Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 9

Carriers: The Invisible Threat In A Zombie Apocalypse (And In The Real World, Too)

Many disease have a gap between the time a person is first exposed to it and the time they start showing symptoms. This is, technically, know as the latent period, and its length can vary quite considerably from disease to disease, and more importantly so can the ability of one person to infect others during it. With certain diseases, such as HIV, people can pass the infection on to someone else during this latent period, making it much harder to control. This is because the person themselves might not even know that they are carrying the disease and may fail to take measures to reduce the risk of passing it on. What, you may be thinking, does this have to do with zombies?

Well, the existence of a latent period, where a person is able to pass on the disease while appearing to be completely healthy, within a zombie-causing disease would have some dramatic implications for how it would spread and how it could be controlled. With zombie diseases, and here I’m talking of something which turns people into ravenous, flesh-hungry and violent killers, we would all instinctively know to keep away from the slobbering maniac with the crazed look in his dead eyes that’s trying to rip us limb from limb. However, what about the apparently healthy person who you meet while out foraging? With no latent period, you could pretty much assume that they’re okay and you could welcome them into your safe house or let them join up with your jolly band of survivors with little or no risk. If, however, there’s a latent period, this simple act of human kindness could be exceedingly dangerous. This is because you’d never know if they might be infected, and just not showing symptoms yet, with the risk that they will turn in the night and attack you without warning. These are The Carriers, and they’re the invisible threat in any zombie apocalypse.

The mere possibility of carriers means that you could never trust any new people you meet not to be infected, and just not showing symptoms. You could try asking them, but there’s a good chance they’d lie, or they might not even know they’re infected – believing that they’d been lucky and got away from an encounter with a zombie without picking up the disease. Instead, the best survival tactic would be to avoid mixing with strangers, and to drive any that come near you away before they get too close.

However, it wouldn’t just be strangers you’d have to worry about. Any time you were separated from others in your group, there’d be a chance that someone might become infected without realising it, or rather failing to mention that this might be a possibility because of how everyone else would respond. This means that every foraging trip, every scavenging run, every encounter with zombies would create the potential for someone to pick up the disease and return to your safe area, bringing it through all your carefully crafted defences.

Carriers mean that you could never really trust anyone and there’d always be the risk that someone will turn in the night, creating havoc as they run amok within your compound, and, indeed, this might be the most common way that safe zones would become overrun. The possibility that people could be infectious during a latent period, passing the disease on to others, would only make carriers all the more dangerous. Imagine the zombie disease spreading silently throughout your group before anyone is even aware that there is a risk of infection. This isn’t the blood-splattered attack of the fully fledged zombie horde which everyone would recognise as a danger. Instead, this is the invisible creeping of a disease through a community, with no one being able to do anything to stop it until it’s too late.

Therefore, the possibility of carriers is something which always needs to be guarded against by survivors in any zombie apocalypse. So, how would you go about doing this? Well, the answer is very simple, and very old-fashioned: Quarantine. That’s right, you’d simply require anyone who might have been exposed to spend a period of time in quarantine – separated from the rest of the group until you know they are safe. Luckily, under most zombie apocalypse scenarios, any periods of latency are likely to be relatively short because the disease which causes it is likely to be so voracious. This means a simple over-night quarantine might be enough to minimise the risk from potential carriers. However, proper quarantine procedures would be an important strategy for the survival of any group during zombie apocalypse, and these would need to be initiated right from the start. This means that you’d need to have a certain level of paranoia, especially towards strangers because of the risks they might pose in terms of bringing the disease into your group.

Of course, zombie apocalypse scenarios are fictional, but the possibility of carriers, and their ability to silently spread a disease through a community is a real medical threat. In traditional societies, there was a natural distrust of strangers, and often this was driven by the risk that they might bring new diseases into a group. Even in modern western societies, the risk of carriers has long been recognised. Ships arriving at a new country still have to fly a yellow quarantine flag until they are cleared for entry. Of course, nowadays this is more associated with checking passports and the search for smuggled contraband, but it’s a reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that ships arriving from far off places were regarded as dangerous because of the possibility they might bring diseases, such as the plague, smallpox and yellow fever, with them as well as the goods they carried.

In the modern, overly connected world, carriers are even more dangerous than in the age of sail. We might check passengers at airports for weapons and bombs, but people are rarely stopped to check whether they might be carrying a deadly disease. This allows older diseases, such as flu, and newly emerged ones, such as SARS, to be spread throughout the world within days or weeks, and before anyone really realises there’s a problem which needs to be dealt with. Air travel might be seen as a modern staple, but because of the existence of carriers, it actually makes us ever more vulnerable to being caught by surprise by diseases which could bring us to our knees if we’re not very careful about exactly how we handle them. And all because of that little interval in the transmission cycle of diseases called the latent period.

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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.

Giveaway: ‘Zombie Apocalypse Survival Training Instructor’ T Shirt

This weekend saw the 7th International T Shirt Day, and to mark this, I’m giving away two t shirts featuring one of the quirky zombie-based designs I’ve been working on over the last couple of months.

These t shirts are black with a white design consisting of a gun sight trained on an approaching zombie (with a head shot lined up, naturally) surrounded by the text ‘Zombie Apocalypse Survival Training Instructor’.

