Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 5

Why I Like Going To Author Events

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been to three different author events. These events are something I try to get to whenever I get the chance. Even if I’m not a particular fan of the author themselves, or their work, there’s something about listening to another author talk about their work that always leaves me feeling like I’ve learned something new about what it means to be a writer.

For those of you not familiar with author events, they typically consist the author talking about whatever book they happen to be promoting, and maybe reading a few sections from it, before opening the floor to questions from the audience. This means that they give you the unprecedented opportunity to pick the brains of a famous author.

The three events I went to recently all happened to be Scottish crime writers, and it was interesting to hear three very different takes on how to approach the writing process and where ideas came from. However, I think the most insightful words came from Stuart MacBride in response to a question from a young woman about how you go about writing your first book. There was a brief pause, before he replied: ‘Sit your arse down, and write a damn book!’

Now, at first this may seem flippant, and to some extent it was, but he went on to qualify exactly what he was meaning. The only way to learn how to write is to sit down and write something. Then you can read it over, and decide what you like about it, and what you didn’t, and then make sure you don’t make the same mistakes in the next thing you write. This, indeed, is the key to writing a book. Sit down, write it, learn from your mistakes, and start the process all over again.

You see, the first published book by any author is rarely the first book they ever wrote. In fact, this is a basis of a question I often ask other writers at their author events: How many books did you write before the first book you got published? Having asked this question of a lot of authors, I know that many wrote three or four more or less complete novels, before they wrote the one that finally landed them a publishing contract. You might think of this as a waste of time and effort, but it’s not, it’s just part of the apprenticeship that all authors must go through. And such early works are rarely wasted as many authors will return to them at a later date and turn it into a more complete piece that is then published.

There’s also something about watching the way authors hold themselves in front of an audience that you can learn a lot from. In all the events I’ve been to, I’ve never once seen an author take themselves too seriously. In fact, many seem to take an approach that is closer to stand-up comedy than to any serious introspection about their life as a writer.

This, I think, is important. To be a writer, you just cannot take yourself too seriously. There will always be people who don’t like your work, who will criticise you, who will knock whatever you write, and you cannot let this get under your skin. Yet, this can only happen if you take yourself, and your work, too seriously.

This is particularly important for writers who are just starting out. While it may feel like it at times, writing isn’t a matter of life and death, and you cannot spend all your energy trying to second guess what others may think of it. All you can do is write the best damn book that you can, and hope that others like it as much as you do. If they do, great. If they don’t, it’s not the end of the world. Pick yourself up, brush yourself down, get your arse back in the chair and start again.

This leads onto the last thing that I’ve learned from author events. If you want to be a writer, you have to get used to rejection. Writing is one of the few careers where you can guarantee you will get rejected. A lot. Even if you’re a famous writer. This is illustrated nicely by something said by another Scottish crime writer, Peter May, at his recent event in Glasgow. Amongst other things, he’s now famous for writing what is known as the Lewis Trilogy. These are three books set in a remote Scottish island and are deeply woven into the fabric of the local community and landscape. Even though he was already a relatively well-known author at the time, the first of these books was rejected by every publisher in the UK, and only saw the light of day when he showed it to his French publisher after it had lain in a drawer, gathering dust, for three or four years. They have since sold in excess of several million copies all around the world.

What can you learn from this? Publishers can be surprisingly poor at spotting good books, and the fact they turn you down is often absolutely no reflection on the novel you have written. This means that you have to be confident in what you’ve written, and be willing to pick yourself up every time you’re knocked down, and start the whole submission process again with a different publisher. And then again. And again. And again.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all rejected manuscripts are great, overlooked masterpieces. Many will be pure dross, but as the writer, that’s something you can control, and as I said before, it’s up to you to write the best damn book that you can. After that, everything else is a bit of a lottery, and as with any lottery, the more tickets you have in it, the higher your chances of hitting the jackpot, so if one particular novel just isn’t getting you the attention you know your work deserves, then file it away, write another one, develop your writing skills, write a better book that the first one, and keep your fingers crossed that this time it will be the one. If it is, you can always come back, brush the dust off your other manuscripts and have another go.

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

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

The Creatures In The Fog – A Short Horror Story

The greyness swirls around me, so thick, it feels like I could reach out and grab it. It had been bright sunlight when we���d entered the forest, or maybe that should be when we were forced to flee into it, but within minutes the fog started to descend. At first, it was just the slightest tendrils of mist, snaking between the trees as we ran for our lives, but as time passed, the tendrils started to merge, forming ghostly islands that brought the visibility down to a few hundred feet. That was okay, it was still far enough to see the creatures that were pursuing us, allowing us to stay ahead of them, to stay beyond their reach, but then the misty islands began to drift together and coalesce into a fog that grew denser and denser until I could barely see my hand in front of my face.

In fog like this, running���s no longer an option: the forest floor���s littered with fallen branches, rotting trunks and gnarled roots, just waiting to trip the unsighted, twisting ankles and snapping legs; yet stopping���s out of the question, too. We can hear the creatures pounding feet as they close in on us, but we can���t make out each other, let alone tell whether the shifting shapes we can see moving amongst the fog are friend or foe. All we can do is blunder forward, hoping we���re heading away from our pursuers, and not towards them, as we grope our way, lost and disoriented, through the oppressive grey blanket which encircles and ensnares us. Voices echo through the woodland, muted by the fog, making it impossible to tell how near, or how far away, they are. You can tell the people speaking are scared, though; even the fog can���t swallow the fear with which their words are spat. Then comes the first scream: it sounds close and I can see shadows moving just beyond my limited field of view. Suddenly, it stops: the scream, I mean; it doesn���t fade out, it just ends, and that���s when I know the creatures are among us.

