Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 7

An Interview With Colin M. Drysdale On Bookkaholic.com

I’ve been a bit lax on blog posts recently, mostly because so much of my time has been taken up with a mix of my day job and publicising The Outbreak. However, one of the things I have had time to do recently was an interview with Rachel Storey for Bookkaholic.com, an online book magazine.

If you are interested in reading this interview, you can find it here, and I’d also recommend checking out Rachel’s own blog (which has the great name of Storey On A Story), which you can find here.

I’ll hopefully get some more time to devote to writing articles for this blog in the near future (I’ve got a few ideas packed away which I’m keen to turn into posts – including one on why rocky shorelines are a surprisingly good place to find yourself in the event of a zombie apocalypse), and maybe even a short story or two since I haven’t posted one of them in a while.

Until then, you can check out Rachel’s interview with me, which has a few tidbits about where the world of For Those In Peril might head in the future, including the first publicly released information about whose perspective the next book in the series will be written from – and this might surprise you!

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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.

Zombies! Run!

What do zombies eat? It’s not just brains, apparently they like sushi, too. Or at least the one which walked into the sushi restaurant I was having dinner in last Saturday did. At this point, you’d be forgiven for wondering what on earth I was talking about. Well, my home city of Glasgow has been hosting a series of zombie runs over the last couple of weekends. For those of you who don’t know, zombie runs are an interactive role-playing game which takes place on real city streets. The competitors have to complete a series of stages and challenges, all while avoiding being bitten by zombies, or at least people playing zombies, and it was one of these people who walked into the sushi restaurant after the event had finished.

This particular zombie run was put on by 2.8 Hours Later (a nice little homage to my all-time favourite zombie film), and is fairly straight forward to play. All you have to do is survive for 2.8 hours while being pursued by zombies, vigilantes and the police. They have been doing these events for a couple of years now, and while I’ve been tempted to sign up, there’s always one thing which has stopped me. What happens if, right at the beginning, you get caught and it’s game over? At £28.00 a ticket to enter, they’re not cheap and it could be a lot of money for a very short time playing.

However, while look at their website the other day, I found one there’s another way to take part. You can. it turns out, sign up for free to be one of the zombies. You have to go to zombie school, but hey what could be more fun than that? And not only do you learn how to be a zombie, but they give you a free zombie make over on the day. So, next time these guys are in town (and it is rapidly becoming an annual event here in Glasgow), I think that’s what I’ll be doing. After all, what could be more fun that pursuing people through the streets of a busy city driven by the ungodly urge to eat their brains? Or, after the event has finished, sushi.

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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 Outbreak’ – Kindle Edition $0.99 Until Monday 25th August 2014

The kindle edition of my latest post-apocalyptic survival novel, The Outbreak, will be on sale for $0.99 this weekend instead of its usual $4.99. If this isn’t enough to tempt you to buy it, here’s what readers have been saying about it so far:

‘Loved this book and the story line, the characters are great! Felt myself well up at certain points and got far too caught up in some characters emotions (a good thing obviously). Very well written and I highly recommend it to anyone.‘ Five Stars out of five (Goodreads Review).

‘This is a thriller with gritty, convincing detail and enough human interest to keep you gripped to the end.‘ Five Stars out of five. (Customer review from Amazon.co.uk).

‘… Beautifully written and put together; a book and storyline that will, without doubt, stay with me for a very long time … The story moves on very quickly, it gets to the point, and before you realise it, you are witnessing an Apocalyptic event happening in the UK which, if I’m honest, terrified me …‘ Five Stars out of five (Goodreads Review).

‘… The author has produced a very well paced, exciting and at times extremely sad thriller. It rattles along quickly having just the right amount of descriptive detail, dialogue and technical info for it to be well explained to the uninitiated in regards to the setting (Glasgow and the remote islands), sailing and development of the characters … The characters are exactly right, you like the ones you are supposed to like, feel sympathy for the ones you are supposed to sympathise with and downright hate the ones you are supposed to hate!!!!!! It’s about as perfect as you can get …‘ Five Stars out of five (Goodreads Review).

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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.

Idle Speculations On My Perfect Zombie Filmfest

I’ve been sitting through a rather dry academic conference for much of the last week as part of my day job, and during some of the more boring presentations, my mind has been wandering off towards zombies, and specifically, what my ideal line up would be for a zombie film festival. I don’t know quite why this idea entered my head, but it did and it stuck. This meant I ended up getting drawn into the idea of what exactly I’d have in it.

My starting point was what theme I’d use. After all, as with any filmfest, I’d need something to connect all the films together. At first, I thought about arranging films in some sort of temporal order, such as the years in which they were made, starting with something like Romero’s first film, Dawn of the Dead, or maybe even going as far back as White Zombie, and taking it all way through to World War Z, hitting various key films in between.

Soon, however, I gave that idea up as being too predictable, and I moved onto the idea of arranging them by the speed of the zombies. This, too, might start with Dawn of the Dead (the original version) and end with World War Z, but in between, and in this order, might be Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Dawn of the Dead (the remake) and 28 Days Later. This would be more quirky, but still rather obvious.

Finally, I figured I could just do it by selecting films which I thought had brought something new to the genre. This would not only allow the inclusion of full length classics from the silver screen, but also some of the best shorts from YouTube. This, then, was where I began, and from there I started picking the films I’d feature and the order I’d shown them in. Interested in what I came up with? Well, here’s what my fictitious film festival would look like:

1. Dawn of the Dead (original version): This is the one that kick-started the modern zombie film genre, so it was always going to be a good place to start.

