Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 18

When Zombies And Free Running Meet …

I’ve long argued that parkour, or free running, would be a really useful skill to have in a zombie apocalypse, and finally someone has put together a video which proves it! They’ve done a really good job and it’s well worth watching, and it only lasts for four minutes so you don’t have the excuse that you haven’t enough time. Of course, the only problem is that some of the zombies seem to know how to do parkour too …

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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. 25 – The Hotel Guest’s Dilemma

You’re on holiday on your own when there’s a zombie outbreak in your hotel. According to the local news, the authorities have the hotel sealed off but it will take them several weeks to clear out all the undead which now infest it. You’re safely locked in your hotel room so you’re not in immediate danger, but there’s no food or water in it. There are, however, vending machines in the corridor by the lift which are full of snacks and drinks. Through the spy hole in your door, you can see a lone zombie lurking outside your room and stopping you getting to the supplies. Then you hear a noise and realise there’s someone trapped in the room next door. You start talking through the wall and find out they have nothing to eat or drink either, but between the two of you, you come up with a plan: if you both open your doors at the same time, the zombie will be distracted, giving you the precious seconds you need to kill it, meaning both of you can get to the vending machines. However, there’s a risk that one of you might get injured or even killed, but you agree to the plan as it seems like the only possible solution to your predicament.

You’re in position with your hand on the door when a thought occurs to you. The person in the other room can’t see you, you could just not open your door on the agreed signal. They would open their door, with no choice to distract it, the zombie would rush into their room and attack them. You could then shut the zombie in the next door room and get to the vending machines with absolutely no risk to yourself. Then you realise the other person might be thinking exactly the same thing and it could be you that’ll get attacked if you open the door and they don’t. Yet, if neither of your open the door, there’s a good chance you’ll both starve to death before you can be rescued. You hear the person in the next room start the count down: Three, two, one … 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.

This dilemma is based on the prisoner’s dilemma much love by those who study game theory. The basic premise behind it is that the best option for each of you as an individual is to screw over the other person, yet if you both do this, you’ll both lose out. It all comes down to whether you can trust the other person to do what’s in the best interest of the pair of you as a group, or just for themselves.




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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.

Silence – A Zombie Flash Fiction Story

I listen intently, but hear nothing. I glance round, wondering what caught my attention enough to wake me but not enough to have me grabbing my axe and leaping to my feet. Once sounds in the night would have been the sirens of fire engines or the rattle of the last train pulling into the station behind my house; now they’re more likely to be the low guttural moans of the dead as they hunt the living. I hear the sound again, and realise what it was that woke me in the first place – just the cry of a fox out seeking a mate. I fall back onto my mattress, trying to get some rest but knowing I’m now too much on edge to get back to sleep before dawn.

I lie in the dark, thinking about how the world sounds different now: no more jumbo jets roaring overhead as they start their descent into the airport across the river; no more taxi engines idling below my bedroom window while they disgorge their laughing passengers; no more car doors slamming in the night, or car alarms going off in the small hours of the morning; no more kids kicking an empty tin can down the street or drunks screaming at each other outside the pub across the road. I’d hated all those noises before everything changed, but now I’d give anything to hear them again. Now all I hear is the silence of the deserted city, weighing me down, stifling me, only broken by the occasional cry of an animal or, more frequently, by the sound of the dead as they stagger through the streets in search of flesh. I don’t know why, but every now and then they let out a groan or a snarl, each one setting off the next in some ungodly chain reaction. If I didn’t know they were dead, I’d have sworn they were communicating, letting each other know where they are and whether they’ve found anyone to feast on or not. If they could communicate, it would explain how so many turn up so suddenly the moment one of them works out where you are, but surely being dead they couldn’t be doing anything as purposeful as that, could they?