I search around for something I can use to defend myself, cursing the fact that the creatures had surprised as we slept. There���d been no time to prepare, not even time to grab the axe I kept under my pillow for just such an eventuality. They���d swarmed out of nowhere and over our camp in seconds, leaving us no choice, but to run or die. Now, it seemed this apparent choice had been an illusion: the real choice had been die there and then, or run and die later, enveloped by a fog so thick it seems almost unnatural; and for all I know, it is. I���d been a man of science once, but since the creatures had first appeared in my life, in all our lives, I���d been questioning everything I���d ever believed to be true.

There���s another scream, and the sound of someone struggling, fighting for their life. Unexpectedly, the fog lifts, and for a moment I can see them: a man I don���t recognise wrestling with one of the creatures, doing his best to hold it off, then another pounces on him and together they drag him to the ground. Just as the blood starts spurting from the man���s neck, the fog descends again and swallows the creatures that are now feasting on his still-writhing body.

I bend down, feeling around on the ground for something, anything I can use to defend myself. At first, I find nothing, them my hand fastens onto a stout branch, no doubt brought down in a winter storm. I don���t know how strong it is or how long it has been lying there, but it has to be better than nothing. As I straighten up, a shadowy figure races towards me through the gloom and I ready myself to swing. I strain my eyes, trying to work out if it���s one of my companions, or one of the creatures, but there���s no way I can tell: all I know is that it���s coming straight at me, fast. I watch it close: twenty feet, ten feet, eight, five, but still I can���t see what it is. In desperation, I swing, catching the figure across the side of the head. It yells as it goes down, and that���s when I know the figure is human: the creatures never make a noise, no matter what they���re doing.

I crouch down to help the man up, but as soon as I am close enough to see his face, I know there���s no point: the side of his head is shattered beyond recognition, and I can see grey, greasy flecks of brain mixing with the blood that���s seeping down his face. I���m revulsed and I feel my stomach heave, but I can see more figures moving through the fog all around me, so there���s no time to reflect on it, and I force the burgeoning feeling of self-loathing, sparked by what I���ve just done, to the back of my mind. I peer through the greyness, praying for another break in the fog, but it remains as thick as ever and still I can���t make out what the figures are. I raise my makeshift weapon again, but now I���m hesitant. I don���t want to make another mistake, to accidentally kill another person when there are so few of us left. My mind races: is it better to strike out before I���m sure, and risk killing someone else? Or, the next time one comes close, should I wait until I���m certain, and risk being attacked before I can react? Neither option���s palatable, but they���re the only two which are available to me.

Another figure starts to close, but what should I do? As I adjust my grip on the branch I���m holding, I feel it slip in my sweat-soaked palms. I call out, but there���s no reply. Does that mean it���s a creature? Or is it just someone running so hard that they���ve no spare breath to reply? The silence tells me nothing. I need to make a decision, but my brain just keeps going round in circles: to risk killing, or to risk being killed? Which should I chose? The fog swirls and flows around me, around the trees, around the approaching figure, but still I can���t make out what it is: human or creature? Creature or human? It���s now only twenty feet away, what should I do? Ten feet, I shout again ��� Still nothing. I need to make a decision one way or the other, and I need to do it now, but I don���t want to make another mistake. Eight feet. Do something. Anything. My mind���s yelling at me, but I���m paralysed with indecision. Five feet. It���s now or never. Three feet. Aaagghhhh!

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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.

Happy New Year … Now Where’s My Hover Board?

Those of you with long memories (or who are fans of obscure film facts), will know that this year, 2015, is the year that the film Back To The Future II was set in, and that should mean we are in a world where everyone finally has their own personal hover boards. Yet, despite the occasional hover board hoax, we are still a long way from having real hover boards which can be use any where, although we are getting closer.

This, then, is the danger for writers who wish to write books or films which are set at a specific date in the future. When the work is originally created, the chosen date may seem a long way off, but when it finally does roll around, there will be no end of people to point out exactly what the author got wrong about their predictions for the future (and, much more rarely, what they got right).

Think about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. That year must have seemed an eternity away when the book was written in 1948 (with Orwell simply reversing the last two digits to get his future date) but when 1983 finally came to an end, there was everyone ready to point out exactly where Orwell’s predictions failed. The thing is, I don’t think Orwell necessarily got it wrong, I think he was just a few years ahead with many of his ideas. After all, look at the world we now live in, with what seems like constant war, near universal surveillance of everything we do (all in the name of our own security), the biased media coverage, the preference for personality amongst our politicians rather than substance, and western populations kept placid on a diet of meaningless reality TV (one of which, Big Brother, even takes its name from Orwell’s book!).

The same goes for the Terminator series of films. In the second film in this franchise, the date when Skynet becomes self-aware, so marking the start of the fall of humanity to the machines, is given as the 29th of August 1997, yet on that date, there was nothing even remotely close to sentient machines, and even the web was still struggling to find its feet. Of course, by the time of the third film, Judgement Day had been shifted to 25th July 2004, and then to 21st April 2011, and still humanity has yet to find itself having to fend off sentient machines which are hell-bent on our destruction. This having been said, in 2014, no lesser a person than Stephen Hawkings was warning that this could be a real possibility in the near future. Maybe he was being serious, or maybe he was just having a bit of fun, but we are still along way from living in a world of sentient machines (sometimes I’m not even convinced that we live in a world of sentient human beings!).

