Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 17

What Would You Do If … Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse: No. 28 – The Rope Bridge Dilemma

You’re running through the trees, trying your best to stay on your feet while dodging the low-hanging branches. Around you are a crowd of people who are all running too and for the same reason: there’s a horde of zombies chasing you. Ahead, you see the trees thin out and you know you’re almost at the ravine at the edge of town. You speed up, making it to the bridge before anyone else; its old, and is little more that a series of wooden slats held up by ropes strung to posts hammered into the ground at either end. You feel the bridge shudder beneath your feet as you race across it. Once you reach the other side, you turn, machete in hand and consider your options. If you cut through the ropes, there will be no way for the zombies to get across and you’ll finally be safe, yet there are still others streaming across the bridge. You glance at the ropes, not knowing how much time it will take to cut through them. If you start trying to cut them too soon, you’ll be sending many other survivors plunging needlessly to their deaths in the river far below. If you start cutting the ropes too late, the zombies will have time to make it across before you can finish severing them and then you’ll be doomed. What do you do?

Take Our Poll

As always, this dilemma is just here to make you think, so there’s no right or wrong answer. Vote in the poll to let others know what you do if you were in this situation, and if you want to give a more detailed answer, leave a comment on this posting.

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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.

Eight Quirks Of The English Language

English is an odd language and I can understand why those trying to learn it sometimes struggle. Despite being a writer, there are still bits I can’t quite get my head around. Here’s eight of my favourites.

1. Why do you frequently hear of people being overwhelmed or underwhelmed by events, but you never hear of them being whelmed? It’s a real word, but I’ve never heard any one use it.

2. Lead (the thing that you use to take your dog for a walk) and lead (the 82nd element on the periodic table are spelt in the same way, yet if you read a scene in a book where a man says ‘Go get your lead!’ to his dog, you know instantly which one its meant to be. I guess, for some words, context is everything.

3. I feel disgruntled every now and then. Does that mean I spend the rest of my time being gruntled? Am I also consolate and combobulated much of the time? If not, how could I ever be disconsolate and discombobulated?

4. If articulate and inarticulate mean the opposite of each other, how come inflammable and flammable mean the same thing?

5. If you follow the examples found in other words, the word Ghoti can be pronounced Fish (think of how you prononce the ‘GH’ in Laugh, the ‘O’ in women and the ‘TI’ in station).

6. My spell-checker keeps suggesting that undead should be changed to unread. Does that mean Microsoft don’t believe in zombies or are they just being rude about people who don’t read much? I know this isn’t technically a quirk of the English language but it always makes me think!

7. If you silently mouth the phrase ‘Elephant Dew’ (as in the small droplets of water you’ll find on elephant first thing in the morning), most people will think you’re saying ‘I Love you’! Try it – although probably best wait until you get home or you might get yourself into trouble if you try it on your colleagues at work … or on random strangers on the bus!.

8. You can unedrsatnd a senetnce eevn if the lteters are jumlbed up in smoe of the wrods. All that matetrs is whehter the fisrt and last letetrs are in the rihgt palce. This dosen’t maen you don’t hvae to wrory abuot proof raednig yuor wrok beofre you pulibsh it thoguh!




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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 Does Creative And Scientific Writing Compare?

In the last few of weeks, I’ve been spending much of my time working on the scientific writing which is the mainstay of my day job and little time doing any of the creative writing which I post here (hence the lack of any new short stories or flash fiction recently – although that will hopefully change once these current projects are finally out of the way). The writing I’m working on is a mix of technical manuals for post-grad students and scientific papers, and you might think that this type of writing is very different from creative writing. That’s certainly true at first glance, but if you look below the surface, you’ll see that a scientific paper and a short story have very similar underlying structures and rules.

In fact, believe it or not, just like any good story, scientific papers have plots with a beginning, a middle and an end, characters that need to be introduced and described, and the best will even have a twist at the end. Indeed, I’ve often found that the easiest way to explain to students how to write a good scientific paper (and indeed how to interpret one they are reading) is to explain their structure in just these terms. This is because most students are familiar with these terms, while the terms used by scientists for these aspects of a scientific paper are much less well known, or indeed obvious.