2. Shaun of the Dead: The film that launched the zom-rom-com genre (and indeed ended it, too!).

3. Cargo: For those not familiar with Cargo, this is a short film which has a truly unique take on how a father can best look after his baby daughter in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.

4. Dawn of the Dead (remake): While 28 Days Later brought the idea of fast zombies to the fore in the zombie genre, they weren’t really zombies, so I’m putting the remake of Dawn of the Dead in here because it marks the acceptance of the idea that true zombies can be fast and not just slow.

5. Steadfast Stanley: This is a great little, heart-warming film which take views the zombie apocalypse through the eyes of a dog looking for his young master, and it offers a very unique perspective on such events.

6. The Crazies: While most zombie films concentrate on a disease being the cause of a zombie apocalypse, The Crazies takes a different route and thinks about it being caused by chemicals leaching into the water supply of a small town.

7. Zombieland: While Shaun of the Dead was also comedy, it was an homage to its near namesake. Zombieland was more unique, particularly with its tongue-in-cheek breaking of the fourth wall to deliver its iconic rules and its brilliant cameo by Bill Murray.

8. 28 Days Later: This was always going to be the final film in any list I put together, but not only is it my favourite film in the genre, it also re-invigorated the whole genre itself. Without it, there would probably have been no Dawn of the Dead remake, no The Walking Dead and no World War Z (book or film). Yes, it’s not a true zombie film since the rage-infected humans aren’t true undead, but nonetheless it falls squarely within the genre and it stands as a major landmark in the development of zombie films. Of course, it’s also a great way to end any night!

So there we have it, eight films all of which I feel have brought something new to the zombie genre. I’m sure others would select a different set of films, and for different reasons, but taken together I think they’d make for an interesting, and hopefully thought-provoking, day of zombie action.

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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.

‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’ Wins Best Indie Book Award

A while a go, some of you will remember I posted about the importance of book awards for independently published books and writers.

As it happens, my first book For Those In Peril On The Sea has just been announced as the winner of the horror category in the 2014 Best Indie Book Award. As always, it’s great to get some recognition for my work. If you’re interested, you can find the official announcement here.

This award comes with a nice little statuette (although that might take some time to reach me), and a review on Jelly Bomb Review, which can be found 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.

The Day Job – Part 2

About this time last year, I wrote a post about what I do in my day job as a marine biologist. In this post, I want to revisit my day job again, and specifically one aspect of it: the academic conference. This is because I’m going to be spending the next week or so at one of these supposedly auspicious events. For those not familiar with academic conferences, these are events, usually held annually and somewhere exotic, where academics from around the world, all specialists in a particular field, come together to share ideas and so help to advance the very science which is their daily bread and butter.

At any rate, that’s what they are meant to be. In practice, they are quite different creatures, and are a mix of academic one-upmanship, back-stabbing, gossip, drinking and debauchery. In other words, they’re just like pretty much any other gathering of humans anywhere on the planet. Yes, ideas are discussed, advances made, but these won’t be in the rarefied atmosphere of the seminar room. Rather, it will be more likely to happen late at night in a dimly lit hotel bar, with half a dozen people crowded around a table, peering blearily at a paper napkin covered in scrawls and doodles that seem to make sense at the time, but which, in the cold light of day the following morning, when heads are pounding, will mean nothing.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that academic conferences are nothing but thinly disguised week-long parties which can be charged to expense accounts. They are serious events, it’s just that they are not necessarily always taken with the seriousness that most people associate with both science and scientists. Nonetheless, friendships are made and connections are forged, and although this may result in nothing more than hangovers in the short-term, in the long-term, they do lead to greater collaboration and real scientific advances.

The locations of these events can be almost anywhere in the world (places like Maui, the Canary Islands and Monaco to name some of the more exotic ones I’ve been to over the years). However, despite this, most of the time will be spent in stuffy, darkened conference halls, far from the reach of the beaming sun and blue skies outside, listening to dry and, to be frankly honest, quite boring talks outlining the latest advances. Worse, if you happen to be staying in the same hotel as the conference is taking place, there’s a good chance the only time you’ll catch a glimpse the locations exoticness will be from the cab as it travels from and to the airport. Yet, there will always be that one presentation which lights a spark deep inside your brain and sends you scurrying for the nearest bar napkin to start sketching out a new idea which might change your career in ways you never thought possible. These are the moments which make sitting through the rest of the talks worth it, even if you are continually reminded that scientists are rarely the best public speakers.

Still, when all finally finished, hair is let down and when this happens scientists can party with the best of them. This usually happens at the closing banquet, or to be more accurately after it, when all the business of the conference is out of the way and everyone can finally relax. This is when things can get messy. One memorable conference, the final night started with a drag queen cabaret show and an open bar (never a good thing to offer scientists!), and ended with the conference organiser being led away in handcuffs while several vans full of Spanish police in full riot gear waited outside for the order to move in because of all the noise we were making at what was by then some ungodly hour of the morning. Needless to say, that was the point at which I decided to leave, unclear as to whether the departmental finance officer at my university would find a bail payment an acceptable conference expense or not.