So is this a bad thing for writers? Well, if you don’t mind lots of people pointing fingers at you and telling you exactly what you got wrong in exquisite detail, then no. If anything, you might find that you get an unexpected spike in sales as the date where your book or film is set as people revisit it, just to see how wrong you got things.

However, if like me, you would likely find this type of rather pointless scrutiny irksome, then it’s probably best to avoid the mention of specific years as settings for your works of futuristic fiction. This doesn’t mean that you can’t still use specific dates, just that you need to leave the year off. A great example of this is found in John Wyndham’s The Day Of The Triffids. Here, while the 8th of May is given as the day the world ended, no specific year is given (although some people have tried to work it out given that he says this date is a Wednesday). This means that The Day of the Triffids, rather than being criticised for getting things wrong, can actually be looked at as predicting certain key elements of what is our present, but was Wyndham’s future. He certainly foreshadows genetic engineering, and the risks that it could pose if genetically engineered plants escaped into the wild and were allowed to run amok. There are also worries about fuel and the greed of big business, as well as concerns that our modern way of life is uneasily balanced on the edge of a precipice into which it could slip if given even the slighted nudge. This means that The Day of the Triffids holds up much better to modern readers than something like Nineteen Eighty-Four, which, while futuristic when it was written, now appears somewhat dated, even if some of his predictions have, more or less, come true in the years since his story was set.

Anyway, to get back to the main topic of this posting, writers of anything set in the future need to be very careful about setting things in a particular year. This is not to say that this is something you shouldn’t do, just that you need to be aware that if you do, you may well live long enough to regret it when the year you have chosen finally comes, and everyone starts point out exactly which bits you got wrong. Now, just to emphasise the point one final time, happy 2015 … now, WHERE’S MY HOVER BOARD???

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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.

Santa Claus Versus The Zombies – A Dark Christmas Tale For Readers Of All Ages

T���was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, nothing was stirring, not even a mouse. The same could not be said, however, for the graveyard next door. Every year, Tommy stayed up for as long as he could, excitedly peeking out of his bedroom window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus as he travelled the world delivering presents, and every year, Tommy fell asleep before Santa arrived. Tommy would wake next morning, his head freezing cold where it had drooped against the window pane as he dozed, to find a bulging stocking hanging from the end of his bed, but not a hide nor hair of Santa Claus himself.

This year, Tommy was determined to stay awake long enough for Santa to arrive. He was a year older now, and he was sure that this year he���d finally be able to do it. Yet, despite his best efforts, as the clock struck midnight, Tommy could feel himself starting to nod off. Trying to hold the inevitable sleep back for as long as possible, Tommy stretched and yawned. Then a movement outside caught his eye, and instantly he was wide awake. At first, Tommy wasn���t quite sure what the movement was, but one thing was for sure: it wasn���t Santa Claus. The ground outside was covered in snow, turning the usually scary looking cemetery behind Tommy���s house into a winter wonderland: frost coated the trees, and the grass, and the grave stones, making them glimmer in the moonlight, yet underneath the snow, something was stirring.

Suddenly, a long thin object thrust itself upwards through the snow. At first, Tommy watched the object curiously as it moved back and forth, then, to his horror, he realised it was a bony, wrinkled hand. The hand reach skywards, opening and closing as it grasped at the cold night air. A moment later, it was joined by another, and together the two hands pulled, first a skull-like head, then a decaying body from the ground. Tommy stared, both terrified and mesmerised by what was happening just beyond the end of his garden. As Tommy looked on, the bloated, rotting body finally pulled itself free of the frozen ground and staggered to its feet. It shuffled through the snow, dragging one foot behind it. Tommy watched it for a minute: it didn���t seem to be going anywhere in particular, just wandering aimlessly between the grave stones, touching each one as it passed. Then Tommy noticed the snow lying on another grave began to tremble, and a head started to emerge. Then another. And another. So shocked was he, that it took Tommy a few seconds to notice the pattern: every time the first zombie (and what else could it possibly be, but a zombie?) touched a head stone, the body buried in that grave clawed its way from the ground and started to follow it.

After ten minutes, Tommy found he was no longer frightened. Instead, he could feel laughter building inside him. When it had just been one stumbling re-animated corpse, it had been scary, but now there were so many of them, all playing follow-the-leader as they trailed after the first zombie, shuffling and staggering, bumping into each other, slipping on the ice and the snow, and falling over when they bounced off each other. It was hilarious and Tommy couldn���t help but think that if this was all that zombies were capable of, they weren���t really anything to be afraid of after all.

Then, off in the distance, high in the night���s sky, Tommy saw something else. At first, it seemed like it was just another twinkling star, but slowly it grew bigger and bigger, and Tommy knew that stars didn���t do that. Tommy wasn���t the only one to have notice the rapidly approaching object: the zombies were looking up, too, letting out mournful moans as they reached towards it.