Take the plot for example: Any good story must have a plot which moves along from a beginning where the basic premise of the story is explained, through a middle where much of the action happens and the tension is built and on to an end where the tension is resolved. Within a scientific paper these are simply known as the introduction (which sets the scene), the method and the results (which move the story forward and develop the tension – will they find what they set out to find, or will they find something unexpected which over turns our current understanding of the world?) and the discussion (where the ‘story’ being told is resolved). Just as with a short story, these sections all need to flow into one another to form a continuous storyline or the reader will get confused, and just as in short stories, you cannot suddenly reveal something at the end to explain your findings if you haven’t already introduced earlier into the paper.

Then there are the characters, except these are generally known as your study system and can be anything from atoms and quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (famous for recently finding evidence of the elusive Higgs Boson) to a Petri dish filled with bacteria or (as is often the case in my papers) species of whales or dolphins. Just as in any story you need to introduce these characters and describe them so the reader knows how they behave (or should behave if you’re going to have a twist at the end!). And just as in any story, your characters can be goodies and baddies, and sometimes you need both to make your paper really stand out. For example, in a paper I’m working on at the moment, the goodies are harbour porpoises which are trying to survive while the baddies are (believe it or not) larger bottlenose dolphins which beat them up and kill them. The tension within it comes from whether or not these attacks are frequent enough to cause the population of porpoises decline or not. The twist at the end of this particular story is that the answer is yes, but only under certain conditions caused by climate change (which no one was really expecting).

While the link between the structure of scientific papers and creative writing is easy to see once someone points it out, what it perhaps even more unexpected is that the same links even exist within the technical manuals like as the ones I’m currently working on. These contain a series of exercises for doctoral students to work through to help develop their technical skills, and you might think these would have little to connect them to writing short stories, but there is. This is because, you still need to have a ‘plot’, drawing the individual exercises together so that the student finds they are developing their skills as they work through it, while the characters are the data which the students will get to know as they work with them. Even within each exercise, you need a clear aim (which equals a sub-plot), and a clear movement through a beginning, a middle and an end otherwise the student will not feel they’ve gained anything from working through the exercises (just as a reader must think they have gained something from reading a story).

I’ve often thought that scientists should be taught creative writing as part of their training, and I’m sure if it were, scientific papers would be both easier to understand and more accessible to non-experts. However, this is an idea which always meets with resistance when I suggest it. Partly, I think this is because the word ‘creative’ in the title as this makes it sound like you are encouraging people to make things up (a big no-no in science), but I think it is also due to a certain level of intellectual snobbery. In particularly, there is a not unsizable proportion of scientists who revel in making things as difficult to understand as possible. This, they seem to feel, is a way of keeping the knowledge within a small elite group. You’ll only be welcomed into this elite if you can prove that you, too, can not only understand papers written in highly technical language filled with strange terms and complicated formulae which no outsider has a hope of understanding, but also write them. To them, writing clear, well-structured papers which takes the reader by the hand and leads them through from start to finish are an anathema which is to be discouraged rather than applauded.

Personally, I feel that this is science’s loss as in today’s world, we to make it as easy as possible for any interested amateur to understand what scientists are finding rather than making it more difficult. We, as scientists, need to share our skills and knowledge with as many people as possible, and the only way we can do that is by making our writing easier for anyone to understand.




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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.

What Would You Do If … Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse: No. 27 – The Air Strike Dilemma

You are the leader of an army unit sent in to contain a zombie outbreak in a nearby city. At first, it looked like you manage to get it under control but now you realise its spread too far, and the only option left is to call in an air strike. The airforce will then drop a series of powerful fuel-air bombs which will obliterate everything within the affected area. The outbreak is spreading fast, and the sooner you call in the air strike, the smaller the area they’ll have to bomb to stop it in its track. This means fewer innocent civilians incinerated along with the zombies. If you call in the air strike right away, the death toll will only be a few thousand people, but you will definitely be one of them. If you delay calling in the air strike for half an hour, you’ll be able to get far enough away that there’ll be a 50% chance of you surviving the blast, but it’ll also give the outbreak time to spread and a much larger area will have to be bombed to stop it. As a result, tens of thousands of people will die. If you wait an hour, you’ll be able to get far enough that you’ll definitely survive, but by then the whole city will have to be levelled to stop the outbreak spreading to the rest of the country, and that will mean the death of half a million people. What do you do?