Of course, that was back when I was a grad student, and these days I am older and wiser (well, at least I like to think I am, but maybe I just lack the energy of my youth to stay up all night). This means that the conference I’ll be attending next week will probably not involve too much drunken debauchery (at least not for me), but it will be fun watching the latest in-take of grad students acting the same as we did many years ago, while they look at us old timers and think of us as boring party-poopers for not getting involved in their antics. If only they knew the truth, they’d probably have a lot less respect for their supervisors, their bosses and, indeed, the heroes of their field.

So that’s academic conferences for you and while my mind will primarily be focussed on that for the next week or so, you can be assured that during the more boring moments, my mind will be drifting towards my other career as a novelist. Story ideas will be thought of, zombie set pieces imagined, and possibly even rough drafts polished, as I wait for that one talk to inspire me, and remind me why I love doing science so much.




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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.

Traces: A New And Unique Way For Writers To Provide Interactive Content To Their Readers

I have always been keen on providing interactive elements which help readers immerse themselves within a story. For both For Those In Peril On The Sea, and The Outbreak, I created Google Earth layers which allow the readers to explore the real world locations where these book are set. I’ve also toyed with the idea of presenting stories within a series of linked locations within a Google Earth layer, although I’ve never got round to actually writing one. This is, in part, because the reader could still read the story while sitting on their sofa in front of the TV, and what I really wanted was something that would make people actually visit the locations where a story was set as they visit it.

This is where a newly released app called Traces comes in. Traces allows you to virtually tag locations and plant text, photos or videos there. You then send out the information to other users of the app, and they can then read whatever you have left for them. However, and here’s the twist, they have to actually visit the location with their mobile device in the time period you specific before they can see it.

For me, this opens up a huge world of possibilities for writers which would allow them to provide interactive content in a way that really hasn’t been possible before. For example, writers could plants parts of a story in the real world locations where they are set, and tell the reader which order to visit them in. This would mean that the reader is visiting the locations themselves as they are reading the story. Similarly, rather than text, you could provide audio files which the reader could listen to while viewing the sites where the story takes place.

This wouldn’t work for all types of story, and might work better for short stories rather than full length novels, but if done properly with the right ones, this new app has the potential to allow readers to interact with pieces of writing in ways that would never have been possible before. In addition, with the time sensitive element, it would be possible to do things like provide a new chapter of a book each day which could only be read a specific locations of your choosing. There’s also an interesting potential of bringing readers together in one place while they read your work, allowing them to discuss it with each other, so bringing strangers together through their shared love of reading the works of a specific author.

This would require some effort in behalf of the reader, and not all would-be readers would be up for it, but for those that are the experience could be truly gripping. This is, of course, all in theory, but I think it’s a technology that worth exploring because of the possibilities that it offers for writers to interact with their readers in a new and unusual way. All I need to do now is give it a go and see if it works quite as well in practice as it seems like it should in theory.

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

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

What Are The Chances Of There Being A Zombie Apocalypse In Your Lifetime?

We all know that there are zombie apocalypse preppers out there, and many think that they’re simply wasting their time because a zombie apocalypse could never happen. However, what if they are right and it is the rest of us that are wrong? Isn’t it better to be prepared and have nothing happen, than not be prepared and get caught out?

Well, that all depends on the risk of it happening. As with anything in life, we need to know how likely (or unlikely) something is to happen before we can decide whether we should take precautions and how much time and money we should put into them. Yet, how is this risk calculated? How on earth would you calculate the risk of being killed in a zombie apocalypse?

Let’s take a look at how risk is calculated by looking at mortality risk. This is effectively the chance of something killing a person multiplied by the number of times it can potentially happen over a given length of time. This is worked out by taking the number of people that die from a specific cause, dividing it by the total number of people exposed to give the chance of each individual dying because of it. This figure is then divided by a measure of time to get the death rate. This death rate can then be expressed in a number of ways, but the most common is the micromort. What is a micromort? It’s a one in a million chance of dying from a specific cause (which is about the same chance of throwing 20 coins into the air and them all landing heads up). So that’s the theory, but how does it work in practice?

Well, if we wanted to work out the risk of being murdered in the UK (where I live), we can work this out as follows: There were 640 murders in the UK in 2011. This is out of a population around 61.37 million. So we divide 640 by 61.37 million and find that each individual has a 0.00104% chance of being murdered each year. To work out this value in micromorts, we then multiply it by a million and find that the risk dying from an external cause in the UK each year is 10.4 micromorts.

But is 10.4 micromorts a lot or a little? To find that out, we need to compare that to other causes of death. The chances of dying because you spend one night in hospital in England is 75 micromorts. So, each year, you’re 7.5 times more likely to die from having to spend a night in hospital in England than of being murdered. Similarly, you’ve got about the same chance of dying each time you’re were given a general anesthetic as being murdered (10 vs 10.4 micromorts) and you’re eight times more likely to die each time you give birth in Britain than being murdered in any one year (and you’re 17 times more likely to die while giving birth in the US than of being murdered in any one year in the UK). Of course, that’s just the UK. In The US, the risk of being murdered is almost five times higher than in the UK at 48 micromorts, while in Canada it’s 16 micromorts.

So, that’s how risk calculations and micromorts work, but how do we apply this to work out the chances of a zombie apocalypse happening and, indeed, the chances of you dying in a zombie apocalypse? First, we need to set the parameters for our zombie apocalypse. When we do this, we need to be realistic about this and follow the rules of how the world actually works. This means it can’t be dead people coming back to life, that’s just biologically impossible. However, we can have diseases which take over people’s brains and make them act like flesh-eating zombies from the movies that will attack any other human they get hold of. There’s a surprisingly large number of real diseases that can do that, but I’m going to focus on one real ‘zombie’ disease and that’s rabies.