As Tommy watched, the object came closer and closer until it was near enough for him to see what it was, and his heart leapt: it was a sleigh being pulled by eight powerful reindeer. With the night being clear, there was no need for Rudolph to be leading the way, and Tommy tried to remember the names of the other reindeer: there was Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, Donner, and ��� what was the last one again? Tommy always had trouble remembering that last name. His brow furrowed for a moment and then it came to him: Blitzen! Yes, that was it. By then, the sleigh was close enough that Tommy could make out the plump man with the long, white beard and red suit who was holding the reins and shouting orders to the reindeer. Slowly the sleigh turned and started to descend, and Tommy realised to his delight that it was coming into land on the soft, fresh snow that covered his back yard.

A second later, and Tommy���s delight turned to terror: the zombies had seen Santa Claus too, and they were now racing towards the wall that divided Tommy���s yard from the cemetery. Hang on, thought Tommy, racing? That couldn���t be right. He closed his eyes tight shut and shook his head before opening them again: sure enough the zombies which had, until then, been bumbling around aimlessly, were now moving fast and efficiently across the frozen ground. What on Earth, Tommy wondered, was going on?

As Santa���s sleigh touched down, the first of the zombies made it over the wall and rushed across the snow towards where the sleigh had come to a stop. By this time, Santa���s head was buried in his big black sack, searching for something, and that was when Tommy went cold: Santa hadn���t seen the zombies. More and more of them were pouring over the wall with every passing second, and still Santa Claus was rummaging through his sack, unaware of the danger that was descending upon him.

Tommy knew he had to do something. He couldn���t, after all, be the kid who���d let Santa get eaten by zombies, he���d never live it down, but what could he do? The house was locked and he couldn���t reach the key to open the back door. Even if he could, what hope did Tommy have against all those zombies? Then it struck him: all he needed to do was warn Santa that the zombies were coming. Santa, after all, had flying reindeer, he could easily escape from the yard before the zombies got to him. Tommy banged on the window, but Santa didn���t look up. He banged again, still nothing. Finally, in desperation, Tommy pulled the window open and yelled at the top of his voice. ���Santa, there���s zombies coming! They���re right behind you!���

Santa suddenly shot upright, and looked round. He saw Tommy and waved, a jolly smile on his rosy-cheeked face, still unaware of the rapidly approaching danger. Tommy shouted again and gesticulated wildly at the zombies, which, by then, were only a few feet from the back of Santa���s sleigh. Santa frowned for a second and then slowly turned. When he saw the zombies, he froze, but only for a moment, then he sprung into action, grabbing the reins and yelling to his reindeer, urging them on, but nothing happened. That was when Tommy realised his warning had been too late, the zombies had already got a hold of the sleigh and no matter how hard the reindeer strained, they couldn���t manage to pull the heavily laden sleigh and all the zombies that were now clinging onto it.

Tommy watched in horror as Santa looked round desperately for something he could use to defend himself, but he found nothing. This was unsurprising; after all, the worst thing Santa Claus usually had to deal with was when the elves drank too much eggnog as they were loading the sleigh and started fighting with each other, and drunken elves weren���t exactly difficult to deal with. As Santa started frantically digging through his sack of presents, searching for anything he could use to fight off the zombies, Tommy could see the fear in his eyes. Santa glanced up and seeing the zombies just a few feet from him, he gave up searching for a weapon and, deciding to hide rather than fight, he dived out of sight. The zombies weren���t fooled and they started clambering on to the sleigh as they hunted for their intended prey. Tommy was aghast: surely there was no way Santa could possibly survive? This, Tommy thought, wasn���t how Christmas was meant to end, for without Santa Claus to hand out presents to the children who���d spent all year being nice rather than naughty, what was the point of Christmas?

Then, out of the corner of his eye, Tommy saw a red blur streaking across the heavens and towards the ground. A moment later, it landed with a heavy thud behind the zombies and Tommy instantly realised who it was: it was Rudolf. The lone reindeer pawed the ground and snorted loudly, causing some of the zombies to turn and run towards him. Despite the undead that were rapidly closing on him, Rudolph bravely held his ground. Then, when the zombies were only a few feet away, Rudolf lowered his head and charged, running the closest zombie through with the tips of his razor-sharp antlers. Once he was sure it was dead, Rudolf threw the once-more deceased zombie to the ground, but he didn���t stop there. Rudolf charged again and again, throwing zombies this way and that, breaking arms and cracking skulls.

After what seemed like an age, but couldn���t have been more than a minute, the zombies realised they were beaten. Those that could still run, tried to retreat towards the safety of the graveyard, but Rudolph wasn���t about to let them get away so easily. He chased after them, slashing at them with his antlers and trampling the last of them under foot. Soon, nothing was moving that shouldn���t really be moving in the first place, and the lone reindeer, with his bright red nose glowing in the darkness, trotted across to the sleigh and let out a gentle whinny.

Tommy held his breath, wondering if somehow Santa could have survived, then he emerged, crawling out from under the seat where he���d been curled up in a desperate attempt to remain beyond the grasping hands of the attacking zombies. Santa straightened up, adjusting his clothes and brushing stray flecks of glitter from his beard. He patted Rudolph���s nose, before leaning forward and removing a withered arm that had become wedged in Rudolf���s antlers. Santa smiled, knowing his old friend had just saved his life, and tossed the arm into the snow. He looked up at Tommy, and tipped his fur-lined hat in thanks towards the young boy, before pulling on the reins and taking off once more, Rudolph following closely after.

