Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 3

‘The Island At The End Of The World’ – New Post-apocalyptic Survival Thriller From Colin M. Drysdale Out Today

The Island At The End Of The World is the third novel in the For Those In Peril post-apocalyptic survival series by Colin M. Drysdale. It is now available as a paperback and as a Kindle eBook. While a PDF preview of the first three chapters is available here, the first three chapters will be serialised on this blog over the next three days.

Set amongst the rugged and beautiful islands of Scotland’s remote west coast, this book weaves its tale of post-apocalyptic survival into a landscape where people have struggled to survive for thousands of years. With its evocative use of real locations on both land and sea, and atmospheric depictions of the trials faced by those trying to survive in a world which has changed forever, The Island At The End Of The World further expands the new and unusual take on the traditional post-apocalyptic genre provided by the first two award-winning books in the For Those In Peril series, as the characters struggle to move from just surviving to trying to rebuild their lives in the hostile and unforgiving world they have found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into.

As with the first two books, this is a first person narrative, but it is told from point of view of 19-year-old CJ, rather than the narrators of either of the first two books (Rob in For Those In Peril On The Sea and Ben in The Outbreak), providing a new and different perspective on the world of the For Those In Peril series.

From The Back Of The Book:

Civilisation has collapsed, the land has fallen to the infected and the few who remain unturned are left wondering if there’s anywhere left that’s truly safe …

A mutant virus has turned humanity into savage, cannibalistic killers who roam the land in search of prey, and only a few scattered groups survive uninfected, clinging to life in the furthest corners of the Earth. CJ and her crewmates have sailed their forty-foot catamaran across the Atlantic, searching for a safe haven that’s beyond the reach of the infected. Now, they’ve arrived in Scotland and are heading for the remote island of Mingulay, but when they get there, will they find the uninhabited paradise their captain, Rob, remembers from his youth? Or has it, too, been lost to the disease? And what of the others who might be out there, clinging to life, amongst the numerous islands of Scotland’s western coast?

Final Cover Design For ‘The Island At The End Of The World’

It’s been a while since I posted anything here, and that’s primarily because I’ve been struggling to get the third book in my For Those In Peril series of post-apocalyptic survival/zombie novels finalised for publication. The publication date was originally set for the 21st of September 2015, but due to problems with formatting the Kindle ebook edition, it’s now going to be released tomorrow (the 22nd of October) instead. This means that for three days, starting tomorrow, I’m going to be posting first-look extracts from The Island At The End Of The World on this blog.

In the meantime, I thought I’d take the opportunity today of posting the final cover design. In some ways, of the three books, this is my favourite cover. Partly because it’s relatively understated, but also because the island featured on the cover formed a major part of the view from my Grandparents house, situated as it was high above the sea on the west coast of Scotland.

So, what does the final cover look like?

Well, here’s the front:

And here’s the back:

And this is the full cover design.

I have to say, sitting on my shelf next to the previous two books in the series, these three covers from a rather nice set (even if I do say so myself!). And if you’re interested in reading the extracts from The Island At The End Of The World, which will become available tomorrow, watch this space!

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

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 Outbreak’ Wins Horror Category Of The 2015 Best Indie Book Award

After a rather disappointing day yesterday (I won’t go into the reason why), I arrived home and opened my Inbox to find an email from the Best Indie Book Award. This is an award which aims to help support Independent authors. There had been a slight delay in the announcement of this year’s awards, but then the email I’d been hoping for finally arrived. I opened it with anticipation and found, to my great pleasure, that The Outbreak had won the Horror category of the 2015 Best Indie Book Award!

This makes it the second year in a row that I’ve picked up this award (my first book, For Those In Peril On The Sea, won the same category last year).

Pleased as I am with this, it does put some pressure on the third book in the series, The Island At The End Of The World, which will be coming out in the next couple of weeks, to do the same in the 2016 awards. This, however, I think might be somewhat unlikely, not because it isn’t as good as the first two books in the For Those In Peril series, but because it’s quite a different type of book. Rather than being a full-on zombie novel, The Island At The End Of The World moves the story arc on from simply struggling to survive to rebuilding some sort of a life in a world which has been changed beyond all recognition by a virus that has turned most of humanity into zombie-like, cannibalistic killers. It still has some killer zombie scenes, but it’s more a tale of post-apocalyptic survival, and this makes it hard to fit into any one recognised genre.