The fallen city surrounds me, fencing me in on all sides and this means I must keep quiet too: never speaking, being careful where I tread so I don’t send the creak of a loose floorboard out into the night and towards those long dead but ever-listening ears, making sure I make no noise at all. All I can do it cower silently in my attic, where I’ve been since it all started, working my way through my ever-dwindling supplies, hoping against hope that the dead will somehow disappear before the last of my food is consumed and I’m forced out into their world by the need to find more. If I have to do that, I know my silence will no longer be enough to keep me safe, as it has done all these months, because even though their eyes are dead, somehow they can still see, and it’ll be only a matter of time before I’m spotted. Then, as they descend on me, heads thrown back, roaring to let others of their kind know food is near; the chase will begin, and it’s one I know I’ll never win.

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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.

Preserving Knowledge …

Do you know how to change the alternator on a car’s engine? What about how to weld two bits of metal together? How about amputating a gangrenous limb or making antibiotics or turning the wool from sheep into nice warm clothing? The chances are you don’t, but in a post-apocalyptic world these are all things you might find yourself needing to do. So how would you find out how to do them? In the world of today, you’d almost certainly turn to the internet and all the wonders it holds, but where would you go if this was no longer available to you?

This is an interesting conundrum. Nowadays we have become so used to storing everything electronically that we barely give it a second thought. Here I’m not just talking about your favourite songs or your holiday photographs but the very knowledge on which much of our world now runs. We may know more than we, as a species, have ever known before, but that knowledge is also now uniquely vulnerable because of how we store it. If the world were to fall apart tomorrow, there’s a good chance much of this precious information would be lost. If we’re lucky, the people who have the skills will survive long enough to record it again in some more permanent format; if we’re not, the information will die with them, plunging the world into a new dark age.

There are others who have foreseen this possibility and who seek to archive as much information as possible and there are many great libraries around the world which act as massive store houses of human knowledge. Yet, due to constraints of money and space, many of them are shifting towards storing their information electronically rather relying on paper and ink. However, this is short-sight. To read an electronic document you need a programme and a computer. You also need something to store it on and something to read it back. Then you need power to run the whole system. This means even if the electronic records somehow survive, there will be little chance of being able to access the information contained in it. With a book, you just need to open it and start reading.

Yet, even with books, we may be faced with problems with actually using the knowledge they contain. Take, for example, an instruction which tells you to measure out three feet of some material. Sounds simple enough, but what happens if you don’t have a tape measure or a ruler? How would you know how long three feet was?

This cast iron plaque on Glasgow City Chambers provides a reference for how long a foot is. In the event of the end of civilisation, it will survive long after all the knowledge on all the computer servers in the world has disappeared.

In the past, before the ubiquity of computers and all the modern accoutrements we’ve become dependent on, these issues were well known and taken into account. For example, on the City Chambers in Glasgow (which doubled for Philadelphia in the recent World War Z movie) is a simple metal sign which provides anyone with the means to be able to accurately measure out units of one, two or three feet. This cast iron device, made in 1882 and provided as reference for the many industries in Glasgow which needed to know such things, will survive well after all the electronic information has evaporated into the ether and provides as permanent a record of units of length as is possible. Yet, in the modern world, such permanence of information is becoming increasingly rare.

While planning for survival in a post-apocalyptic world, we generally concentrate on our own personal survival and that of our loved ones. However, we should also consider how we will preserve the knowledge we’ll need to know not just to survive but to recover and re-build if and when the immediate threats are over. Some skills, such as fixing an engine or spinning fleece into wool, are ones we can learn for ourselves and preserve in our own heads, but others we’ll need to preserve in different ways. We’ll need to protect the libraries, with all the knowledge they contain, and preserve the information we need to use that knowledge to allow us not just to survive but also to thrive in a world which has been unexpectedly upside down. If we don’t we’ll be left scrabbling for survival, picking through the ruins of once great cities, wishing we knew how to do even the most basic things we need to survive. After all, would you know how to grow your own food or make your own clothes? And I’m not meaning from packets of seeds purchased from a garden centre or using material you got from your local haberdashery, I’m meaning would you be able to do these things from scratch?