Tommy watched until Santa, his sleigh and all the reindeer, including Rudolf, had disappeared into the night���s sky before turning his attention to the devastation which had been left in his back yard: there were bodies, or what was left of them, everywhere. That, Tommy thought to himself, would take a lot of explaining when his parents woke up and saw the mess, and he really wasn���t sure they���d believe him if he told them what had just happened. Maybe he���d be better off not telling them anything about what he���d seen, and instead left them to try to work out what happened when they got up the following the morning. Satisfied that this was the right thing to do, Tommy decided he���d better go to bed before anyone discovered he was still up and started asking awkward questions.

That was when Tommy realised that in his rush to get away after Rudolf had saved him, Santa had forgotten to leave him his presents. At first Tommy was upset, but after giving it some thought, he realised that one small boy missing out on his presents this one year was a small price to pay for saving Santa���s life from the zombies. Tommy sighed, and turned away from the window; that was when he saw the over-stuffed stocking hanging at the foot of his bed. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief: how on Earth had Santa managed that? Then it dawned on Tommy and he smiled happily to himself: while Santa might be just as scared of zombies as the rest of us, he���s still magic.

Happy Christmas!

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A PDF of this story can be downloaded from here.

This is the third year that I’ve done a special Christmas-themed zombie short story for the readers of my blog. If you haven’t read the previous ones, you can find the Christmas 2013 story, titled The Office Christmas Party – The Tale Of A Christmas Night Out That Goes Horribly Wrong, here, and the the Christmas 2012 story, titled Waiting Up For Santa Claus – A Cautionary Tale, 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.

Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Microburts and Heatwaves: How Weather Can Add Texture To Zombie Apocalypose Novels

Rightly so, most zombie apocalypse novels concentrate on getting the zombie set pieces spot on, making them both mesmerizing and terrifying. However, in order to make a zombie novel truly riveting, there has to be more than that to them. There has to be good characterisation, there has to be conflict, there has to be landscape, and, finally, there has to be texture.

What do I mean by texture? Well, texture is all those extra additions which make a zombie novel seem real. They are little bits here and there that remind the reader that this isn’t just a fantasy story, but instead that it’s something which is happening in a real world, very much like the one they, themselves, inhabit.

One of the best ways I have found of adding texture is through the use of weather. In most parts of the world, the weather changes day by day, hour by hour, and, in some places, minute by minute, and by referencing this, you can give the reader a greater understanding of the mood of the story, and the characters within it.

Really, there’s three ways that you can use weather to add texture. The first is comparative weather. This is where the weather in a specific scene matches the feelings of the scene itself, helping to emphasize and amplify the internal mood of the characters and any conflict they are facing. This can be the use of rain or drizzle when the characters are feeling run down or depressed, sunshine when they are feeling happy or a sudden storm when their luck unexpectedly shifts. Comparative weather is very tempting to use, but it should always be used sparingly. If you use it too frequently, then it quickly becomes clich��d.

The second is contrasting weather. We’ve all experienced a time in our lives when we’ve been in the foulest of foul moods on the brightest of bright sunny days, or been unable to stop smiling, despite the fact that it’s pouring with rain, soaking us to the skin. These are examples of contrasting weather, and when used in a novel, they can really help to bring it alive. This is because while they’re at odds with the situation the characters might find themselves in, everyone can remember a time when they felt this way themselves, and this makes the characters seem more real. With contrasting weather, you can have characters breaking out into laughter in the middle of a rainstorm because they’re ecstatic at just having escaped from a dangerous situation, or downcast and depressed as the sun rises to reveal a clear blue summer sky because they have just lost one their number to the undead. Again, as with comparative weather, contrasting weather has to be used sparingly, or it will quickly become old.

The final way of using weather is perhaps my favourite, and it’s to use weather as an additional element that the characters have to deal with. Fighting off marauding zombies is one thing, but how much more scary is it to have to be fighting them off in the middle of a hurricane, when the characters also have to struggle against the storm as well? Or what about being attacked by zombies in a fog-filled forest, where you can barely see more than a few feet in any direction? That would be terrifying, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t know if that blurred shape coming towards you was a friend or foe until it was almost too late. Then there are thunderstorms and tornadoes, which can unexpectedly tear down defences, letting zombies into otherwise safe encampments, or a ice-storm that abruptly turns the world your characters inhabit into a white hell and makes running away all but impossible. And what about heatwaves? Can you imagine being huddled together in a small, airless room with zombies hammering on the boarded up windows as the mercury in the thermometer hits 110 degrees? Or sweating away in quickly cobbled together zombie-proof armour on a scorching summer’s day as you try to both hold back a marauding horde of undead and not pass out from heat stroke? If used correctly, all of these possibilities would add to the tension of any given scene by providing that extra layer of information and visualisation.

These are just a few of the possibilities that are out there when it comes to using weather to add texture to a zombie novel, and with a bit of searching, you can always find just the right bit of weather for any given situation. There is the weird and the wonderful, things like weather bombs, or microbursts or white squalls. There are clouds of every different variety from wispy, feather-like stratus to the ever-threatening cumulonimbus or the out-right bizarre mammatus clouds that always make me feel like the end of the world is coming. There’s zephyrs, and breezes, and gale force winds. There’s sleet and snow and hail and rain (the Inuit might, or might not, have 47 words for snow, but here in Scotland we have at least twice as many for all the different types of rain you can get). Really, the options are endless.