Technically, post-apocalyptic survival books are science fiction, but few view them this way, especially when they contain zombies (or even zombie-like creatures). Unlike the previous books in the series, there’s not a strong enough element of death and destruction to be considered horror, and there’s too many zombies for it to be considered a straight-out thriller, and it’s this lack of easy categorisation which, I think, will make it struggle to do as well as the previous two books in any book competitions which I choose to enter it in. Not that I’m too bothered by this, after all, I write because I want to write, not just to win prizes in book awards, although it’s always a nice surprise when this happens – especially when you find out you’ve won at the end of an otherwise disappointing day!

A full list of this year’s winners of the Best Indie Book Awards can be found here.

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

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.

Schematic Of The world Of The ‘For Those In Peril’ Series Of Post-apocalyptic Novels

With the planned publication date for The Island At The End Of The World (the third book in my For Those In Peril series of inter-connected post-apocalyptic survival novels) rapidly approaching, I’ve been turning my attention to where the characters (and indeed other as yet unmet characters) in these books will go next.

To help me get an overview of the whole world that I’ve created so far, and that I’ll add to in the future, I’ve put together a schematic that shows all the different elements which I’ve created so far, and those that are still in the planning stages, fit into the overall timeline for the world, and indeed how they are all connected to each other, both directly, through the main storyline, and indirectly through shared minor characters, incidents and concepts.

So far, there are three books in the series itself (with the third one due out later this month), and two more planned: The Rise Of The Infected – a prequel to the whole series set around the original drug trial gone wrong that creates the infected in the first place – and The Voyage Of Salvation – which will be set across a time span reaching from the end of The Rise Of The Infected until a few years after The Island At The End Of The World).

In addition, there are a number of short stories, such as The Wall and The Girl At Little Harbour, which provide additional detail and exploration of elements in the world, some of which are included in my short story anthology, Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales Of The Undead.

I’m also intending to write a few more of these to flesh out a few plot points which, while tangential to the main story line of the series, I think are work exploring. This will include one titled The Last Log Of The Mingulay Seabird Research Station, and once you read the upcoming The Island At The End Of The World, you’ll quickly see both where it would fit in, and why it would be so interesting to write.

There are also a few additional short stories which, while set in the same world of the series, are not directly connected with any individual book. These include the connected pair of stories Rendezvous and The Need To Know, which along with The Girl At Little Harbour, are amongst my favourites of all the zombie-based short stories I’ve written.

Finally, there are other little spin-off projects which are connected to this world in a number of different ways. These include my Maths With Zombies blog, and the accompanying book, which should be out by Christmas, called The Little Book Of Zombie Mathematics, and the Moral Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse series of posts from this blog, which I’ll wrap up into a book at some point next year. In addition, I’ve managed to slip the basic zombie disease scenario from the world of the For Those In Peril series into an academic textbook I’m working, but I’m not quite to sure that really counts as part of the world itself.

How do all these different elements fit together? Well, here’s the schematic that will hopefully help explain it all (although I haven’t included the textbook in it as that’s not written under the same name):

As you can see it’s quite a world that is gradually building up, especially when you consider that it all started out with what was meant to be a single stand-alone book (the titular For Those In Peril On The Sea).

What’s more it might not even stop with this schematic. I’m tempted with the idea of writing a Young Adult book which would view much of the story lines of The Outbreak and The Island At The End Of The World from the point of view of the fourteen year old Sophie, and similarly put together a graphic novel which would tell the same events from the point of view of the seventeen year old Daz (one of my favourite characters from the whole series). In addition, it is very likely that more short stories will be added in due course as story ideas occur to me. However, whether I’ll actually get to complete all these projects, only time will tell!

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

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.

Ten Rules For Using The Internet – Some Advice For A Young Internet User

As a person who spends most of his days sitting in front of a computer, I’ve gradually become the resident ‘tech support’ for most of my family and friends, and it is because of this role that it has fallen to me to teach my 12 year old nephew how to use his first tablet computer so that he can do his own research for his school homework on his own.

