, a Scrooge. Yet this misses the point. It’s not that I don’t like any of the special events we have spread throughout the year, it’s the way that they are foisted on us long before we’re ready for them by people whose aim isn’t to make them more enjoyable, but to guilt us into spending more money on them than we can really afford. They know that if we see it often enough, they’ll eventually wear us down and we’ll eventually give in. They become richer, but we’re the ones who get ever-increasingly stressed out because we’re not fully prepared for Christmas by the end of November (not realising of course, that the sell-by date on those mince pies we just brought means they’ll go off before we’ve opened more than a few doors on the advent calendar – leaving us no choice but to bin them on the 24th and make a last-minute dash round all the shops to try to find some more).

It seems we’re not longer allowed to enjoy the now, and instead we must always be looking forward to what’s coming up next. Even the words have started to change their meanings. When a television voice-over announces what’s coming up after the program you’re currently watching, they refer to the following program as ‘coming up now’ when it’s still a good 15 or 30 minutes away from starting, while for them ‘next’ means the program after that. This bears no resemblance to what I understand these words to mean.

I think this is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to post-apocalyptic fiction and films. In a zombie-filled world, you never know what’s going to happen next, so all you can do is think about what’s happening now. Enjoy the little moments of rest and security when you can, eat whenever you find food, sleep when you get the chance. There’s no little niggling voice in your head, put there by advertisers, whispering that you can’t enjoy today because you haven’t yet finished planning for another one which is still almost a quarter of the year away. With all the flesh-munchers around, life might be difficult, but at least it will be current, and so it’ll be more meaningful. If only we were allowed to live like that in the real world, but I guess that doesn’t make those who run (or is that ruin?) it enough money?

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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 Movember And Zombie Apocalypses

It’s that time of year again when men everywhere start synchronously sprouting hair along their upper lips, all in a good cause, and it has reminded me of something which really annoys me when watching zombie apocalypse films. The same issue also arises in The Walking Dead. So what is it that gets on my goat, and what on Earth does it have to do with Movember?

Well, it’s facial hair. Somehow in amongst all the melee and confusion, men within these zombie apocalypse stories somehow manage to remain almost universally beard free. At best, they, like Rick in The Walking Dead, grow a bit of designer stubble, but nothing more. It seems they manage to have an unlimited supply of all the accoutrements required to keep male facial hair at bay: razors, shaving foam, electric trimmers and shapers, and so on. Even if they somehow managed to keep themselves well-stocked with all that’s required, there’s the issue of getting the warm water needed to use them. As a rather hirsute man myself, I can tell you that shaving with cold water is, at best, a painful experience and, at worst, a rather bloody affair.

I first learned this when I was twenty and spent a month on a yacht in the waters off Labrador on the east coast of Canada chasing humpback whales round icebergs. Don’t worry, the aim wasn’t to hurt them, but to photograph the unique pattern each individual has on the underside of its tail so we could tell who was who and to use a crossbow to collect a small skin sample from their backs for genetic analysis. The yacht we were on was very much a working boat and fuel was sufficiently limited that warm water was viewed as a luxury, so was fresh water. As a result, bathing and shaving were done using buckets of water plucked directly from the sea. Within days, I learned that shaving and ice-cold, salty water do not mix and it quickly disappeared from my daily routine. The result was a surprisingly full and rather fetching beard which has remained within me, in various guises, ever since.

From this experience, I can tell you that regular shaving will be one of the first casualties of a zombie apocalypse and any man of sufficient age will quickly start to develop facial hair. The exact extent will vary from person to person, with some being full and luxurious and others being little better than patches of peach fuzz, but you cannot escape the fact that facial hair will be a feature of almost any post-apocalyptic world.

If you wonder how long it would take for facial hair to start making an appearance, simply find the man nearest to you whose participating in Movember, and watch the whiskers appear as the month progresses. Now, I know some of you might not be aware of what Movember is, so to give you an idea, it’s a challenge where normally fresh-faced men (and a few very brave women) stop shaving their upper lip for the month of November.

This is done to raise awareness of men’s health and, in particular, male cancers. This is a cause I very much support, and I’d participate if it wasn’t for the rule which says you have to start the month clean-shaven. The last time I chose to shave my beard off was when, early in our relationship, my girlfriend urged me to get rid of it so she could see what I looked like underneath. The response from all around me was immediate and unanimous: grow it back as quickly as possible (the six year old daughter of my best friend pretty much burst into tears and told me she didn’t like what I’d done).