Of course, as with any literary device, weather has to be use sparingly. After all, what you are writing is meant to be a zombie novel and not a weather forecast, but get it just right and it will bring a level of reality and believability to your story that you will find difficult to generate in any other way.

So how to you get it just right? Well, there’s no hard and fast rules here. What you are looking to achieve is having just enough references to the weather to paint the right pictures in the readers head without them ever consciously noticing what’s going on. This means that weather references need to be subtly woven into the rest of the story until they seem such an integral part of it that the reader couldn’t imagine a scene without it. This is not always easy to achieve, but if you can get it right, it can pay off big time because of the depth and the texture it brings to your writing.

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

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

Why, As A Writer, I Donate To Wikipedia

As a writer, I spend almost as much of my time researching my books, stories and blog posts as I do actually writing them. Over the years, I’ve needed to check out things like the population of Miami, the year The Day Of The Triffids was published, the names of characters in the film 28 Days Later, how hurricanes work, what a pneumothorax is and how to treat it, how diseases are transmitted, what the symptoms of rabies are and how long they take to develop, what a pyrocumulonimbus cloud is , how to use a medieval weapon called a pike (which, I found out, is potentially very effective against zombies!), and many other weird and wonderful things.

Like many writers, when I need to find out something new, or remind myself of something I’ve forgotten, I often turn, in the first instance, to Wikipedia. In the last few years, it has gained a reputation as the place to find out anything you need to know, or at least to provide a starting point for looking deeper into things. I also routinely link to Wikipedia articles within my blog posts when I want to point people in the direction of more information on any given topic.

One of the main strengths of Wikipedia is that it is completely independent and is self-funded by donations from its users. This means that there’s no commercial bias, no distracting advertisements, and no risk that it will ever push information to the fore simply because someone has paid them to do it.

This is not to say that Wikipedia is perfect, I would be the first to admit it has its faults, but its funding model keeps its information free to anyone who wishes to access it, and as untainted by commercialisation as it is possible to be in the modern world, and this is important to me as a writer. I need to known that the information I find during my research is as unbiased and accurate as I can get. Only then can I go on and write the articles, blog posts, short stories and books that I want to be able to write, while still having a firm foot in the factual. I also need to know that if I point people towards a web page or site for more information, that it will give them that information rather than try to sell them something.

In many ways, Wikipedia has become the living embodiment of the concept created by Douglas Adams in the 1970s of an electronic guidebook that contained information on anything you could ever want to ask (and a few things you mightn’t want to!). It might not have the comforting message of Don’t Panic! on the cover, but none-the-less Wikipedia has become our generations very own Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Indeed, Douglas Adam’s went as far as creating his own version of this type of universal, user-driven database of knowledge, H2G2, launching it two years before Wikipedia was even founded.

For these reasons, once a year, around this time, I make a donation to help support Wikipedia and help keep it running on its current non-commercial basis. The amount I donate depends on exactly what type of year I’ve had, but I feel it’s important that in some way, I give back to this resource that has given me, as a writer, so much over the previous 12 months.

If as a writer, you use Wikipedia as part of your research on a regular basis (or indeed if you’re not a writer, but regularly use Wikipedia never-the-less), I would ask you to consider doing the same. It doesn’t have to be a lot, and in some ways the giving is more important than the amount, but consider giving back to this resource which many writers, and indeed many other people, rely on so much to provide them with unbiased, accurate information about almost any subject they wish to learn more about.

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

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

How To Rebuild The World After A Zombie Apocalypse

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how it might be possible to re-build civilisation if it were ever to collapse. This has been inspired largely by the fact that I’ve been spending a lot of time working on The Island At The End Of The World, the third book in my For Those In Peril series.

The first book concentrated on the discombobulation brought on by returning to civilisation and finding it has, for some reason, disappeared, while the second focussed on what it would be like to suddenly find yourself in the middle of an ongoing apocalyptic event.

The third book, the one I’m currently working on, has, for its main theme, rebuilding lives, communities and civilisations after the immediate danger from an apocalyptic event has passed, and it’s a theme that raises a lot of interesting issues.

In the modern world, it is very rare to find one person who knows how to make something from start to finish. A mechanic, for example, might know how to put the parts of an internal combustion engine together, but he’s unlikely to know how to make the parts in the first place, or how to extract ore from the ground and turn it into the raw materials you need to assemble before you can even think about making the parts. It is also unlikely that he’d know how to make the fuel you’d need to run an internal combustion engine, or the oil to stop it ceasing solid the moment you turned it on, or the battery you’d need to start it.

Making pretty much any modern item requires complicated, inter-connected networks reaching across half the globe, and such networks are highly fragile, so if the world were to fall apart tomorrow, whether from nuclear war, disease, asteroid strike, or, of course, the resurrection of the dead, how could ever hope to re-create anything like the world we currently live in?

The chances are we couldn’t, but could we even recreate a simplified version of it? How many of us actually know how to do even the most basic things like starting a fire without matches or lighters? Or how to turn the fleece of sheep into a nice warm woolly jumper? Or animals into a nice tasty meal and a rather fancy fur coat?

What about antibiotics and medicines? How would we ever survive without things we take so much for granted, like Penicillin? Or asthma inhalers? Or artificial lenses to deal with your failing eyesight?