Knowledge will be key to surviving in the long-term after any apocalyptic event, especially if we are to re-build any sort of functioning society. We’ll need to know how to make medicines and how to stave off illnesses, how to grow food and preserve it, how to smelt iron and forge steel. And we’ll need to know how to do this not on a modern basis, but in the way that it can be done with the resources which are likely to be available to us in a post-apocalyptic world: without electricity and industrialisation. And the only way we’ll be able to do this is if we preserve the knowledge we’ve garnered over hundreds and thousands of years in such a way that we can access it once the power goes and the world turns dark.

In short, we need to halt the rush to the paperless world that the likes of Google and Apple and Microsoft are intent on whizzing us towards and think, instead, of how knowledge needs to be stored so we can still access it if modern civilisation came to an end tomorrow and we were suddenly thrust into a post-apocalyptic world.




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

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

A Zombie Apocalypse Venn Diagram …

Just a bit of fun for a bank holiday Sunday …




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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. 24 – The Safe House Dilemma

The zombie apocalypse has come and in the immediate scramble to survive you find yourself alone and holed up in an old house. Looking round, you make a quick assessment of its suitability as a safe house. You see that if you can get the windows boarded up and the doors barricaded, it will be an okay place to sit tight: it will keep the zombies at bay, but only if there’s just a few of them at any one time. Any more than that and there’s a risk you’ll be over-run. Thinking about how best to maximise your chances of survival, you conclude that there must be better safe houses out there, ones which would keep the zombies out no matter how many there are; however there are also a lot worse places you could be and if you set out to search for another safe house, there’s no guarantee you’ll find somewhere better. Worse, you may find you lose your existing safe house either to other survivors or to the undead. And then there’s the risk of going outside where you’ll be exposed to the marauding zombies. Yet, if you don’t try to find somewhere better now, you might not get the chance later and you’ll be stuck in your existing situation, knowing your safe, but only if you don’t attract to may zombies. 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.

‘With One Leap Jack Was Free’ And Other Solutions To Impossible Situations

The title of this article refers to what’s generally considered sloppy story telling. Your characters end up in some seemingly impossible situation and then with no explanation beyond saying something like ‘and suddenly they were free’ they manage to get away unscathed. This is a really good way to annoy your readers as they’re left wondering what actually happened, but it’s an easy trap to slip into if you’re not careful. A similar situation arises when a character picks up an essential tool or weapon which has never been mentioned before, or suddenly reveals a key skill the reader never knew they had until the very moment they need to use it to escape.

So how do you avoid this in your writing? One obvious solution is not to let your characters get into impossible situations in the first place, but then you lose the tension such situations create and your story becomes dull and uninteresting. A better solution is to plant the seeds for everything needed for their miraculous escape earlier in your story, often as casual comments or passing references. This way, the reader is left thinking, ‘Oh, of course!’ rather than ‘Where did that come from?’. However, you need to be careful exactly how you insert these little ‘plotlings’ (the seedlings from which your plot will grow). If you’re not, you’ll find they end up jumping up and down in the reader’s mind waving their arms and screaming ‘PLOT DEVICE!!!’ at the top of their lungs and that just makes them seem clunky.

To illustrate this point, we’ll take a scene where two characters, John and Max, are being chased by a group of zombies. They see a cottage in the distance and decide to take shelter in it. They reach the front door, managing to get inside and get the door shut before the first zombie arrives. While catching their breath they look around and realise to their dismay that there’s no other way out, meaning they’re well and truly trapped. Meanwhile the zombies are now battering and the door and it’s threatening to give out at any second. How do they get out alive?

Well, they’re going to find a gun and shoot the zombies just as they finally break through the door, allowing them to escape unscathed. However, you can’t just have a gun lying around in the room they happen to have become trapped in, that would be way too convenient and reader just wouldn’t buy it. Instead, you could have them finding a gun at an earlier point in the story so that they are already carrying it when they become trapped in the cottage (which, for arguments sake, we’ll say happens in chapter 10). For example, you could introduce a gun when their search another house for food earlier in the day (maybe in chapter 8) with the line:

‘Just as John was leaving the room he spotted something, “Oh look a gun! That will come in useful if we ever get into trouble.” ’

Your readers now know John has a gun which can be used to help them escape from the cottage, but it’s not exactly subtle; you might as well reach of the page and smack your reader in the face with said gun and say ‘Remember this, it’s going to be important!’. A better approach might be something like:

‘Just as John was leaving the room, he spotted a bag which looked as if it had been hastily stuffed behind the couch. He pulled it out and glanced inside, finding it contained enough food to last them a week, two machetes and what looked like an old pistol. Before he could examine the contents properly there was a shout from outside telling him he only had time to grab the backpack and run.’