Anyway, the crux of the matter is this: when they stop shaving, men grow facial hair surprisingly quickly, and when men stop having easy access to hot water to shave, most will give up shaving pretty much immediately. So it’s a simple fact of male biology that zombie apocalypses will be populated by hairy-faced men and not clean-shaven ones, and this won’t simply be trendy designer stubble, but full on facial fuzz. Frustratingly few portrayals of zombie apocalypses reflect this, what some might consider, ugly little fact and it breaks the illusion that it could be real. It’s a small thing, and you could rightly accuse me of being pedantic, but gets to me every time I notice 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.

If Civilisation Collapsed Tomorrow, What Would You Miss The Most?

Imagine something were to happen, whether it’s the dead rising from their graves, an unforeseen epidemic or just plain old nuclear annihilation, and that by this time tomorrow you found civilisation had collapsed: what do you think you would miss the most? By this, I’m not meaning anything associated with the basic struggle for survival, such as food, water and a safe place to hide, or people you might have lost, but rather those little luxuries of civilisation which we take for granted each and every day.

Would it be the warmth of an electric blanket on a cold winter night? Or maybe it would be the ability to pull out an album and listen to the voice of a long-dead singer? How about a still-warm batch of freshly made chocolate brownies, or lying back on a sofa with slice of pizza and a cold beer while watching your favourite movie for the umpteenth time? Would you, like Tallahassee in Zombieland, dream of finding a stash of uncontaminated Twinkies? Or would it be that extra special cappuccino from your favourite coffee place which you treat yourself to whenever you’ve had a really bad day? Would you miss going to see a live band at your favourite venue? Or to a theatre to see a play? Or laughing yourself silly at a stand up comedian? Would the thing you’d miss the most be a long, lazy breakfasts in bed on a Sunday morning? Or Christmas dinner with your nearest and dearest? What about the luxury of a long soak in a hot bath? Or curling up in your favourite chair to watch the latest episode of the TV series you’re currently addicted to? Would it be driving too fast down winding country roads in your beloved sports car? Or would it be dropping into your local pub after work on Friday afternoons to catch up with your mates and have a couple of drinks to get the weekend started? How about intimate dinners in little neighbourhood restaurants? Or dancing all night in dimly-lit nightclubs to the latest tunes? Or would it simply be a large slice of chocolate cheese cake served on a clean white plate?

For me, I think it would be books. There’s a point in the movie 28 Days Later where Selena says to Jim ‘You were thinking that you’ll never hear another piece of original music, ever again. You’ll never read a book that hasn’t already been written or see a film that hasn’t already been shot.‘ It’s almost a throw away line, but whenever I hear it, it resonates with me. While I could survive without books, I couldn’t live without them. They are what I turn to when I can’t sleep, or when I need to escape from the real world for a while. Reading books helps me develop ideas and learn new things. They cheer me up when I’m feeling down, and some are so often revisited that they feel like old friends. Books are a simple pleasure in an increasingly complex world, and if everything went wrong tomorrow, they are the things I’d miss the most.

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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.

Eating Well While Escaping From Zombies, Or How To Cook A Hot Meal On A Car’s Engine…

When you’re running for your life, trying to escape those pesky marauding zombies that are somehow everywhere all of a sudden, you don’t really have time to stop and cook. Yet, having your belly full of nice warm food will be a great morale-booster, so what do you do? Well, if you are fleeing in a motor vehicle, the answer is quite simple: use all the heat from your engine which is otherwise going to waste to cook a nice tasty meal. Now, you might this is a stupid idea, but it’s actually something that working drivers have been doing for as long as engines have been around. There’s even a book on the subject by Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller with the great title of ‘Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine!‘.

Once you’ve mastered the art of cooking while on the move, the question then becomes where do you get the food? Well, luckily the road might just be able to provide that too, in the shape of road kill. Now, when you think of road kill you’re probably thinking of some smelly, rotting scrap of flesh that’s been there for weeks, but think about it for a moment or two: when it was first killed, it was lovely and fresh, and would have made good eating.

Unlike many things on this blog, I can actually speak with some authority on this. Around where I live in Scotland, each year thousands of pheasants are released into the wild to boost numbers for shooting, but since they’ve been raised in captivity, the poor buggers have little road sense. This means at certain times of the year, there’s plenty of plump, fresh birds lying at the side of the road, just asking to get picked up and eaten. And in my student days, when funds were tight, a fair few of these found their way into my oven. After all, when you’re a student free food is free food no matter where it comes from!

Of course, you need to know what you’re doing if you’re going to eat road kill, but luckily there’s a book to help you with that too, and it’s called ‘The Original Road Kill Cookbook‘ by Buck Peterson.