Then there’s our recreational loves, how would we get our daily caffeine kick (would you even know where to start making your own coffee, or, for that matter, how to milk a cow to get that creamy foamy head you like so much on your favourite cappuccino)? What about cigarettes to feed your nicotine addiction? Or a cold beer at the end of a long day?

These are the thoughts that have been exercising me of late, and I’ve been coming to one conclusion: if you want to be able to start re-building society after an apocalyptic event, you’d really couldn’t do better than have an experimental archaeologist  in your survival group. What, you might wonder, is an experimental archaeologist? Well, it’s someone who explores how people made and used tools in the past to do various things, like making knives from lump of flint, or extracting metal from ore. They know all sorts of handy things, like how to make basic medicines from native plants, or turning barley into ale, or converting animals into sizzling hot steaks with nothing but pile of tinder and two sticks to rub together.

The other person you’d want to have in your survival group is a bloke by the name of Lewis Dartnell. Why this guy? Well, it just happens to be the author of a rather interesting book on this subject called The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World From Scratch. It aims to provide all the key information you would ever need to rebuild modern Western society (or at least all the technological parts of it – hopefully we wouldn’t make the same mistake of inventing lawyers and politicians and advertising executives again, after all we’d hopefully be trying to build a better society than we lost, not re-creating it exactly, mistakes and all).

Of course, if you can’t get hold of your very own Lewis Dartnell, you’ll just have to get a copy of his book instead, and you better make sure you get a printed copy. After all, the batteries in your e-reader will only last so long once the power grid goes down.

It’s also a book that’s worth reading for its own merits. By looking at what information we’d need to rebuild the world, it sheds a spotlight on the society we currently live in, and how it is potentially vulnerable because of the level of inter-connectedness we now all take for granted, and that is always interesting.

Politicians and business-leaders are always telling us that globalisation is a good thing (and that’s why they are in the middle of secret negotiations to try to make the world an even smaller place, although the exact details of what they are trying to do are pretty scary for the ordinary man on the street), but is it, if it is making us more vulnerable to the vagaries of a highly connected world?

After all, just look at the global financial system: someone decides to play the system by giving mortgages to people who can’t really afford them in the northeast US, and the next thing we know is that half the world is plunged into a recession so deep that it still hasn’t recovered. Wouldn’t it have been better if what happened locally, stayed locally? Maybe then the banks would have had second thoughts about offering the catastrophic sub-prime loans in the first place, and the whole world would have undoubtedly been better off if that had happened.

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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.

Buy Nothing Day, And Other Antidotes To Black Friday

Today is Black Friday, that annual apogee (or should that be nadir?) of rampant consumerism where frenzied shoppers will quite happily trample little old ladies to death, just to get a good deal on a new television that they don’t really need. If you’ve ever want to know how it would feel to be caught up in a zombie apocalypse, then being in the middle of a horde of Black Friday bargain-hunters is probably about as close as you can get (although you might stand a better chance of getting through the experience unharmed amongst the zombies!).

Living in Britain, Black Friday used to be something that only ever really appeared in the consciousness as one of those wacky ‘And finally …’ stories on the news that we would watch, bemused, while shaking our heads in a disbelieving manner as we wondered at the strange things our cousins across the ocean got up to in the name of consumerism. But now, Black Friday is slowly raising its ugly head here, too, which is really strange since we don’t even have Thanksgiving, so why do we have a sale the day after it?

For whatever the reason, Black Friday looks like it’s here to stay, but for those, like me, who’d rather face a zombie horde than participate in such an egregious outburst of consumerism that encapsulates much of what is wrong with modern western society, there are some interesting alternatives out there that can help you strike back.

For a start, there’s International Buy Nothing Day (which falls on the last Saturday in November in much of the world, but the Friday after Thanksgiving in the US). Started in Vancouver in 1992, it’s an international day of protest against consumerism and needless over-consumption. The idea behind it is simple: Challenge yourself, and indeed your friends and family, to try to go 24 hours without buying anything what-so-ever (it’s harder than you might think!). While you can just do it on your own, there are also organised events, like Credit Card Cut-ups, and even zombie walks where participant ‘zombies’ wander around shopping malls or other consumer havens with a blank stare. When asked what they are doing participants describe Buy Nothing Day.

Next on the list is to sign a Pre-NUPP with your friends and family. What’s a Pre-NUPP? It’s a pre-Christmas No Unnecessary Presents Pact. You know what it’s like at this time of year, you find yourself racing around the shops, grabbing random things to give to people because you know that at that precise moment they are doing exactly the same for you. None of us want such poorly thought-out gifts and they never end up getting used, yet still we buy them because we somehow feel obligated to do so, driven by the fear that we might be unexpectedly given a gift when we don’t have one to give back in return. So, why not get together, well in advance, and simply agree not to give the damn things to each other in the first place?

This, of course, doesn’t mean not celebrating Christmas or anything like that. It simply means that you’ll not be giving people things they don’t really want or need, just for the sake of giving them something. Remember that when it comes to presents, it’s the thought that counts, not how easy it is to wrap, and there are a lot of alternatives out there to traditional gifts. Why not try, for instance, to do something nice for them instead: Offer to babysit the kids for an evening, or even a whole day, take them out for a nice meal, or coffee and a chat, or how about helping them do that DIY task they’d never get round to doing on their own. The possibilities are endless, and they’ll appreciate it a lot more than that over-priced piece of tat you were going to get them!