Here the gun is only mentioned as a possibility along with a list of other items and items like the food might be more critical to the plot at that specific moment in the story (since that was what they were looking for in the house at the time). Thus, the ‘plotling’ is planted but without drawing too much attention to itself. This means when you first write the cottage scene in chapter 10, you might have them being pursued by five zombies and have the following to reveal how the gun will be used in their escape:

‘Suddenly, John remembered the pack he’d found when they were looking for food; hadn’t he seen a gun in it? He frantically rummaged through the bag until he found what he was looking for. It was indeed a very old and very dirty pistol. John had no idea whether it would still work, but he knew it was their only chance. In a single movement he pulled it out and slid it across the room to Max just as the door finally gave way.’

Max grabs the gun, shoots the zombies and hey presto, your characters are finally free to leave the cottage and your readers are left thinking ‘lucky he remembered the gun when he did or they’d never have got out of there in one piece’ rather than ‘where’d that gun suddenly come from?’ or ‘finding that gun there just when they needed it was a bit too convenient’.

Of course, sometimes you’ll find that as you edit your story, you need to go back and change these little ‘plotlings’ to keep everything consistent. If we go back to the example above, the reference to an old pistol could be taken to mean a revolver, which would have a maximum of six bullets in it (assuming it was fully loaded). However, when you come back to edit this scene, you might start thinking that five zombies isn’t really enough to build any real tension, and you up the number to ten. Except in order to be able to kill them all, the gun would need to reload at some point and you’ve not explained where the extra bullets came from. This is when you’d go back to the scene where John finds the bag while looking for food and change it to:

‘Just as John was leaving the room, he spotted a bag which looked as if it had been hastily stuffed behind the sofa. He pulled it out and glanced inside, finding it contained enough food to last them a week, two machetes, a half-full box of bullets and what looked like an old pistol …’

It’s a small change but now the bullets are mentioned in passing along with the gun as part of the list of newly-found things, so you are free to use them in the cottage scene. Of course having to reload the gun half way through a zombie set piece also allows you to rack up the tension with things like:

‘With the first four zombies down, Max pulled the trigger again but it just clicked. He looked at it for a second before he realised it was empty. As John fumbled in the bag, trying to find the box of bullets he’d seen earlier, Max leapt backwards as the remaining zombies surged towards him. After what seemed like a life-time, John found the bullets and threw them to Max before pulling out one of the machetes …’

This has the advantage that you are now also using one of the machetes the reader knows was also in the bag. If these had never appear in the story again, your reader might end up wondering what ever became of them. This, of course, is the flip side of ‘plotlings’: you can’t introduce something such as a weapon, if your characters never make use of it. If you do, you’ll leave your readers wondering why you ever mentioned it in the first place. You don’t need to use everything mentioned in a single ‘plotling’ for the same escape scene, but you do need to use everything you mention at some point, even if it’s just something like (maybe in chapter 9):

‘In his haste to climb onto the tree which lay across the ravine, John flung the bag over his shoulder, sending one of the machetes clattering onto the rocks below. John cursed his stupidity, knowing they wouldn’t have time to retrieve it before the zombies arrived …’

This tells you one of the machetes has been lost and will play no further part in the story. The other, however, remains in play (to be used by John later when Max runs out of bullets in the cottage in chapter 10).