So, as you can see, just because you’re life’s suddenly been turned upside down by the arrival of the undead, there’s no excuse for giving up on eating properly and starting to live off Twinkies. And if you’re really brave, maybe you could even try it before the world comes to an end. After all, whenever you’re on the road, a nice hot meal is just a small bump and a warm engine away!

Obviously, I’m not suggesting you should run anything down on purpose, but accidents do happen, and if they do you might as well make the most of 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.

Active Reading – A Great Way To Develop You Writing Skills

Most of the time when we read, we do is passively. That is, we take in the words without really thinking about them too much. There’s nothing wrong with this, but there is another way to read called Active Reading, and if you want to develop your writing skills, it’s a great technique to use. So what is active reading. Well, it’s when you think and analyse what you read as you’re going along. This includes thinking about which words the author used and whether they could have used other words instead, thinking about the way the words are used, how the sentences are structured and how these contribute to the author’s own unique style of writing. By concentrating on these issues, you can pull apart what makes the difference between good writing and bad writing, and so learn what you should do, or avoid doing, in your own work.

It’s also good to think about how the plot is structured within a book, and how the author leads the reader through it. Is this done in an effective way where the reader realises what’s going to happen just as they get to a twist, or is it done in a way that leaves the reader having to flick back through the book to see what they’ve missed? Alternatively, are there too many signposts as to what’s going to happen, making the story too predictable, or is there so little information that you, the reader, is left struggling to understand what’s going on? Are there any bits of the way the plot is developed that you really like, or that you really hate, or that just leave you thinking meh? Again, thinking about these things when reading the writing of others will help you improve you own plot development skills.

You can also think about the characters and how they are introduced and described. Does this paint a picture in your head of exactly what they are like, or is too much left to the imagination? Are their personality traits consistent throughout the book, or do you suddenly find them doing something which is out of character with what has gone before? Do they change and develop as the story progresses, or do they just remain the same? Do you like them or hate them, and if so, are you meant to like them or hate them?

Then there’s the dialogue. Writing good dialogue is often something new authors struggle with, and I have to say it’s something I find difficult, but thinking about how other writers structure what their characters say can really help develop your own skills. Here, the key is to concentrate on how dialogue is presented and how it’s linked in with the actions of the characters. Does each character have a distinctive voice, or do they all kind of melt into one? Can you tell which character is speaking just from the dialogue or do you need other information? Are there times when you get confused as to which character is speaking, and if so, how could this has been avoided?

With active reading, you can get something useful out of any piece of writing, and in this respect it’s worth reading bad books as well as good ones. This is because learning what turns a reader off is as important as learning what they like. If you read a book and find yourself hurling it across the room in disgust because of the way it’s written, don’t curse the money you’ve wasted on it. Instead, treat it as a learning experience and work out exactly what you didn’t like about it, then promise yourself you’ll never fall into the same trap with you own writing.

Of course, when it comes to writing, not everyone likes the same thing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, in order to develop your own unique voice, you need to know what you like, and then work out how to write in that particular style. After all, first and foremost, you’re writing a book because you have a story which you want to tell, and at the end of the process you have to have a book which you are happy with. Active reading can help you identify just which elements you like in the literature you read, and why you like them. Only once you know this can you writing something which you can look back on and feel rightly proud of having written.




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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.

Six Uses For Duct Tape In A Zombie Apocalypse

Duct tape is widely recognised as one of the most important tools for making rough and ready repairs, and you find it in use everywhere, but is duct tape also something you should think about packing into your survival bag in case there’s a zombie apocalypse? In my opinion, it’s a resounding yes, and here’s six reasons why:

1. Makeshift Armour: Human teeth aren’t well-adapted for biting and tearing through flesh. This means that even fairly thin armour can offer you a lot of protection. In fact, using duct tape, you can make a pretty effective zombie proof armour out of something as simply as empty cardboard boxes. How? First, open up the cardboard boxes and lay them flat on the floor. Cut out a piece which you can wrap around your torso and then cut holes for your arms. Next, cut sections which will fit snuggly round your upper arms, your forearms, your upper legs and your lower legs. Now, use duct tape to tape these pieces in place around your body. This will already provide a lot of protection, but you can do better, Run strips of duct tape across the gaps between the different pieces, but remembering to leave enough space to allow yourself to move freely. Finally, wrap duct tape around the cardboard until it’s fully covered. This both water-proofs the cardboard and re-enforces it, making it almost impossible for human teeth to bite through (go on give it a go, see if you can bite through it!). Finally, make yourself a helmet in a similar manner (making sure you have a long flap at the back to protect your neck), and use duct tape to connect it to the torso. Again, make sure these are loose enough to allow you to turn your head. There you have it, a fully zombie-proof set of makeshift armour thanks to duct tape.