Take Our Poll

As always, this dilemma is just here to make you think, so there’s no right or wrong answer. Vote in the poll to let others know what you do if you were in this situation, and if you want to give a more detailed answer, leave a comment on this posting.

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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.

I Spy With My Little Eye, Something Beginning With Z … Or Do I?

Yesterday, I realised there’s a potential fatal flaw in my ability to survive a zombie apocalypse. This came as a bit of a shock as I always thought I had a pretty good post-apocalyptic survival skills base: I’m a reasonable shot with both a rifle and a shotgun, and I can handle a crossbow thanks to regularly using one to take skin samples from whales; I can hold my own a sword pretty well thanks to spells fencing for various university teams down the years; I might not do it as much as I used to when I was younger, but I can deal with being stuck in the great outdoors and sleeping out in the open; I’m reasonably proficient in foraging in the wild, and I know how to both hunt and fish; I can drive pretty much any car, motorbike, van, motorboat and sailboat; I’m petty good with a hammer and nails, and I can do basic engine repairs if I really have to. I’ve even been doing my cardio recently and can cover 5 miles in a reasonable time (although admittedly that has more to do with attempting to hold back the tide middle-age spread for a few more years rather than preparing for a zombie apocalypse).

So what’s changed? Well, I’ve just realised overlooked one small problem: I’m so short-sighted I can barely see my feet if I don’t have my contact lenses in or my glasses on. I hadn’t really thought about the implications this would have for survival in the post-apocalyptic world until I glanced in the cupboard where I keep my monthly disposal contact lenses and thought, wow I’ve got enough stock-piled to last any collapse of civilisation. Then I thought, hang on, they’re going to run out some time, then what am I going to do?

That’s okay I thought, I can go back to glasses and I should be fine. Then I remembered an incident from when I was about fourteen. I was at an outward bound survival training camp on the west coast of Scotland, when, thanks to mucking about when should have been listening, I managed to lose my only pair of glasses over the side the boat that was going to drop me off on a remote island. There, I’d have to survive alone for two days before I’d be picked up again. All I had with me other than the clothes on my back was a box of matches, a single pot and a knife (this was the eighties when you could still give kids weapons and maroon them on remote islands in Scotland without too many people asking about things like health and safety!). Anyway, rather than admit I’d lost my glasses and could barely see, I when through the whole 48 hour survival test with much of the world being little more than an indistinct blur.

Thinking back on this, I know I’d be able to forage and collect enough food even without being able to see too well (I did it back then and so I could do it again if I had to), but the bit where I’d fail miserably would be defending myself against marauding zombies. You see without my glasses, before I’d be able to tell whether any rapidly approaching fuzzy shape is friend or foe, they’d be on top of me, and if it turned out they were a zombie it’d be to late to do anything beyond screaming as they chewed the flesh from my face. This would put me at a severe disadvantage, and one which I probably wouldn’t be able to overcome.

So what does all this mean? Well, firstly, the moment I finish writing this post I’m going out to buy a spare pair of specs – just in case! Secondly, if I do find myself in a zombie apocalypse, I’m going to have to make damn sure nothing happens to my glasses…




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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 Roles People Play In A Zombie Apocalypse Survival Group

Were a zombie apocalypse ever to happen, most people assume survival will be easier as part of a group but this is not necessarily the case. In particular, a group will only increase your chances of survival if everyone works together, and to do this, they will need to fill one of the many different roles people can play in groups. Of the available roles, some will be familiar to you, while others might not. Yet, they all play important roles in keeping a group working together. So what are some of these roles?

Firstly, and most obviously, there’s the group leader. This is the person in charge and the one who makes most of the decisions, and to whom people look up to for guidance in times of need. Having a strong but fair group leader is essential to having a positive group dynamic. If the leader is too weak, he will not be able to get people to work together and this will greatly lessen the chances of survival. Similarly if the leader is seen as being unfair, it will cause dissent and discontent.

Next, we have the enforcer. The enforcer is generally the person who ensures that the group leader’s decisions are implemented. While the name ‘enforcer’ makes it seem like this must be done through force, it can equally be achieved through other forms of persuasion.