Rabies really does take over people’s brains and make them act violently to others, and it’s transmitted by bites, but there’s two things which stop it creating a zombie apocalypse. The first is that it’s 100% fatal so anyone infected with it dies (at least if they’re not treated before they start showing symptoms). The second is that it’s not easily transmitted from one person to another. In fact, there are no known cases of human-to-human transmission. This isn’t because the disease isn’t infectious, but rather because human teeth are actually remarkably poor at being able to bite through human skin. Also, for obvious reasons, we tend to keep well clear of people who are staggering around, foaming at the mouth and trying to bite us. Together, these make it hard for humans to transmit the disease to each other.

But what if this were to change? Diseases mutate all the time and it is not inconceivable that the rabies virus could mutate in such a way that would make it less fatal, and easier to transmit. Indeed, there is already evidence that some strains of rabies are already evolving towards being able to spread much faster and more efficiently between animals without the need for bites.

So what’s the risk of this happening? If we assume that the natural mutation rate of the rabies virus is 0.00001, that is for every 10,000 times it copies itself, there’s one mutation which changes something about how it operates. Some of these mutations may be good for the virus and some may be bad, but we’re looking for very specific mutations that would change the virus in a very specific way. Thus, out of all the mutations, maybe only one in a billion might have the effect we’re interested in. Taken together, that means that there’d be a 1 in a ten trillion chance of just the right mutation happening. You’d think that would make it so unlikely that we’d never need to worry about it, but you’d be wrong. Why? Because of the law of very large numbers.

The law of very large numbers means that even very unlikely outcomes can happen if we do something often enough. You see, there isn’t just one rabies viral particle in anyone who’s infected, but millions of them, all reproducing, all the time and so all at risk of mutating in just the right way. If we take the figure of 1 million as a highly conservative estimate of the number of viral particles in any one person with rabies, and say that each one reproduces once every 10 days (again highly conservative), then within any infected individual there’s a 0.0001% chance of the required mutations occurring. Still a very small chance, but much more likely than 1 in a 10 trillion, and that’s just in each 10 day reproductive cycle in each person.

A typical person may survive for 12 weeks after infection, so there would be around eight such reproductive cycles in each person. This brings the risk of the required mutation happening in any one infected person up to 0.0008%, and around 50,000 people are infected each year, which means that when all the viruses across all the people are considered, there’s a 42% chance of the mutations happening in any one year. Just because we’re dealing with very large numbers, we’ve suddenly gone from a risk that’s infinitesimally small to one that’s almost the same as guessing whether a coin will land heads up or tails.

Rather shockingly, that means there should be a rabies-related zombie apocalypse once every 2.4 years. If we assume that 80% of the world’s population of seven billion would be killed or infected if a zombie apocalypse were to happen, then this would equate to 2.3 billion micromorts each and every year. Now, compared to out 10.4 micromorts for being murdered in the UK, that’s pretty damn high. It means that in any one year, you’d be almost 50 million times more likely to be killed in a zombie apocalypse than of being murdered, which is pretty wild and suggests that most people are worrying about all the wrong things when it comes to what’s likely to kill them.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking to yourself that you don’t remember any zombie apocalypses happening recently, and even though you’ve been pretty busy for the last 2.4 years, you’re pretty sure you’d remember 80% of the world’s population getting wiped out. So, if these are the odds, why hasn’t it happened?

Well, this is most likely to do with two things. The mutations which might make rabies more transmissible between humans might also make the virus itself less fit, and that means any viruses which carry the mutations are pushed out by those which don’t so they cannot get enough of a toehold to become the dominant type of virus in any one individual. This in itself would be enough to stop any copies of the virus which carry the required mutations from breaking free and rampaging across the planet. In other words, the virus itself might be keeping dangerous mutations in check simply because they have to compete with other versions without the same mutations for the limited resource which is the human body.

Secondly, it might be that the rabies virus simply cannot generate the mutations needed to turn it into a supervirus capable of taking over the planet. A mutation can only change what a viral gene already does. It cannot suddenly create a brand new gene that does something completely different (like genetic engineering can do). It’s just like a car, you can fiddle with the engine to make it go faster, but you can’t, just by tweaking it here and there, suddenly turn it into an aeroplane. There just aren’t the existing building block there to do that. So it might be with the rabies virus, that no amount of tweaking could ever turn it into a civilisation-destroying, zombie-apocalypse-creating megavirus that would wipe humanity from the face of the planet, but we don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s not a one in 10 trillion chance mutation, but one in a ten thousand trillion. Very unlikely, but still possible given enough time (in this case about 238,000 years – short by our lifespans, but not long in terms of how long humans have been roaming the planet, picking up rabies from other species – and that still gives it a value of 2384 micromorts per year, still high in comparison to the risk of being murdered).

So what can we learn from all this? Well, firstly, if you do anything often enough, even the most unlikely events can happen, and what has a very low probability of happening to each individual, might be quite likely to happen when there are 7 billion people on the planet – after all, someone has to guess the right numbers and win the lottery, it’s just very unlikely to be you.