However, you still have a bit of a problem. Max has managed to grab a gun off the floor and shot four zombies with a maximum of six shots (which is pretty good going for anyone!), and you can’t have a character popping off perfect head shots like that without explaining how they know how to shoot (well you can, but it’ll probably annoy your readers!). This means you also need to mention this somewhere before the cottage scene. This can be quite subtle, with something like this placed in chapter 3:

‘As the night closed in around them and they reached the bottom of the whisky bottle, they started to reminisce about their lives before the zombies. Max took another mouthful and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, “I sure as hell won’t miss my old man. He was a mean drunk, forever wailing on me. When I was young I’d sometimes sneak his gun out of the bedside table when he was out drinking and use it to shoot tin cans off the fence in the back yard just to get my own back on him. Only one time he came back earlier than I expected and caught me. He beat me so badly that day I couldn’t sit down properly for a week. He’s one son of a bitch I’m glad I’ll never see again.” There was a brief pause as he took another slug from the bottle, “I’ll miss my little sister though.” ‘

Here the ‘plotling’ seems to be more about Max’s relationship with his (presumably now dead or zombified) family; yet it also serves to introduce the idea that Max knows how to shoot and would be capable of picking up a pistol that had just been slid across the room and scoring direct hits on the zombies as they pour through the cottage door.

So in the example here, the reader has been armed with the knowledge that: 1. Max can handle a gun (mentioned in chapter 3); 2. John has what might be a gun along with some extra bullets (from chapter 8); 3. John also has a machete, again in chapter 8, having lost another one due to his carelessness – in chapter 9. Each of these elements has been inserted into the storyline in an appropriate place long before chapter 10 when these two characters become trapped in the cottage, with what at first might seem like little chance of surviving. This means everything is in place for the characters to make their narrow escape as the zombies finally break through the door.

Getting the knack of slipping in these ‘plotlings’ into stories can be quite difficult, and probably the best way to learn how to do it successfully is to look at the work of others. J.K. Rowling is one of the best authors for this. The Harry Potter books take place in a relatively complex world meaning it would be easy for escapes to appear miraculous. Yet, she always introduces just the right amount of information ahead of time so the reader is never left feeling cheated whenever the characters escape by the skin of their teeth through one magical means or another. Sometimes the ‘plotlings’ for specific dramatic events are planted several books before they are needed, making them particularly impressive. For example, a major plot line in book 6 revolves around a broken vanishing cabinet which we hear about for the first in book 2 where it gets broken as part of a seemingly insubstantial action, and then again in passing in book 5. Even if you’re not a fan of her books or their subject matter, they are worth reading purely from a technical point of view to see how well she does this.

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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.

Seven Interesting Inventions Which Might Help You Survive In A Post-Apocalyptic World

In the last few months, I’ve come across a number of interesting inventions which could help you survive in a post-apocalyptic world, or at least help make your life easier. So without much ado, here are my seven favourite ones:

1. A Flashlight Powered By The Heat Of Your Own Hand: This is a really interesting bit of technology which makes use of the heat gradient between your skin and the ambient air temperature to create enough electricity to power super-efficient LED bulbs. What’s more, it was invented by a Canadian high school student and the parts only cost $26! With no moving parts to break down and no need for batteries, this would certainly be useful thing to have in a post-apocalyptic world.

2. Moser Lamps: Imagine this, you’re holed up in your safe house, all the windows are boarded up to keep out whatever’s wandering around out there and there’s no electricity. Are you just going to sit around in the gloom? Thanks to one Alfredo Moser, you don’t have to. In 2002, this Brazilian mechanic came up with a way of lighting up dingy indoor spaces using nothing more than a clear plastic bottle filled with water and a splash of bleach. How does this work? Well, if you poke the top of the bottle through a roof and leave the rest hanging through, the water in it will refract the light, making it glow as brightly as a 60 watt bulb (as long as it’s sunny outside of course). The bleach is just there to stop algae growing in the water. This power-free lighting method is now being used in more than 15 countries, helping some of the world’s poorest people light their houses for nothing. In a post-apocalyptic world, this would be the way I’d bring light into my safe house if I didn’t have any power. If you want to make your own Moser lamps you can find out how here.