Most other members of the group will fall under the category of followers. While this makes it seem that they don’t play any important role within the group, this is untrue and many followers will have a vital roles. These include the armourer, who functions as the weapons expert, the scrounger, whose skills involve finding anything that is needed by other members of the group and the fixer, whose skills involve mending anything which becomes broken. These roles are relatively well established, but there are other, less familiar roles for followers. These include the mediator, who helps to settle minor disputes and the dissenter, whose role is to question the group’s decisions. This is important because it means the group doesn’t accidentally talk themselves into doing something stupid by mistake (just think how many times business and political leaders have done this because they’ve surrounded themselves with yes-men!). Then there’s the role I refer to as the font-of-all-knowledge (FOAK). The FOAK is the member of the group who all others, including the leader, turn to for advice and information. The FOAK often someone who also fills another role, such as the forager (the person responsible for getting food), medic or cook.

There are also other roles which the individuals filling them might not even realise they are doing. Yet these are still important for maintaining good group cohesion. Of these, probably the most interesting are the human garbage can and the Jonah. The human garbage can is the person who eats anything and everything (we all know someone like that!), meaning that no food is ever wasted. Why is this important? Well, high quality food is going to be in short supply and you may end up being faced with some pretty unpalatable meals much of the time (another spoonful of dog food anyone?). By being willing to eat anything, the human garbage can helps others see that these unpalatable meals are still edible and their presence encourages others to eat things they’d otherwise turn their nose up at. The Jonah’s role is not well-defined but basically they are the one who gets blamed whenever something goes wrong. It doesn’t matter that it’s their fault or not, it’s just that a group needs someone to blame when things don’t go their way. Often the Jonah will be someone who is naturally unlucky and is the type of person for whom everything which can go wrong usually does. However, for a Jonah to function, it’s important that they don’t feel picked on and usually the rest of the group will only refer to them as such when talking to each other rather than directly to the Jonah.

I’m sure there are also may other roles, but these are the ones which seem to be the minimum required for a group to function effectively under difficult conditions, a least in my experience, and this means they’re probably the most important ones to have filled in any post-apocalyptic survival group.




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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.

What Would You Do If … Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse: No. 26 – The Last Bullet Dilemma

You’re running for your life, just as you have been for the last six hours. There were eight people in your group to begin with, but now there’s just two of you left, the rest having been caught and killed by the zombies which are chasing you. The only good thing is that since some of the undead stopped to feed on those they’ve killed, their numbers have dwindled and now there’s only one left tracking your every move. You see an alley leading off to the left and run into it, realising too late that half way along its blocked by a chain link fence. You quickly assess the situation. If you try to climb the fence, the zombie will be able to grab you before you get over it so that option is out. You check your gun and find to your dismay that there’s only one bullet left and there’s no other possible weapons within reach. You know your aim’s not very good and there’s only a 50% chance of hitting the fast-approaching zombie if you try to shoot it. If you kill it, you’ll both be able to get away but if you fire and miss you’ll have nothing left and you’ll both be killed. There is, however, another option. This is to shoot your companion in the leg. At point-blank range, you’re guaranteed to hit him and you’d be able to climb over the fence while the zombie attacks him as he lies injured on the ground. What do you do?

Take Our Poll

As always, this dilemma is just here to make you think, so there’s no right or wrong answer. Vote in the poll to let others know what you do if you were in this situation, and if you want to give a more detailed answer, leave a comment on this posting.

*****************************************************************************

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 Fast Do You Need To Run To Escape From A Zombie?

This is a common question in any discussion about surviving a zombie outbreak and it’s often broken down into a consideration of whether you’re up against the newer fast zombies (often typified by those in 28 Day Later) or the older slow zombies (as found in the original 1978 version Dawn of the Dead).

This, however, is a dangerous oversimplification and if I’ve learned anything from all those zombie documentaries I’ve watched, such as the ones mentioned above (they are documentaries, aren’t they?), it’s that the undead in different zombie outbreaks move at speeds which fall across a continuum rather than into a simplistic slow-fast dichotomy. So, therefore, does the speed you need to go at to out-run them.

With all these different zombie possibilities out there (I think they must be caused by different strains of the zombie disease or something), you can’t guarantee that if you find yourself in the middle of a zombie outbreak you’ll be up against ones you can just saunter away from.