2. Taping Zombie’s Mouths Shut: Okay, this one is risky, but if you can neutralise a zombie’s nashers, then they can’t bite and infect you. A strip of duct tape strapped across its mouth, and wrapped around its head, and a zombie can’t hurt anyone. Great for when you need a zombie to study so you can learn more about their habits, or as a last line of defence – but not really recommended under most circumstances!

3. Improvised Tripwires: Imagine this, you get caught out in the open and you need to set up camp for the night. How will you be able to tell if any zombies are coming? Easy. Find a wooded area and set up your tent. Next, walk 30 metres out into the wood and tape out a circle around your camp by wrapping the duct tape around the tree trunks at about knee height. Repeat this again at about chest height. Duct tape is tough enough that most zombies won’t be able to break through it either quickly or quietly, and you’ll be alerted to any that blunder into it in the night. This will give you plenty of time to get away.

4. General Repairs (To Your Equipment And Yourself!): In a zombie apocalypse, speed is of the essence, and duct tape can be used to repair anything from your shoes to your backpack, or even a flat tire, in seconds. I suspect you could also use it as a quick way to stop blood loss from cuts and injuries which might otherwise result in death and buy you enough time to get somewhere safe where you can deal with it properly. Duct tape is also the perfect thing for making rudimentary splints to help fix broken bones. Just get a couple of pieces of wood and fixe them in place on either side of the afflicted limb with your trusty roll of duct tape.

5. Restraints: While it may seem unpalatable, there will be times in a zombie apocalypse when you need to restrain someone. This might be someone who’s been bitten or it might be someone who’s causing trouble. Either way, duct tape is the perfect thing to securing them quickly either on their own or by securing them to an object such as a bed. Do it well enough and they won’t be getting free any time soon.

6. Re-Enforcing The Windows Of Your Vehicle: At some point you’ll almost certainly have to move from one location to another, whether it’s because you’ve been over-run, or whether it’s because you need to find food or supplies, and when you’re on the move, you’re always at risk from those pesky biters. Moving around in a vehicle will reduce that risk, but all vehicles have a weak point and that’s their windows. Duct tape is the perfect thing for reinforcing them. Simply stick strips across the windows to form a grid and you’ll find the window is much less likely to break, and even if it does, the tape will hold the shards in place, stopping the zombies reaching in.

So there you have it, six reasons why I’d make sure I always had some duct tape in my post-apocalyptic survival bag, and I’m not the only one who sees how useful it could be. Joerg Sprave (he of the toilet brush gun which featured in a post last week) thinks so too, and he’s posted a nice little video titled How To Weaponise Duct Tape on his You Tube channel. Watch and learn.

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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.

A Helpful Pie Chart Showing How People Might React To A Zombie Apocalypse

Just a bit of fun – and because the scientist in me I likes making charts and graphs…

A pie chart showing how people might react to a zombie apocalypse. The larger the coloured slice, the greater the proportion of people who might react that way.

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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 End A Zombie Apocalypse Story

As is the case every now and then, the inspiration for this post has come from search terms which people have used to find their way to this blog. In addition, one of my most popular posts is my article on How To Write A Zombie Apocalypse Novel. Taken together, these two things suggest there are quite a few people out there who are both interested in writing zombie stories, but who are stuck when it comes to working out how to end it. This perhaps isn’t too surprising because ending a zombie story in an effective way can be difficult.

However, when you think about it, there’s five basic categories of endings for zombie apocalypse novels. These are:

1. Fade To Black: A ‘fade to black’ ending is where either all the characters or, in the case of a first person narrative, the narrator of the story dies, usually at the hands of a zombie horde. While this type of ending can be effective, there’s two potential problems. Firstly, it’s very bleak and most readers want there to be at least some glimmer of hope when they reach the end (this is something the editor I work with from time to time is always saying to me). Secondly, it’s a very final ending and doesn’t really leave any room for a sequel. This is not necessarily a problem, but rather it makes it much more difficult for you, as the writer, to revisit the world you’ve invented, and you may find at some point you might want to do this (this something I find quite common amongst zombie authors). This is pretty difficult to do if you killed everyone off the first time round. However, I’ve found the ‘fade to black’ scenario can be very effective as the ending to one-off short stories. If you do decide to use a ‘fade to black’ ending, you need to be careful how you do it. In particular, you can’t simply have the character(s) die completely out of the blue on the last page. Instead, you need to build up to it slowly so that the reader is aware that this is how the book might end and can prepare themselves for it. If you do it suddenly, and with no advanced warning, your readers will most likely feel cheated because it wasn’t the ending they anticipated.