Previously, he’s been restricted to using his father’s laptop from time to time to Google for information, but from today onwards he will have the whole internet at his finger tips whenever and wherever he wants. Well, not quite the whole internet, I’ve ensured that various restrictions are in place which should limit what he can actually access, but these are never perfect and it’s a bit of a scary prospect to think of all the information, good and bad, and all the other stuff, he could now potentially gain access without any adult supervision in the privacy of his own bedroom.

This was something that people of my parents generation never had to think about. Information was much more limited, and it was so much harder to access, and quite frankly, the level of effort required to find certain things made it just too difficult for all but the most dedicated, until you were old enough to do it legally, if you so wished to do so. Yet, now, kids can potentially access almost anything at the click of a button or the tap of a screen, so how do you stop them from doing something that could potentially screw them up, damage their future prospects or even get them into serious trouble?

One option is to ban them from accessing the internet, but that’s both unfair, and just not feasible. There will always be friends’ houses and unsupervised computers, so they will still be able to get online whether you like it or not.

Another is to just to let them head off into cyberspace unsupervised and unhindered, while keeping your fingers crossed, and let them work things out for themselves. While it’s a strategy that a lot of parents seem to follow, that, too, is unfair. The internet has a long memory, and, in my opinion, it’s not right to let kids go out and potentially do things that could haunt them for the rest of their lives without providing them with some warnings and advice before they do it (after all, would you like the stupidest thing your did on the spur of the moment when you were a teenager to be the first thing that pops up when a prospective employer types your name into Google just to check you out?).

So, I’ve chosen to take a middle path, and provide a set of basic rules that I hope will help explain how the internet works, and what is good to do, and what isn’t, without making him scared of using the internet in the first place. This, then, is how I’ve come up with my ten rules for using the internet which I will share with him. You may agree with some, and disagree with others, or even want to add your own (and I’d be happy to hear any suggestions that you might have), but they seem to me to be a good starting point for introducing young people to the power of the internet, without being too explicit or specific about what might be out there, waiting to trip up the unwary.

 

Ten Rules For Using The Internet

1. The internet contains an incredible amount of stuff. Much of it is good, but some of it is very, very bad. Make sure you stick to the good bits, and don’t get drawn into the bad bits. If you want to know whether something is a good bit or a bad bit, simply ask yourself if you would be happy with anyone looking over your shoulder and seeing what you are reading or looking at. If you would not be happy with someone seeing what you are reading or looking at, then you probably should not be reading it or looking at it in the first place.

2. Never assume that anything on the internet is private. It is not. It might not always seem like it, but the internet is a public place, just like a town centre, and you should not do anything on it that you would not be happy for others to see or to know about. As a general rule, if you would not do it in your local town centre, then do not do it on the internet.

3. A very large amount of the stuff that is on the internet is untrue (or, at least, it is the opinion of other people rather than being facts – no matter how strongly they claim that they are facts). This means that you always need to use your commonsense to filter what you read, hear or see in photographs and videos. Remember that photos and videos can be edited to show very different things that they originally contained. As a result, do not uncritically believe anything you come across, and always look to back it up with additional information from a truly independent data source. This is true of life off the internet, too.

4. Just as in real life, if something seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is, so do not click on links which are offering things that seem to be too good to be true. Nothing is for free, even on the internet, and you end up paying one way or another.

5. Don’t watch videos unless you are very sure that you want to see their content. You cannot unwatch videos once you have watched them, no matter how much you would want to. The same goes for looking at pictures, you cannot unview them once you have looked at them, and they can stay in your head for a very long time.

6. Never give out your home address, name, age or phone number to anyone you have only met on the internet, and never arrange to meet anyone who you do not already know in real life. This is because people on the internet are not always who they seem or pretend to be. Similarly, never give out your personal details to people who are offering you money. This is always a scam of some description or another, and it can get you into a lot of trouble.

7. Never click on a link in an email which asks you to put in your username or password, no matter what. These are always spam, or attempts to steal your identity. Instead, if you have an account with a specific company, always visit the site directly. As a general rule, if you are in any way in doubt about the validity of an email, do not click on a link in it. Instead, ask someone else for a second opinion.