Zombies don’t just come in fast and slow varieties. Instead, they can move at all sorts of different paces depending on where they come from. So then, does the speed you need to move to get away from them. Use this handy zombie-speed check diagram to help work out how fast you need to run to escape any zombies you meet.

So to help you survive, I’ve put together this handy zombie speed-check diagram. Just line up the speed any zombies you meet can move at on the outside and the scale in the middle will tell you how fast you will need to move to escape. It really is that simple to use.

I’ve added data I’ve extracted from those documentaries I was talking about to the diagram to help you work out where your particular zombies fall on this scale.

I recommend you cut this diagram out (it’s easy to do, just take some scissors and clip around the dotted line on the screen – don’t worry about leaving a hole in my blog, I’ll replace it with a new copy later) and keep it with you at all times. After all, you never know when the dead might rise.




Now, I’m off for a run to help me get in shape, just in case I find myself in a zombie outbreak where the undead are Zombieland speed or higher. After all remember the Cardio rule!

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

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

The Importance Of Backing Up Your Writing: Options And Considerations

A few weeks ago, I had the mis-fortune to have both my laptop and a portable flash drive which I used to store much of my word die on me in quick succession. While I managed to recover all the files I needed from the laptop, those in the flash drive have proved unrecoverable. This has raised in my mind, once again, the importance of backing up my writing in a secure and sensible manner. I have to say, this is something which I am terrible at remembering to do and I don’t do it nearly as often as I should. However, it’s also something I realise is exceedingly important to do and it’s something every writer should give some though to. This is because there’s a plethora of options, some of which are better than others (and the best option might not be the one you’d think!). So here’s a quick run through a few of the currently-available back up options with some thoughts on the pros and cons for writers of each one.

Firstly, there’s those little flash drives which you plug into the USB port of your computer which are almost everywhere these days. They are cheap and easy to use, and it’s tempting to use one of these as your back up. However, any possible benefits are out-weighed by the fact that they are remarkably unstable, prone to failing suddenly and without warning, and very easy to mis-place. This makes them a very poor option for storing you back up files and it’s not an option you should rely on as your sole approach for backing up your writing.

Secondly, while external hard drives also plug into a USB port and may seem like larger versions of a flash drive, they save information in a very different way and provide a much better option for longer term and reliable storage. They are also quick and easy to use, making creating a back up of your work at the end of the day very fast and simple. The main issue with using an external hard drive to back up your files is not the device itself but where you keep it. A friend of mine recently had someone break into her house and steal her laptop. They also nicked the external hard drive she was using to back up her files because she kept it sitting next to her computer so it was always close at hand. The lesson here is that if you’re going go down this route for backing up your work, you can’t simply leave the external hard drive sitting on your desk beside your computer.

Thirdly, there’s the good old-fashioned CD-ROM, or the newer DVD-ROMs. It’s quick and easy to burn your files onto a disk, but they can be difficult to update. This means they are better suited for creating archived versions of finished pieces than backing up things you’re actively working on. In addition, while they are pretty stable in the short-term, they can degrade over a number of years, meaning they are not great long-term storage devices. There is also the issue of where you keep them. It’s simple enough to slip them into a bottom drawer and forget about them, but what would happen if there was a fire? Your back up files would simply go up in flames with your computer and all your work would be lost.

This brings us to the next option: backing up your data on a remote server. This is known as ‘cloud computing’. The idea here is that some company, either for free or for a small fee, allows you to store a copy of your files on one of their servers. This is often quick and easy to do through custom-designed apps, and for many it seems like a perfect option for storing copies of your work. Certainly this avoids all the potential pit falls associated with keeping a back up in your own home, but it does come with others which are often not very obvious. The first of these is that the company running the serve you use could, out of the blue, decide you are violating their terms and conditions and close your account. They have every right to do this (it’s right there in the user agreement that you ticked, without reading, when you signed up) and you’ll have little chance of getting your files back if the do so. Similar things can happen if the company suddenly decides to stop offering the service or goes bust.

Cloud computing accounts are also subject the same risks as any other computing system and this means they can get hacked, become infected with viruses and so on. This means you have to be careful with passwords and other information you need to access them. The problem with this is that you also need to remember all this information and there is nothing more frustrating that needing to access the files in an account only to not be able to remember the log on details you need to do so. There’s also the question of what the service providers can do with files you store in the cloud. If you read through the terms and conditions in full you’ll often find some pretty scary rules about what they can do with your files and their contents without asking. Finally, in order to access your files, you need internet access and you may find the one day you really need to get a hold of your files is the one day that the net is, for some inexplicable reason, down and you are stuck with no way of accessing them. These options make the cloud a rather poor option for creating useful and secure back ups of your work.