Secondly, just because you can calculate the likelihood of something happening, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will. In particular, if you don’t take everything into account properly, your calculations can go very wrong (in case of the above, assuming that the types of mutations required to turn rabies into a zombie-apocalypse creating megavirus are actually possible).

Finally, as long as you’re not talking about risen-from-the-dead type zombies, a zombie apocalypse is possible. There are diseases out there which can take over the brain and turn humans into zombie-like killers and it’s biologically feasible that they could mutate to create a highly infectious zombie-like disease. Given the numbers, even if such a mutation was very, very unlikely, there’s still a possibility that it will happen eventually. This leads on to a very interesting question: What’s stopping this happening?

In other words, if the law of very large numbers makes it highly likely that diseases will spontaneously generate the mutations needed to spark a global epidemic, why are they so rare? If we can work that out, then we could hopefully move towards stopping those that do occur. Here, I’m not talking about a zombie apocalypse, but real world problems, like HIV, flu, ebola, SARS and MERS, and others which we’ve still yet to discover, and which have the power to destroy large proportions of humanity if and when they go pandemic. What makes these diseases suddenly appear as if out of nowhere and start running riot through human communities and populations, while others, like rabies, simply remain bubbling away slowly in the background? This isn’t just idle speculation, but something which is fundamental to our understanding of diseases, and indeed our future on this planet.

Who would have thought that’s where we’d have ended up when we started trying to work out if zombie apocalypse preppers were wasting their time or not?




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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 Outbreak’ – The First Official Review Is Out And It’s Five Stars Out Of Five!

Just over a week after The Outbreak was published, the first major review is out … And it’s five stars out of five!

It’s a Foreword Clarion Review and you can read it on their website by clicking here, or you can download it as a PDF by clicking here.

To give you a taster of what the reviewer said, here’s some excerpts:

‘Now, here’s a zombie apocalypse that really knocks ‘em dead.‘

‘With zombie apocalypses occurring across all media at an alarming rate these days, it is difficult to find a new spin on the catastrophe. But Scottish marine biologist Colin M. Drysdale’s second book about the walking dead, The Outbreak…, adds a refreshing new twist to the genre: a small group of Glaswegian survivors finds safety at sea. Tackling themes such as uncertainty, not judging people by appearances, and the importance of living for the moment, Drysdale’s seafaring tale makes a splash in the postapocalyptic genre. …‘

‘…The thriller moves at a fast pace, with each chapter ending in a cliff-hanger designed to ratchet up suspense while keeping the audience turning the pages. Another brilliant coup occurs as it becomes impossible to predict who will die and how death will occur. As with the Game of Thrones series, The Outbreak also possesses no qualms about killing off characters one has become invested in. The alacrity with which some die only reinforces the horror of it all. …‘

Needless to say, I’m chuffed not only to have got a much coveted five star rating for the second time from Foreword Review, but also to get such a great review.

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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 Write The First Draft Of A Zombie Apocalypse Novel

So, you’ve come up with a killer idea for a zombie apocalypse novel, you’ve got great characters in mind that you know people will love, and you even the ideal anti-hero to come good in the end and save the day. Then you sit down at your computer and all that happens is you end up staring at the cursor blinking away on the blank screen for several hours wondering where on earth you should start.

As any would-be writer quickly finds out, there’s a big difference between having the idea for a book and actually writing one. Often the biggest stumbling block isn’t getting it finished, but rather it’s getting it started in the first place. Why is this? I think it has a lot to do with the fact that you’ve got what you think is this perfect idea in your head and the moment you start writing it down, it soon becomes apparent that it’s not so perfect after all. The characters as a bit flat, the story arc doesn’t quite work and that amazing opening scene you envisioned in your head turns out to be a dismal failure.

At this stage, it’s easy to become disenchanted with the whole writing process and simply give up after drafting out the few chapters, but you shouldn’t. Not all writers like to admit it, but that everyone’s first drafts are like this. Sure, the first draft of your very first book’s probably going to be a lot worse than the one for your tenth, but there will still be plenty of room for improvement.

So how do you go about writing the first draft of your zombie novel without falling out of love with it, and indeed falling out of love with writing in general?

Firstly, you have to accept that your first draft is always going to be a bit crap, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It would be much weirder if you got your novel spot on in the first draft.

Secondly, you have to understand the purpose of your first draft. It’s not to have a finished novel by the time you’ve completed it, but rather it’s to erect the scaffolding around which your finished novel will be built during the editing stages.

Finally, you have to remember that editing is for afterwards and it’s not something you should be doing while writing your first draft. There’s always the temptation to go back and try to polish what you’ve just written, but if you go down that route, there’s a good chance you’ll never get beyond the end of the first chapter because there will always be something you can improve in it. Instead, what you need to be concentrating on is getting the broad-brush strokes of the whole story in place, all of it and not just opening scenes. Then you can come back and polish it until it sparkles and glistens.

While editing can be done in little blocks here and there, writing a first draft generally requires solid blocks of time which you can set aside just to write. You might think that you can just do half an hour every night, but for the first draft this is unlikely to work because you’ll have to get yourself back into the post-apocalyptic world you’re creating at the start of each session and then work your way back into your story. By the time you’ve done this, the chances are much of your precious half hour will have gone leaving little time left for the actual writing. Instead, I’d recommend setting aside blocks of at least a couple of hours at a time for writing your first draft, and ideally a day, a weekend, or even a whole week or month so you can do nothing but immerse yourself in your world and get the basic structure down on paper. Of course, few writers can actually afford to do this, because most have other jobs to support themselves, but putting aside a whole day once a week to write will almost certainly be more productive than spending the same amount of time on it spread across each evening of the week.