8. Never send or post someone a photograph or video of yourself that you would not be happy with everyone in the world being able to see – forever. It might seem like a bit of harmless fun at the time, but once you post something on the internet, you no longer have control over it and it is almost impossible to get it back or get it taken down. As a result, always think twice about what you post. As a general rule, if you think, ‘My parents would kill me if they ever saw this …’, then don’t post it on the internet or share it with anyone else. Better still, do not take the picture or the video in the first place!

9. Always think twice before posting, messaging or emailing anything to anyone, and never send or post anything in the spur of the moment if you are angry. Once something is sent or posted, you cannot get it back. Similarly, never post anything on the internet that you would not want everyone else to read or to know about you (now or in the future), and never post anything about someone that you would not say to their face.

10. You are allowed to have a ‘get out of jail’ free card. This means that you can call me up and say, ‘Uncle Colin, I think I have screwed up …’. As long as you are honest about it, I can help you sort it out, and no one else necessarily needs to know about it. The important thing is that if you get into an awkward situation, that you never feel that you do not have a way out of it.

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

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 Unexpected Ways That E-Books Are Changing The World

I’ve yet to join the e-book revolution. This is primarily because I spend most of my days staring at screens of one form or another, meaning that the last thing I want to be doing when I’m trying to relax at the end of the day is to be looking at another one.

There’s also the fact that there’s nothing I like better than opening a honest-to-goodness real live book and feeling the crispness of the pages as I thumb through them, reading a sentence here and there, until I work out where I’d stopped the last time I’d put it down so I can start reading again. E-books just don’t have the same tactile stimulation and swiping left just doesn’t give me the same flutter as flicking through the pages of a new purchase, or an old friend, with a sense of anticipation building as I locate the first page and read the opening sentence.

This doesn’t mean I don’t see the advantage of e-books, or that I don’t appreciate how they’ve changed the world. They’ve led to a publishing revolution that has broken the strangle-hold that traditional publishers had on book production, and allowed people like me to become, in effect, their own publishing companies which connect direct with would-be readers. This is well-known, and widely recognised, but I think e-books are changing the world in other ways, too, and these are much more unexpected. What are these ways? Well, here’s six which give me the greatest pause for thought:

1. Book-burning has always been a rather pointless and, to me, sacrilegious, activity, but in the world of e-books, book burning is increasingly anachronistic. After all, who’s going to throw their brand new Kindle onto the pyre just because its got the latest volume to earn the ire of whichever self-appointed zealot has decided to get offended by it today? What will they do instead? Get together, with their placards and shout for mass deletings, urging each other on as they click OK to confirm that, yes, they really do want to remove it from their device? It just doesn’t quite have the same impact does it? Will they remember to also remove it from their cloud? If they don’t, it’ll simply re-appear on their electronic bookshelf each and every time their device is synced, haunting and taunting them no matter how hard they try to get rid of the offending article. Maybe that’s a good thing, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll eventually learn to love the written word and not to fear it.

2. With an e-book, no one knows what you’re reading. It used to be that you could sit on a train or in the park and judge the intellectuality of all those around you just by looking at the book clutched in their hands. Book covers are distinctive, and some you can spot from a mile away even without being able to read the title. My girlfriend and I play an occasional game of spotting the Harry Potter books on the shelves of people on property shows, and their unmistakable covers pop up so often, I’ve sometimes wondered whether the producers carry a set around with them so they can be taken out and used to fill in otherwise boring backgrounds. I’m not saying that such judgementalism is a good thing, but it is, nonetheless, rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

3. You can’t casually leave an e-book out on your coffee table, just to impress you friends with what you’re reading (or, more than likely, pretending to read). It used to be that you could get all sorts of social kudos by having just the right book laid out with just the right level of disregard to make it appear as though you’d only just put it down to answer the door and let them in. It might be A Brief History Of Time, or War And Peace, or even, to give a more recent example, Piketty’s Capital In The Twenty-First Century, depending on exactly who you wanted to impress, and why. In my student days, there was a certain type of man (not me, but I knew a few), who’d go out of their way to find out a girl’s favourite author, just so that they could have an appropriate book laid out when she came back to his place for coffee at the end of a date, hoping it would increase the chances of it leading to more. For better or worse, you just can’t do that with an e-book.