The last option I’m going to consider probably the oldest: printing your work out in black and white and stuffing it into a filing cabinet. It’s old school and you can’t easily update it, but you can access it any time, even when the power’s down, and it does provide a permanent record of your writing. This means you’ll never find you can’t access your work just because the software package has been updated and the file format you used is no longer available or the type of disk you used is no longer read by any available disk drive (I still have old 3.5 inch diskettes floating around in the backs of various cupboards and no floppy disk drive to access the files they contain!).

So these are a few of the options available to writers for backing up their work, but which is best? Well, personally, while I might use cloud computing and flash drives because they are convenient, I recognise their limitations and do not rely on them a my sole back up option. Instead, they are only one of several I use. This means I also back everything up onto an external hard drive (not kept next to my computer) and when I finish pieces, I’ll burn a copy onto a couple of CD-ROMs, one of which will be kept in my house, while the other goes to a friend’s house for safe keeping. I also like to keep a paper copy of any final works tucked away somewhere as last resort. This means that while I might not back things up as often as I should, when do, I do it in away that hopefully minimises the possibility that I’ll lose the work I’ve back up, and this is something I’d recommend to ever writer.

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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 Difficult Second Book – Part II

Last November I posted an article about the difficulties of writing your second book. That was when I was just starting it. Now, 9 months later, and about 6 months behind my intended schedule, I’ve finally finished the first draft and passed it on to the Lady With The Big Red Pen (a.k.a. my long-suffering girlfriend) to go through with a fine-toothed comb, picking up the problems, pointing out where the plot doesn’t really work, marking where the characters are a bit flat and the dialogue doesn’t really work.

There’s two times in the writing a book when I find getting some outside editing advice is most vital. The first is right at the end, just before submission or publication to catch all those little grammatical errors and typos, and is fairly obvious, but the second is less so. This is when the first draft has been completed. This is because this is the time when it’s easiest to fix any problems with the plots and characters; and there will always be problems with these aspects of a book in the first draft. If you don’t get these sorted early, you may find yourself having to throw away chunks of text you’ve spent hours honing to perfection simply because you’ve got rid of a specific plot line or character and they are no longer needed and that’s just soul-destroying. It’s so much better if you can shake all the problems with the plot and characters when the text is, quite frankly, still a bit of a mess (and this is true of all first drafts).

So, I’ve printed out all 86,184 words which make up my first draft and will wait with bated breath while my girlfriend reads it, red pen in hand. I know there’ll be some bits she likes, and I know there’ll bits she won’t. I’m okay with that because these will often be the very bits I struggled with myself and that I know don’t really work, and she’ll be able to tell me where I’ve gone wrong and what I need to do to fix it. In many cases, the problems and solutions will be obvious the moment she points them out, but without her input I’d have difficultly spotting them because I’m too close to the book – after all it is my baby.

Once her thoughts are in, it will be on with the next stage, because finishing the first draft isn’t the end, it’s not even the beginning of the end, it’s only the end of the beginning. This bit will be the editing, where I’ll start tightening up the plot lines and clipping away at the extraneous descriptions; new set pieces will be added where the first draft is a bit slow and events mentioned in passing will be expanded to fill out the story line; dialogue will be pruned and polished; characters will be fleshed out and made more real (some may even get a sex change if that’s what’s needed to make them work). At some stage the title might even get changed because I’m not too sure I like the working title I’ve given it so far (which is, incidentally, On The Edge Of The World). By then my 86,000 words will probably have grown somewhere closer to 100,000 and it will be time to move onto the next stage: running it passed my handful of specially-selected readers to get their thoughts, before the final session of editing and re-writing.

So, all in all, there’s still a long way to go, but with the first draft now, after many months longer than I intended, out of the way, I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere with this second book. There’s still bits I’m not entirely happy with, but there are others where I feel it’s coming together nicely. I can finally see that I have something which I think will work and which will be a worthy follow-up to For Those In Peril On The Sea. Happy days!




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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.