2. Victory: A victory ending is where all the zombies have been killed or have disappeared leaving the remaining survivors to start putting the world back together. This is not a common ending for zombie stories (although World War Z uses it very effectively) , and I suspect this is because most zombie book readers are looking for something more dystopian meaning that victory over the zombies just won’t cut it. In addition, most zombie stories focus on a small group of survivors, and there just isn’t any way for such a group to actually defeat the millions of zombies which are required to infest the world of any zombie apocalypse novel. This raises another issue with a victory ending, it need to be plausible within the zombie world you’ve created. This means you can’t suddenly find a cure or have all the zombies disappear without having developed this as a plot line.

3. Co-existence: The main focus of a zombie apocalypse novel is often the struggle to survive, especially in those which focus on the initial outbreak and its immediate aftermath. Stories with such a focus often finish with a co-existence ending. That is, an ending where those who have been fighting for their very lives throughout the story find some way to be able to live in a world filled with zombies. This often involves finding some sort place where the survivors can safely hole up either temporarily or for the long-term. This can range from a place which is still zombie free (like an uninhabited island or a remote mountain valley which is inaccessible to the undead) to a community which has somehow managed to keep the zombies at bay. Co-existence endings have the advantage that it makes it easy to revisit the characters at a later date if you so wish. However, as with other types of endings, you need to develop the storyline throughout your story and you cannot simply have your characters finding a way to co-exist with the zombies in the last couple of pages. In addition, the co-existence ending has to be consistent with the rules for your particular zombie apocalypse, otherwise you will leave your reader feeling cheated of the ending they were expecting.

4. Departure: A departure ending can be view as the opposite of a co-existence ending. Rather than ending with the survivors finding a safe place, a departure ending involves some or all the characters having to leave a place which they had previously felt safe and which they viewed as their new home. This departure is often initiated by one of three things: The safe place being over-run by a swarm of zombies; the safe place being over-run by raiders; the development of a rift between the survivors which means some of the group (often those who have been the main focus of the story) have to leave. Again, departure endings allow you to return to the characters and the world again if you so wish. However, as with co-existence, this ending has to be consistent with the rules for the world which you have created for your book.

5. Cliff Hanger: A cliff hanger ending is never a good way to end a zombie novel. Your reader expects resolution and you need to give it to them or they will be annoyed. This doesn’t mean you need to resolve everything, as you might want to leave some things open as the starting point of a sequel, but at the end of a story, you have to give your readers some sort of closure. While they may not to be to everyone’s taste, one of the best examples of this J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. While there’s a common thread and storyline across all seven of these books, each one has a well-defined ending where individual storylines from each book are wrapped up and concluded. In this way, the end of each individual book is closer to a departure ending rather than true cliff-hangers.

As you read through these categories of endings, you’ll have probably noticed two commonalities across them. Firstly, your ending cannot come out of the blue. You may think it’s edgy and different to have your main character died suddenly and unexpectedly in the final paragraph, but it’s not. Instead, it violates the expectations you have built will your readers and they will left feeling cheated and unfulfilled. Secondly, the endings have to be consistent with the rules for your world which the reader have inferred from what has come before. For example, you cannot have your characters find a zombie free island where they can live safely and happily if you haven’t introduced this as a possibility earlier in the book. Similarly, you cannot end a story with someone finding out they’re immune to the zombie virus unless you’ve already made it clear that such immunity is possible.

So how do you avoid falling into these potential pitfalls? Well, quite simply it’s careful planning and plot development. You need to introduce all the building blocks for your ending well before the actual end. This allows your reader to have that ‘Ah-ha!’ moment when they get to the end rather than ‘Huh?’, ‘Oh…’ or worst of all ‘Wait, that doesn’t make sense!’. In addition, it allows the reader to anticipate what is coming and this will help build suspense as they try to work out exactly how the characters will get to the ending they think is coming.

You can add unexpected twists and turns (such as exactly who lives and who dies) and you have to be careful not to sign-post things too much, but you cannot veer too far away from what you have led your readers to believe might happen. It’s a difficult balancing act, but it’s one which is worth spending time on because if you get the ending right, your readers will love it, but if you get your ending wrong, no matter how well they’ve liked the rest of the book and how well you’ve written it, your readers will turn against you in a heart beat, and this is something no writer wants to happen.




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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.