4. Gone are the days when you’d lend a friend a favourite book, only for it to come back spine broken, corners dog-eared where they’d turned them down instead of using a book mark or pages wrinkled from when they’d dropped it in the bath. Such offences signify a lack of respect for the property of others, and of the written word itself, and I wonder how many friendships were irrecoverably damaged by such careless treatment of borrowed books? This could never happen with an e-book, but then again, neither can lending a book in the first place, and that is a far greater shame. As I child, I remember the glorious feeling of an older, wiser someone pulling one of their precious tomes from their bookshelf, before thrusting it into my hands and saying ‘Read this.’. How many times did just the right book being lent at just the right time change how I viewed the world for the better? I don’t know, but I know I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it hadn’t happened when it did. This is, I think, one of the main reasons I cling to the printed word, keeping it within reach so I can do the same for the next generation, although by the time they’re old enough, they may well sneer at the quaint, old-fashioned idea of reading an actual book rather than its electronic counterpart. I hope not, but that does seem to be the way things are going.

5. Coming across other people’s notes in the margin in a second-hand book will no longer happen. I’m in two minds about this one. I’ve never been one for defacing books with scribbled thoughts alongside the author’s intended text, but I know the vicarious thrill of coming across the carefully penned note of another and feeling a deep connection across time and space with the unknown writer because it was exactly how I felt when reading those self-same words. Yes, you can add notes to e-books, highlight text and so on, but they aren’t passed on when you pass them on. In fact, the very concept of the second-hand book is alien to e-publications for they are all perfect first editions, every single one of them. They never age, they never fade, and they never get sold on so they can lead a second life in the hands of another.

6. E-books mean no more second-hand book shops. Yes, there will still be businesses selling books from the pre-electronic age (although most of those are probably as virtual as e-books these days, rather than consisting of bricks and mortar), but that’s not the type of shop I mean. Instead, I’m talking about ones selling battered paperbacks that have clearly seen better days, but that can be purchased for less than a buck, and yet still contain all the same power of the author’s carefully selected words as the did when new. They are places to loiter on rainy Sunday afternoons, or when, as a student, you’re avoiding lectures for classes you’re failing. They’re quirky places to take someone on a second date, or an alternative to the pub to meet would-be soul-mates in the first place. Such second-hand bookshops always have the same feel to them, no matter where you go in the world, and yet each has its own unique character, brought to it by the people who work there and the books that inhabit its shelves. I don’t know about you, but, for me, the world would be a much poorer place to live if they were to disappear forever, yet whether they can cling on in the age of the electronic books remains to be seen.

These are just few of the ways that electronic books are changing the world, and I’m sure there are many more, but these are the ones that make me stop and think.

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

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, I am ashamed to say, 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.

My New Normal – A YA Flash Fiction Zombie Story

What is normal? Not normal for everyone else, but normal for you? Is it dragging yourself from bed and hurriedly pulling on your uniform before taking yourself off to school? Is it hitting the snooze button on your alarm so you can get another five minutes in bed? Or getting up and feeding the kids before feeding yourself? Is it racing for the train at seven am? Or sitting in traffic for forty-five minutes just to get to a job you hate? Is it watching day time television rather than going to lectures? Or partying all weekend, then spending Monday to Friday recovering and looking forward to the next one? Is it caring for your grandmother in her dotage? Or running five miles each morning before class? Is it yoga and meditation? Or kickboxing and spin class? Is it watching soap operas? Or reading gossip magazines? Or posting everything you do on Facebook the moment you’ve done it? Is it completing the Sunday Times crossword, in ink, in twenty minutes flat? Or corn flakes for breakfast, tuna sandwiches for lunch, and meat and two veg for supper, no matter what? Is it cuddling up on the sofa after a long day, and feeling all warm and loved? Or reading a book all by yourself? Is it being happy? Or sad? Or just being you? That used to be my life, too, all of them, at one time or another, but that’s not my normality now. Instead, normal is running and fighting, and screaming and shouting; it’s fear and terror, interspersed with hiding and crying; it’s losing all those close to you, over and over and over again; it’s smashing in skulls and chain-sawing off limbs, just to stay alive; it’s blood and gore, and the stench of rotting flesh; it’s struggling each day, all day, every day without a break or even a pause; it’s not sleeping a wink for months on end, or even daring to close your eyes for a second. This is how life is now that the dead have risen from their graves and walk amongst us, hunting us, consuming us, devouring our very flesh whenever they get the chance. For me, for all of us, this is now what normal is.