Then there’s #GivingTuesday, which this year is on the 2nd of December. The idea behind #GivingTuesday is simple. It aims to encourage people, charities and businesses to donate time, money or their voice to help a good cause. The feeling you get from grabbing a bargain on Black Friday is fleeting and will vanish the moment you get home an open the box (and it will be followed by an overwhelming feeling of dread when you open your credit card bill several weeks later). The feeling you get from doing something good for someone else lasts a whole lot longer. Don’t take my word for it, take the word of eminent psychologists who study this very phenomenon. They call it Helpers High, and it really is a high because of all the endorphins which are released when you take the time to help someone else.

So, if you choose to, enjoy Black Friday, but remember that there are other options out there that won’t leave you quite as broke, and that will leave you a lot happier than fighting complete strangers for the last box on the 75% off shelf, when you don’t even know quite what it is you’re fighting over – all you know is that 75% off is a bargain you’ve somehow convinced yourself you cannot live without, no matter what’s inside. After all, that sort of behaviour is really best left until the zombies rise, and you are left fighting for life. Now, that’s something that really matters!

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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.

Libraries And Surviving A Zombie Apocalypse

When people think of where they’d want to hole-up in the event of a zombie apocalypse, they usually think of shopping malls, or prisons, or castles or warehouses – or maybe even getting out of the city altogether and heading for the hills, or sailing out to sea. Few would ever think of heading for their nearest library. That, I think, is missing a trick. Most library buildings, especially the larger reference libraries which can be found in most large cities, are impressive edifices, with large, well-built doors. They also tend not to have too may windows because too much direct light can damage books. There’s lots of space in them, and if you start to get bored, there’s always plenty to read. Yes, they might not come with a ready supply of food, but a few quick foraging trips should be enough to sort that out.

However, none of these are the reason why I would consider a library as one of the best places to try to ride out a zombie apocalypse. Instead, it’s because of the wealth of information contained within their fortress-like walls. Think about it. Think of all the skills you’re going to need to survive in both the short and the long-term. You might get lucky and find that within your survival group you have a surgeon, a mechanic, an electrical engineer, a military strategist and so on, but the chances of this happening are slim. Instead, it is likely you’ll be surrounded by people who have about as much knowledge as you do about the intricate workings of an internal combustion engine or the human body or a 12 volt DC electrical system. This means that if you’re going to survive, you’re going to have to learn an awful lot very quickly, and just how are you going to do that?

Now, with the way the world currently is, the chances are if you wanted to find out any of this type of information, you’d simply turn to Google and start typing, but how long is Google going to survive once the dead start to rise? My guess is not very long. Even if it does, how are you going to access it? The phone lines will probably fail within a few hours, mobile phone reception is likely to follow soon after, and the electricity won’t be far behind. We’ve got so used to having a little device tucked into our back pocket or backpack that we can simply whip out and find the answer to any question we can think of (and a lot we can’t!), that we’ve forgotten what a privilege this is. Yet, this system is surprisingly fleeting and fragile. It requires so many links in the chain, all unseen by you, to get the information you want from where it resides and into your hand so you can read it, that makes it incredibly vulnerable to even the smallest disruption, so you can imagine what would happen in the event of a zombie apocalypse. This information delivery system would collapse sooner than you could type ‘How do you start a chainsaw?’

So what’s the alternative? Well, the answer is, of course, to find somewhere where all this information is written down in an easy to access format, and this format is the book. You need no electricity to get at the information contained in a book, no servers half way round the world, no fibre optic networks crossing entire ocean basins, no wi-fi or phone lines. You just open it up and start reading. And where would you find the books which would contain the information you’d so desperately need? In a library! If you can find just the right library, it will contain a copy of pretty much every book that’s ever been written, or at least it will contain a good proportion of them. You might not know it, but book publishers in most countries have a requirement to submit, free of charge, a copy of every book they publish to a national book repository.

In Britain, this is the hallowed halls of the British Library, and within its walls, you can find all the information you’d ever need on just about any subject you could ever want. You wan to know how to develop a vaccine for a zombie virus? The British Library will tell you how. You want to build a nuclear bomb? That information will be in there, too. You want to study military strategy so you can work out how to out-flank the zombie hordes? No problem, just go to the military history section. You want to find out how to start a chainsaw? It might take a while to find it, but I bet that information will be in there somewhere too.

Now, in the age of the internet, more and more politicians are arguing that the very concept of the bricks and mortar library is an outdated anachronism that’s had its day, and that public money is better spent on more important things (like paying politicians more money to pass laws that give more power to corporations and less to the individuals who elect them!). This is, however, short-sighted. Libraries are the beating heart of our collective knowledge built up over hundreds of years. They’re the store houses of human creativity and ingenuity. Yes, we have the internet, but we need something else in case the internet ever fails. We need a backup plan in case the web collapses. In short, we need libraries. So, remember to support your local library, no matter how small, even if it’s for no other reason that, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, you might suddenly find you need it, and the knowledge it contains.

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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.

Monsters Of The Deep – The Real Ones Are Far Weirder Than Anything You Could Ever Imagine

As an author, I’m always trying to come up with something new, but it often seems that no matter how hard writers try, when it comes to weirdness, the monsters which they dream up are no match for those that already exist in nature.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at this rather brilliant parody of Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid and see some of the creatures that really exist down in the depths of the ocean. I’ll bet they’re far weirder than anything you could create in your imagination!

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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.