This leads onto the next issue. How do you actually write it? With zombie apocalypse novels, the main aspect of it is the apocalyptic events and the set pieces with the zombies. As a result, I’d always recommend using the first draft to sketch out the basics of the world which you’re creating, how the zombies will act and feel, where the different set pieces will fit in and how they’ll be linked together to create the overall story arc. This means leaving much of the character development and social interactions until later drafts. This is because you need to know that the world you’re creating will work before you start populating it with people. This means that often by the end of the first draft, you might find that you don’t particularly connect with your characters, and that you don’t really care if they live or die. This is okay at this stage, and indeed, it’s only to be expected for a zombie novel. There will be plenty of time to come back and add all the little conversations and back stories which make both you, and your readers, fall in love with the characters, later drafts.

I also tend to avoid working too much on the dialogue during the first draft and sometimes these sections will be little more than rough directions covering what will be discussed. Again, once you have the basic structure of your novel down on paper, you can go back and work out who says what to whom and when.

In general, I also try to avoid being too self-critical when I’m writing a first draft. The aim is just to get it finished, ideally as quickly as possible. There will always be bits which you don’t like when you come back to it, and again, that’s okay at this stage. Once the first draft is completed, you can set about changing what doesn’t work, and improving what does.

There is also the issue of whether you should show your first draft to someone else to get their input. I probably wouldn’t recommend this. Yes, tell people what you’re writing, discuss your ideas with them, even run individual scenes by them, but keep your actual first draft to yourself. After all, showing someone a first draft would be like showing someone a roughly hewn block of marble that’s only a fraction of the way towards becoming a finished statue. You, as the artist, might be able to see, using your mind’s eye, what it will look like in the end, but it’s likely they won’t. Instead, wait until you’ve completed a second or third draft before you start sharing it round. This way, you’re likely to get a much better response because you’ll have had the opportunity to clean up the messier bits and it’s more likely the reader will to be able to catch a glimpse of the finished work that lies beneath the rough and ready exterior of an early draft, and so give you some proper, and useful, feedback

Most of these points can be summarised as follows: The secret to writing the first draft of a zombie apocalypse novel isn’t to write well. Rather, it is to write anything so that you have something which you can later edit. It’s much easier to polish words once they’ve been written, and much harder to create something out of nothing in the first place (especially something good). This means that the sooner you get the first draft finished and out of the way, the sooner you can move on to the much more enjoyable task of turning your book into something that’s good.

You might think that having written a first book, that writing the first draft of the next one would be much easier. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Instead, you find you have to go from a well-polished piece back to the mess of poorly written dialogue and rough outlines of scenes, and start the whole process all over again. At that stage, it can often be difficult to see that one day, it too will become a final version which you can be proud of, and it takes a certain amount of will power to keep plugging away at it regardless until it’s finished and the polishing can begin again.

As an illustration of how rough and ready a first draft can be, below is the first draft (or to be honest, the earliest draft I could find and this means it might not be the very first version, but it’ll be close) of one of the scenes close to the start of my book For Those In Peril On The Sea, followed by the final version. As a spoiler alert, in this scene, the main group of characters encounter the zombie-like infected for the very first time, so if you haven’t read the book and are planning on doing so, you might want to stop here.

If you compare these, you’ll see the first draft version is really just a skeleton on which the final version was built. The dialogue is limited and generally unattributed. There’s little description of what the characters are doing as they are speaking, and there’s very little tension in what should be full of it. In the final version, these elements have all been fleshed out considerably to create a much more tense atmosphere. You might also notice that what was originally one scene has now been broken down into three linked scenes, each concentrating on a different individual element (the attack/escape, moving on and discussing what to do next). Finally, two of the characters have also undergone a name change (John to Jon and Jane to CJ) because the original names didn’t really work.

So here’s the original version of the scene from the first draft, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, wrongly used words and all (word count: 804 words):

We reached about three- quarters of the way back down the narrow concrete path, when a figure appeared at the end of the path high up on the hill. We could only make out the sillohette, but we could see that a large machette dangled from one hand. As one, we turned and ran for the boat, the figure running after us, screaming undecipherably at the top of its voice. By the time we lept into the dingy and cast off, the figure had reached where we had been standing when we’d first seen it. And still it ran towards us. John pulled on the engine cord, but the engine refused to start. We were only a few feet from the rock and well within range of anyone with a machette on the shore. As John pulled frantically at the cord, I grabbed the oars and started rowing as though my life depended on it. By the time the figure reach the shore, we were twenty yards from shore and well beyond its reach.

John finally got the engine started and we looked back as we motored back to the waiting boat. We could see it was a tall, black man, his white t-shirt was soaked in blood and he waved the machette at us and screamed. We couldn’t make out what he was screaming. Eventually, he stopped screaming and waving the machette, and sank to his knees. Despite the distance between us, we could now here him sobbing, and shouting at us to come back, and not leave him to die. John put the engine into neutral and we looked at each other. The man no longer looked insane and dangerous but broken and desperate for our help.

“Should we go back?”

“I don’t know. There’s still something very wrong back there. I don’t think we should risk it. What if its a trap? I mean, where did all that blood come from?”