***

Author’s Note: My girlfriend has suggested this bit of flash fiction would make a great start to a YA zombie novel. YA is a territory I rarely stray into, but looking back on this, I think she could be right. Now, all I need to do is to come up with the rest of the story …

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

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 Thing That Arrived In The Mail Today …

There’ something I’ve been waiting for, both eagerly and nervously, for the last week or so, and it’s the first proof copies of The Island At The End Of The World, the third book in my For Those In Peril series of post-apocalyptic survival novels. Then, today, it finally arrived. It was with great anticipation, and more than a little trepidation, that I tore open the package to get my first glimpse of how it looked, and even if I do say so myself, I think it looks great. The cover looks brilliant, with the profile of an island against a black and red apocalyptic sky, and while it’s a little skinnier, it fits nicely on the shelf along side the other books in the series.

Flicking through it, I can tell you that the layout inside is great, too, but seeing how everything looks and feels is only one of the reasons why I get proof copies printed out at this stage of the novel-writing process. This is also the first version of the book that I’ll share with my carefully hand-picked cohort of readers (well, actually it’s a rag-tag bunch of friends, former students, colleagues and relatives whose arms I can twist into reading my books before they’re finished). These readers are ones I trust to give me honest feedback on what they like and what they don’t, on what works and what falls flat, on whether they care if the characters live or die.

Over the next few days, these lucky (or possibly unlucky, depending on your point of view) few will find a small package drop through their letter boxes, and then it hopefully won’t be too long until I find out exactly what they think. Although this is the third time I’ve gone through this process now, I’m still rather nervous about what their responses will be. This is because The Island At The End Of The World is a quite different beast from the first two books in the series. It’s less about surviving, and more about how to start rebuilding a life and a community with some semblance of the luxuries the world used to have (like electricity, flushing toilets, and warm and cold running beer!). The infected still play an important role, but they are more of a residual background threat than the ever-present, fear-inducing creatures they were in the first two books (at least at first at any rate, but more than that I cannot, at this stage, say).

There’s also the fact that the narrator of the third book is neither Rob (the narrator from the first book in the series, For Those In Peril On The Sea) nor Ben (the narrator of The Outbreak, the second book), but instead, while it’s someone who readers of the first book will already be familiar with, it’s also someone who some readers will find quite unexpected. You see, the book is told from the point of view of CJ, the nineteen year old British girl who was one of the original crew of the catamaran from For Those In Peril On The Sea, along with Rob, Bill and Jon. Choosing to write from this perspective was a difficult decision to make, but looking back, I think it was the right one as it gives the third book a feel that is very different from the first two, without being so different that it doesn’t feel like it’s part of the same series.

Of course, as a forty-something man, writing from the perspective of a teenage girl, even one that would be considered an adult, was, I have to admit, tricky, but it’s been interesting to have to look at the world I’ve created for the series through a very different set of eyes than the older male characters that I’ve used to tell the first two books. For them, I could rely on my own experiences, but, as you’ll undoubtedly not be surprised to hear, I have absolutely no experience of being a teenage girl, let alone one caught up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

Worse than that, I’ve never even known many teenage girls. Certainly, when I was a teenage boy, I lacked the social skills to talk to the few girls I vaguely knew, and by the time I was old enough and confident enough to do so, I was well beyond my teenage years, and so were the girls I was mixing with. This meant that I’ve pretty much had to rely on inferences, and hints and suggestions from my girlfriend as to how a teenage girl might think or act in certain situations.