3. Solar Showers: Okay, solar showers have been around for a while, but they’re great. You simply fill them up with water and leave them out in the sun. Because of their design, this will heat up the water and then you hang it up somewhere nice and high, and let gravity to the rest. One of these was always a key bit of kit when I’ve living out of a tent for any extended period of time. I admit, it’s not going to save your life, but if there’s one thing that’s going to make you feel better about living in a post-apocalyptic world, it’s going to be the ability to get clean in a nice, warm shower every now and then.

4. Pot-In-Pot-Refrigeration: Once the electricity goes off, you lose your ability to keep food cool and stop it going off, right? Wrong, thanks to this invention from Mohammed Bah Abba. You take two pots made of porous clay and put one inside the other with a gap between them. You fill this gap with sand and then wet it. As the water evaporates, it draws heat from the inner container and so cools it, and anything you place in it, down. It’s really that simple and lets you keep perishable items fresh for several weeks.

5. The Solar Stove: Solar stoves are designed to reflect and concentrate heat onto a specific point. If you place food at this point you can cook it without the need for fuel, fire or power. This makes them perfect for post-apocalyptic survival as they need no resources and also they don’t produce smoke which might attract unwanted attention. And you can use them for more than just cooking. They can reach temperatures of up to 165°C/325°F which is hot enough to sterilise water or pasteurize milk.

6. Solar Stirling Engines: So far, the inventions I’ve mentioned here assume you don’t have any electricity, but why not make your own? Then you can just plug everything in like normal and pretend the world hasn’t come to an end. Of the various ways of doing this, my personal favourite is something called a solar stirling engine. They’re more efficient than solar panels, they’re easier to make and maintain and their just plain cool! A stirling engine uses the difference in heat between its top and bottom to generate movement. The greater the heat difference, the faster the engine works. In a solar stirling, a parabolic reflector is used to concentrate the sun’s rays onto one end of a stirling engine, providing a large enough heat difference to generate a good amount of electricity. Get one of these and you could be powering your house for free and you won’t have to worry about the lights going out as civilisation collapses around you!

7. Kinetic Pavements: Of course, living in Scotland we really don’t get much sun so most of these inventions won’t do me much good. However, there’s another new technology which would work even here in our less-than-sunny climate. Here’s the situation: the end of the world has come and there’s all these zombies shuffling around everywhere. Why not use them to generate your electricity for you? This is where kinetic pavement tiles come in. They’re made is such a way that whenever someone (alive or dead!) steps on them, they bend and generate a little bit of electricity. Put enough of them out and get enough people stepping on them and you can generate a lot of power, and if there’s one thing there’s going to be a lot of when the zombies rise, it’s the undead shuffling around so you might as well make the most of them. Here’s the plan: get a load of kinetic pavement tiles, spread them out over your local football pitch, wire them up and then herd as many zombies in as you can find. Hey presto, you’ve got your own zombie power station!

So that’s it for my list of seven interesting inventions which might help you survive in a post-apocalyptic world. I’m sure there’s plenty others out there too, and if you have a favourite which didn’t make my list, feel free add it as a comment on this post.




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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.

Letting Off Steam – A Short Story About Life In A Zombie-filled World

I lean over the balcony and line up my shot before letting the glass ball slip through my fingers. I watch as the snow globe falls, rotating slowly until it makes contact and shatters, sending glitter-flecked water spraying across the ground.

‘Shit! Missed.’ I reach backwards without taking my eyes off the old man who’d been my intended target and who had unexpectedly shuffled to the left while the glass sphere was in free fall. ‘Get me another one.’

I feel the weight in my hand as I’m passed the next one from the bag. My target is now looking down at the shards of glass scattered around his feet, seemingly wondering where they’d come from. A few others look round too, attracted by the noise of the breaking glass, but they all soon lose interest and go back to staring off into the distance. I line up the shot again and this time I get a direct hit. As before the snow globe shatters but so does the skull it just collided with and the spray of glitter and water is mixed with the red of blood, the cream of bone and the grey of brains.

Beside me Jan leans over the parapet, ‘That was way cool!’

We look at each other and laugh; I offer her the next snow globe from the backpack we’ve lugged all the way up here, ‘You want a go?’

‘Nah. I don’t mind watching, but this is your thing, not mine.’