We turned and looked back at the figure. He was just staring at us, pleading with eyes for us to come back. Suddenly, he lept to his feet and turned to stare back up the path. We followed his gaze to where a shape was sillohetted on the crest of the hill, or was it two. We couldn’t see whether it was human because almost as soon as we had seen the shape, it was gone. The next thing we saw was the man on the shore raise the machette and scream, while the bushes nearest to him started to shake violently. In a flash, two shapes flew out of the bushes and were on top of him. Despite his desperate flailing with the machette, his attackers kept up their onslaught and soon the man when down. We could hear the creatures tearing at him, we could hear his screams of pain and their guttoral growls and moans as they tore him limb from limb.

“Shit. What the fuck are those things?”

“I don’t know, let’s just get the hell out of here. NOW!”

We slammed the engine into gear and headed for the boat at full speed without looking back. We tied off the dingy and climbed onto the boat. Bill was standing there with the binoculars looking back towards the shore.

“I thought you were going to go back there for a minute. Just as well you didn’t.”

“Could you see what those animals were that attacked that man?”

Bill looked at me and said nothing, but handed me the binoculars. I swung them up and looked towards the shores. I could see two huddled masses crouched over what was left of the man. Suddenly, one stood up and I could see what it was. It was a young boy, no more than about thirteen years old. I could see the blood dripping down his face as his eyes stared straight down the binoculars at me. But his eyes did not see me, he just stared off into the distance with eyes so wild, so animalistic, and yet so human. He knelt back down and started tearing at the carcass in front of him again. I set the binoculars down and looked at Bill, while the others looked at me.

“What are they?” Jane asked.

I looked at Bill and he shook his head every so slightly.

“I think they were wild dogs. Just as well we got back to the boat when we did. A pack of them must have attacked the lighthouse keepers. We’d best report it when we get to Freeport.”

“No,” said Bill slowly, “I think we should head straight for Miami, get this trip over as soon as possible.” I didn’t disagree. We pulled the dingy onto the boat, lashed it down and headed out of the bay and up northwest Providence Channel.

And here’s the final version from the finished book (word count: 1,928 words):

We were about three-quarters of the way down the narrow path when a silhouette appeared on the skyline behind the lighthouse, a large machete clutched in its right hand. Instantly, we were both running, moving as fast as we could over the cracked and uneven surface. Glancing back, I saw the figure pursuing us, screaming indecipherably at the top of its voice.

We reached the stone steps and scrambled down to the dinghy. I fumbled with the rope that held it to the rock, trying desperately to undo it.

‘Come on, Rob.’ There was a sense of urgency in Jon’s voice I’d never heard before, not even at the height of the storm.

‘I can’t. The knot’s pulled too tight.’

‘Here, try this,’ Jon held out his Leatherman, the small knife already open. I grabbed it and started sawing frantically at the rope.

‘Come on! Whoever that is will be here any second.’ Jon’s eyes were darting nervously between where I was struggling with the rope and the top of the steps.

‘I’m going as fast as I can. Just get the engine started so we’re ready to go as soon as I’m done.’ I was about half-way through the rope already and I redoubled my efforts. I heard Jon yank on the starter chord. The engine shuddered, but that was all. He adjusted the throttle and tried again. Again it turned over, but it still didn’t catch.

‘Careful, you’ll flood it.’

‘I know what I’m doing, Rob.’ Jon never liked it when I gave him advice, but there was a hint of panic in his voice.

I felt the rope separate and I pushed us away from the rocks. Jon was pulling repeatedly on the chord but the engine still refused to start. My eyes flicked upwards. While I couldn’t see the path, I knew the figure could appear at any moment and we were still within range of a machete. As Jon continued to fiddle with the engine, I grabbed an oar and started paddling, making short, sharp strokes on alternating sides of the bow.

We were twenty yards out when the engine finally spluttered into life and a look of relief spread across Jon’s face. Back on the shore, I could see the figure standing on the rocks just above the steps. He was a tall, black man, his white t-shirt soaked in blood. As we motored towards to the waiting boat, he waved the machete and screamed something I couldn’t quite make out. Without warning, he stopped and sank to his knees, his shoulders heaving as he sobbed. Jon shifted the engine into neutral; the man no longer seemed insane and dangerous, just broken and desperate.

‘Should we go back?’ Jon asked hesitantly.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think we should risk it. What if it’s a trap? I mean, he’s covered in blood.’ While he no longer looked threatening, the man still frightened me.

All of a sudden, with a speed that was unsettling, the man leapt to his feet and sprang round to face the path. A new shape was outlined on the crest of the hill. I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal, or even if there was more than one, and almost as soon as I’d seen it, it was gone. The man looked desperately left and right, as if trying to decide which way he should run but, before he made his choice, two shapes shot out of the bushes. He flailed the machete wildly as they flew towards him but it made little difference. When they reached him, they attacked and, within seconds, the man was on the ground. Even from that distance, we could hear his screams of pain and the guttural growls of the creatures. He struggled frantically, trying to throw them off, but despite his size they were too much for him. His movements slowed and eventually ceased as the life drained out of him, but the creatures kept up their assault, tearing at his body, ripping him limb from limb.

‘What the fuck are those things?’ There was a look of abject horror on Jon’s face.

‘I don’t know. Let’s just get the hell out of here. Now!’

Jon slammed the engine into gear and we skimmed over the water at full speed, trying to resist the urge to look back. We tied off the dinghy and scrambled onto the catamaran. Bill was standing in the cockpit staring towards the shore with the binoculars,

‘For a minute there I thought you were going to go back. Just as well you didn’t.’