This was certainly the situation when I started writing The Island At The End Of The World, but then an opportunity arose that means I now know much more about how a girl around CJ’s age might react to the situations I was placing her in. This opportunity was teaching my best friend’s daughter how to drive. While I’ve known her since before she could walk properly, for various reasons (mostly to do with me moving to a different city for close to a decade and just not being around as much as when she was younger), I hadn’t spent much time with her in the last few years. Now I’m back living in my native Glasgow, it seemed only right that I should make the effort to spend some time with her again, and driving lessons seemed an opportunity that would suit both (any awkward silences, and there was likely to be many, could be filled simply with talking about driving, and occasionally me screaming at her to stop – although thankfully those situations are now much fewer and farer between than when we started out!). The end result is that we’ve been going out for driving sessions two or three times a week for about nine months now, it’s been fun to reconnect with her and see how the child I once knew so well is developing into the adult she’s well on her way to becoming.

However, there’s also been a happy side-effect of these driving lessons which I’d never intended to happen when I first offered to teach her to drive. This is that I now know a lot more about how someone like CJ, and especially a girl of her age, would see the world and respond to it. This is not to say that CJ’s character is based on my friend’s daughter, which she isn’t (although, and I’ve never actually told her this, there are more than a few elements of her from her younger years in Sophie, one of the main characters from the second book the series who also plays an important role in this third one), it’s just that these experiences have hopefully allowed me to create a much more believable view into CJ’s mindset than would have been possible without them.

So, now the book’s been written, I’ll spend the next couple of weeks wondering what people will think of it, and whether they, too, will think that I’ve got CJ’s character and point of view right or not. Once I get their feedback on this, and on all the other elements of the different characters, the plots, the twists and, of course, the zombie set-pieces, which are one of the most characteristic parts of the For Those In Peril series, then I’ll be ready to enter the home straight. This will involve working through the book again, incorporating their thoughts and suggestions where I agree with them, or amending the text where I don’t, but where it clearly needs work to get what I’m trying to say across. After that, it’ll be off to the editor I work with for a final proof-reading before sending it off to the printers. All this takes time, but at the moment, it’s looking like it will be on the shelves and ready to purchase by mid-September, and I’ve got the autumn equinox in mind as the actual release date (when you read the book itself, you’ll understand exactly why I find that such a fitting date for it to finally be published).

Hopefully, during this time, I’ll also find the time to get back to blogging on a more regular basis, and I’ll even see if I can get back to writing the odd short story or two. There’s been a growing pile of ideas for these that has been building up since last Christmas, and I’m looking forward to a point where I can get the time to dive into them so I can see how they’ll develop.

There’s one idea in particular that’s a spin-off from The Island At The End Of The World that I’m really keen to work on. Just like The Girl At Little Harbour (a short story spin-off from the first book in the series), it’ll fill in the back story of a character who, while dead by the time their paths cross with the characters in the book, still plays an important role in how it develops. It’s a back story which I think is just dying to be fleshed out (no puns intended there), and it’s one which I think will be both fun and interesting to write. Of course, once it’s written, I’ll be posting it here, so if I’ve piqued your interest, then just watch this space.

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

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.

Is Being Naked Better For You? Not In A Zombie Apocalypse, It’s Not!

I was struck by the title of a blog post today in a way I haven’t been for a while. What was the title? Is being naked better for you? Being zombie-minded, my instance mental response was: Not in a zombie apocalypse! After all, the last thing you’d want to be when being pursued by a horde of undead, hell-bent on tearing you to shreds, would be to be naked. That was my immediate response, but thinking about the implications of this post further, two other of my personal interests were piqued.

Firstly, until reading that article, I’d never realised that there was both a Naked Gardening Day AND a World Naked Bike Riding Day. I’m not too sure about either of them, and both sound like they could go horribly wrong, but it does fit into my general interest in the fact that everything seems to have its own dedicated day these days. I’ve covered this before on this blog, so I won’t go into details here, but I think I’m much more likely to take part in International Talk Like A Pirate Day than either of the above.

Secondly, and this is something I’m planning on touching on in the upcoming third book in the For Those In Peril series (called The Island At The End Of The World – watch this space for further details!), in a post-apocalyptic world, what on earth would we all do for clothes? For a while, we’d be able to scavenge from the existing stocks (or should that be socks?), but eventually these would run out and our last pair of pants would finally fall apart. What the heck are we all going to do then? Gardening naked might be fun to do once a year (and I’m guessing it must have been established by someone in the northern hemisphere so that it was early summer rather than the middle of winter), but it would be hell to have to do all year round!