I shrug and line up another shot, this time a young woman. I let the globe fall and again score a direct hit and I’m rewarded with another spray of glitter, blood, skull and brains. This will carry on until we run out of snow globes and I feel all the tension leave my body; only then will we sneak back to our safe house.

We’ve all got our favoured ways of working out whatever demons are haunting us at any given time, and sometimes I think it’s the only thing which is keeping us sane. I mean, if we didn’t let loose every once in a while, all we’d have is the daily struggle to survive and if that’s all there is to live for we might as well give up like so many others have before us. For most of us, this involves killing zombies which now infest the world around us in a particularly gratuitous manner. When you’re fighting for your very survival, you need to be quick and efficient, but when you’re hunting them for fun, you have the upper hand and you can afford to be more inventive.

Jan likes mowing them down with whatever vehicle she can get hold of. Usually, this is a four by four of some kind or other, but on one memorable occasion she somehow managed to get her hands on a combine harvester. That day she came back so glowing with excitement she didn’t need to do it again for almost six months. Max prefers a more explosive approach, specifically lobbing sticks of dynamite at them; Jamie likes to fry them to a crisp with her homemade flame-thrower; Mike jousts – running them through with long metal poles as he speeds towards them on a motorbike. It doesn’t kill them, but they can’t exactly move around with ten feet of steel sticking through their chests.

Me, I like dropping things on them from a great height. I’d started off with bricks and cinder blocks but then I moved onto bowling balls; it was only recently I’d got into snow globes, but I’d found the effect strangely addictive from the moment I’d seen the first one smash into a zombie’s head – all that blood and glitter: it’s just so incongruous. I know I’ll run out of them soon, but for now it’s the way I like to unwind when things are getting too much. After all, even in a zombie apocalypse you’ve got to find a way of letting off steam every now and then.




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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.

It’s Not Exactly The End Of The World, But …

Yesterday I had one of those days which comes around every few years. I know they’re inevitable, but that still doesn’t make them palatable. So what am I talking about? Well, I was about half way through the day when, out of the blue and with no warning, my laptop died on me. As the title says, I know this isn’t exactly the end of the world but it sure as hell is inconvenient. It’s not necessarily the expense which bothers me (although I could really do without that outlay right now), but all the hassle which comes with a new computer.

I’m picky, and this means I like my computer set up just so. That way I know exactly where everything, but with a new machine I have to go through all the hassle of re-creating this set up, getting all the files in the right place, and getting all the programmes loaded up which I like to use for my work.

Then there’s the issue of new versions of the software I use. It seems my computers last just long enough for the software designers to completely re-design their software so that it’s virtually impossible to just pick back up where I left off. In my case, this means having to change from using Word 2003 (an old favourite of mine for writing) to a newer version which has completely changed and rather than writing, I’ve had to spend much of the day re-learning where everything is (and they seem to have hidden them in some very odd places!). The same goes for the operating system, with Windows 8 having replaced Windows 7 since I last purchased a computer and I have to say I’m not finding it exactly user-friendly.

All of this means that while I’d set aside this week for putting in some serious work finishing off the first draft of my next book, I now know this isn’t going to happen. Instead, I’m going to have to spend the next couple of days getting a new computer set up just so. I can’t help but think it would all be a lot simpler if you could keep all your old programmes rather than being forced to adopt newer versions, and I wonder how much time (and money!) is wasted on each upgrade as people struggle to get to grips with new designs and new interfaces. Some updates are good and useful, but in many cases, it just seems that software is being updated for the sake of updating it rather than to actually improve things.

Added to the software issues are the hardware issues. Specifically, all the keys are in a slightly different position to those on my last one relative to the screen. This means when I’m touch-typing, I keep hitting the wrong keys, and when I try to type ‘said’ consistently end up with ‘dsof’. This is slowing down my rate of work quite considerably and really interrupts my creative flow. Again, it’s not exactly the end of the world, but it’s seriously annoying me, and it feels like I’m having to learn to touch-type all over again.

Anyway, give me a week or so and everything will (hopefully!) be back to normal, but until then things might be a little slow around 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.