‘Could you see what those animals were; the ones that attacked him?’ I wanted to know. I wanted to understand how close we’d come to being attacked ourselves.

Bill looked at me and said nothing as he handed me the binoculars. I aimed them towards the shore and could see two huddled shapes crouching over what was left of the man. As I watched, one of them stood up and I could see what it was. It was a young boy, no more than thirteen. Blood dripped from his face as he stared straight at me. His eyes bored into mine, unblinking, so wild, so animalistic, and yet so human. He knelt back down and started tearing at the carcass again. I watched as he clawed at the man’s stomach, opening up his abdomen and pulling out his intestines. He plunged his head into the man’s body, reappearing a second later with a large piece of liver in his mouth. I lowered the binoculars and stared at Bill, not believing what I’d just seen. As I did so, CJ came out onto the deck.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Don’t know,’ Jon shot back at her as his eyes shifted from Bill to me and back again. ‘Can I get the binoculars?’

I passed them to him and watched as he raised them to his eyes.

‘They’re eating him.’ Jon was appalled.

‘What d’you mean they’re eating him? Who’s eating who? Give me the binoculars,’ CJ held out her hand but Jon didn’t give them to her.

‘Trust me. You don’t want to see.’

CJ scowled at him but there was something in Jon’s voice that suggested he was right and she didn’t push it.

As we pulled the dinghy out of the water and hauled up the anchor, Jon told Bill and CJ what we’d found up at the lighthouse. He sounded almost excited but it was probably just the after-effects of the adrenaline from his body’s fight or flight reaction. I was certainly feeling a little shaky for the same reason.

Jon was just finishing. ‘Jesus, there was blood everywhere … I mean, a lot of it.’

I felt the need to say something. CJ had a terrified look on her face and Jon needed calming down.

‘There wasn’t that much really. I mean maybe it was all from one person …’ Even as I said it, I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.

Once we were underway and had put some distance between ourselves and the lighthouse, we gathered in the cockpit. We were all badly shaken by what we’d witnessed and for a while none of us spoke, each lost in our own thoughts. It was CJ who eventually broke the silence.

‘What now?’

‘Very good question.’ Bill sat there thinking for a few seconds before continuing. ‘No matter what happened back there, there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, I think you guys were very lucky to get back to the dinghy when you did, otherwise … ’ I didn’t want to think what the otherwise might have been.

After a moment Bill carried on. ‘We’ll need to report it, the only question is where. As far as I can see, we’ve got four choices.’ He counted each of them off on his fingers as he spoke, ‘There’s a small village marked on the chart just up the coast, but there’s no guarantee it’ll have a police station. Even if it does, it’s going to be a small one and I’m not too sure they’d be able to deal with this sort of thing on their own.’

Given what we’d just seen, I was amazed at how calm Bill was, at how clearly he was thinking. My own mind had frozen, able to do little more than replay the same shocking sights over and over again, yet Bill was able to think logically about what we needed to do next, just as he’d done in the storm. These were the times I was so glad it was Bill who was in charge and not me.

‘Two, we can sail south and report it in Nassau. Or three, we can continue west and report it in Freeport on Grand Bahama. They’re both pretty big cities, at least as far as the Bahamas are concerned, and both will have sizeable police forces. But it’ll take time for them to get themselves together and get over to Hole-in-the-Wall.

‘Four, we can carry on to Miami, and report it from there. The important thing to remember is that, no matter where we report it, it’s going to raise a lot of questions.’

Bill was silent for a second or two. ’Frankly, I’m not too sure people will believe us. We could get tied up in the investigation for days, even weeks. There’s nothing we can do for that poor sod back there, so if the rest of you agree, I’d rather report it in Miami than in the Bahamas. That way we won’t be stuck in a foreign country while this thing is looked into.’

‘It mightn’t be a foreign country to you …’ I was concerned Bill had forgotten we weren’t all Americans.

‘Good point. But I think you and CJ would still be better off in the US than in the Bahamas. Whatever went on back there, it’s going to cause a big stir when it comes out. At least in the US you’ll have less of a chance of getting dragged into it. We all will. What do you think?’

Bill looked around at the rest of us.

Jon nodded his agreement, as did I, but with more hesitation. My mind was finally starting to work again and while I could see Bill’s point, I still didn’t like the fact I might get stuck in an unfamiliar country, far from my boat, while any investigation took place.

‘CJ?’

‘Erm …’

‘Oh come on, Cammy, make a decision for once; not that it really matters what you think.’ Jon sounded irritated.

‘Shut up, Jon, that’s not helpful.’ I couldn’t stop myself snapping at him. It annoyed me that, despite what we’d just witnessed, Jon still couldn’t resist needling CJ. It incensed me just as much that CJ made it so easy for him. Glancing over at her, I saw the resentment and anger that had been building up within her towards Jon throughout the voyage start to bubble to the surface.

Bill must have seen this too because he sat down and put a reassuring arm around her.

‘CJ, it’s important that we all agree on what we’re going to do.’ Bill’s voice was calm and comforting, ‘What do you think? Are you happy with us carrying on to Miami?’

‘I guess Miami would be okay.’

Jon opened his mouth to speak, but Bill held up his hand and Jon thought better of it.

Bill looked round at each of us again, ‘Right, Miami it is then.’

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

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