I’ve argued before that knitting is a core post-apocalyptic survival skill, but knitting is only part of the process of making fleece from sheep into something warm and wearable. You’d also need to know how to get the fleece off the sheep (and, indeed, how to catch the sheep in the first place in order to do this) and how to turn it into yarn (which is not nearly as straight-forward as you might think and involves a whole heap of specialist tools you’ve probably never even seen before, let alone know how to use) before you could even get going with your knitting needles. Do you know how to do any of this?

Animal skins might make an alternative to clothes made from yarn, but again, how many of us actually know how to turn an animal inside out in just the right way so we can wear it as a jacket, or a nice warm pair of trousers, that doesn’t end up stink of rotting meat after a couple of days? I tried this type of thing once as a child, and it was a long, slow and rather disgusting process that required a lot of things you probably wouldn’t have close to hand in whatever post-apocalyptic world you found yourself in.

So what’s left? Not much really. This is one of those occasions where I don’t have a smart answer, and really, if the worst were to happen, we might find that acquiring the just right clothes to keep us warm and dry would actually be almost as critical as finding enough food, especially in the longer term. After all, as anyone who has ever gone camping with small children, or teenagers for that matter, knows, there’s nothing that saps morale faster than continually being cold and wet.

The only solution, really, is to start pulling the knowledge together now so that if you ever do find that you need to, you’d be able to make your own clothes from scratch. That way, if civilisation ever collapsed, you’d undoubtedly find your skills in great demand, and you’d probably never have to risk your neck going out and foraging amongst the marauding zombies ever again. After all, if you’d been out in the woods for many, many weeks, living hand-to-mouth, what wouldn’t you give for a nice pair of warm, clean woollen socks to keep your feet warm and toasty for the first time in what would seem like forever?

And with that, I’m off to learn how to turn sheep into woolly jumpers. I may be some time!

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

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.

Keeping Fit While Fighting Zombies …

As a writer, I spend a lot of my time sitting in front of a computer, sometimes writing, sometimes just staring at a blank screen waiting for inspiration to hit me around the back of the head with a baseball bat. Either way, it’s not a particularly active life style, and it’s certainly not one that will help you develop the level of fitness you’d need to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Herein lies my conundrum. I know I should try to keep myself in shape, but dragging myself down to the gym is too disruptive to my writing when I finally get into the zone and the words and ideas start flooding out. Running works, and is easier to fit in, but pounding the streets is ever-so-boring. If only, I often wonder, there was a way to keep myself inside the zombie zone while keeping fit and making running a lot more fun?

Well, it turns out I’m not the only person who has wondered this, and others have not only got there first, but they’ve actually done something about it. What have they done? Created an app, of course! The app is called Zombies, Run!, and it allows you to play an interactive zombie apocalypse-based game, including running away from pursuing zombies, as part of your regular (or, in my case, irregular) running routine.

I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet, but if it lives up to its promise, then I could see this being something I’d use on a regular basis as it would be the perfect way to enliven an otherwise boring activity. The fact that it would help me stay fit would be an added bonus, and you never know, it might also inspire me to write better zombie scenes as it’ll give me a more personal experience of what it’s like to be pursued down the street by a zombie horde.

Of course, I’ll need to make sure I don’t get too drawn into it as I don’t think ‘I thought she was a zombie!’ would work as a defence for accidentally knocking a little old lady over when she came up behind me unexpectedly during my cool down session. Maybe it should come with its own t-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Danger: Runner In Zombie Apocalypse Mode – Approach At Your Own Risk!’, just to make sure others know you’re immersed in a very different world from the boring, everyday one they’re inhabiting.

Anyway, once I’ve had a chance to give this app a go, I’ll report back and let you know if it really does live up to expectations. In the meantime, it’s back to writing. After all, there’s a lot more scary thing than a zombie horde pursuing me at the moment, and that’s a deadline for getting my next book finished. It’s rapidly approaching, and there’s still a lot of work left to do, but at least the end is finally in sight.

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

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.