To be in with a chance of winning one of these t shirts, simply fill in the form below. There’s no question to answer, and I’ll ship the prizes to anywhere in the world. However, you will have to tell me what size you’d want, and whether you’d want a men’s or women’s t shirt. The competition will be open until the 28th of June 2014, and two winners will be selected at random from all the entries I receive by that date. Once the winners have been selected, I’ll contact them by email to request a mailing address to allow me to send them their prize.

If you want to check out the full range of zombie-based t shirt designs I’ve created, these are now available from the ForThoseInPeril.net shop by clicking here (if you are in the UK/Europe, you can visit the UK version of the shop here). The t shirts are available in men’s and women’s sizes (children’s sizes will be added soon), and there’s also a few other goodies, too, such as hoodies, mugs, tote bags and even baby grows, all featuring my designs.

In addition, as well as the zombie-based designs, this range of merchandise also includes ones with logos for my three books (For Those In Peril On The Sea, Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales of The Undead, and the upcoming, The Outbreak), so if you’ve read these books, you can now buy the t shirt!

Anyway, to have a chance of winning a ‘Zombie Apocalypse Survival Training Instructor’ t shirt, just fill in the form below and hit the submit button.

[contact-form]

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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 Tell Your Grammar From Your Gramma

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Coming Of Age In A Zombie Apocalypse

Some of you may remember the series of posts I did a while ago under the collective title Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse. In that series, I would set a dilemma and then ask how people would deal with it. Recently, I had a comment on one of these dilemmas pointing out that while I regularly referred to young children in them, I rarely considered where teenagers would fit in to any survival group within my scenarios.

This got me thinking, while many of us would consider younger children in need of our full protection in a zombie apocalypse, at what point would be start seeing teenagers as adults, and so people who would need to start standing on their own two feet? Similarly, if a zombie apocalypse went on for long enough, at what age would children start having to take part in group activities, such as keeping watch, fighting off zombies during an attack or heading out on foraging trips, either accompanied or on their own? What about taking part in any decision-making? When would a child start having the right to contribute to discussions about what should be done, or even have a right to participate in any votes?

Some might argue that there should be a hard age cut off, just as we do in normal society for many things like voting, driving, drinking alcohol, owning a fire arm and joining the military. But when facing life in a world ruled by the undead, what age would this be? Would you consider a thirteen year old mature enough to be on the frontline, fighting the zombie hordes? Would you be willing to trust the decision-making of the average fifteen year old when out on a foraging run? Would you fully trust a seventeen year old to have your back when you really needed it, or not to fall asleep while keeping guard late a night? Would there need to be different ages at which teenagers would start to participate in different tasks, just like we have for many things in normal life?

Others might argue that since every person is an individual, you couldn’t have a single age cut off, where you consider someone not sufficiently mature to do a task one day, but able to participate the next just because they’ve reached a specific anniversary of their birth (indeed, how would you even keep track of the days so that you could do this?). Instead, you might have to consider each young person separately, and accept each one’s participation in specific activities on his or her own merits. Certainly, there are some thirteen year olds I’ve met over the years who seemed much more grounded and trustworthy than many university-age students, although I don’t know if I’d go quite as far as trusting them with my life (then again, I’m not so sure I’d trust every adult my own age with it either!).

Of course, in all these considerations, we need to think about what the teenagers themselves feel about taking more responsibility in the face of adversity. I remember many times when I was growing up where I objected to being treated as a child when I felt like a grown up. However, with the benefit of hindsight, I can also say with absolute certainty that there were many times when my teenage decision-making skills were distinctly poor even though at the time I considered them perfectly sound. Similarly, while I’d never have admitted it to anyone, there were also times when I wanted nothing more than to be relieved of the burdens of being considered a grown up so that I could behave like a child again.

My feeling is that in a zombie apocalypse, children would be forced to grow up fast and they would be expected to contribute more to the group than we might expect even college students to do in our current world. Of course there’s an argument that some of us, especially in the west, let our children be children much too long these days, with them not really taking up adult responsibilities until well into their mid-twenties or even older (something that would be a considered a unachievable luxury by many throughout the world), but that’s another matter.

In a zombie-filled world, children would probably be expected to start taking part in things like foraging in relatively safe zones, cooking or keeping watch during the daytime from the ages of ten or eleven onwards. By the time they were thirteen or fourteen, they’d need to start taking some responsibility for their own personal safety, and by fifteen or sixteen, like it or not, most would have to be fully functional members on any survival group they are part of, and so have to share in both decision-making and unpleasant or dangerous tasks. This would be little different from how thing are in many traditional societies, even today.

However, while they’d be forced to take on these duties, we’d also need to remember that just because a zombie apocalypse would mean they’d need to grow up fast, this doesn’t mean there’s not still a part of them, deep inside, that doesn’t quite feel fully grown up, even to quite a late stage of teenage-dom (and, indeed, if my own feelings are anything to go by, well into supposed adulthood!). After all, a zombie apocalypse won’t change human biology (or at least not the parts associated with being a teenager). This means that teenagers would still need to be given the chance to be children, at least every now and then, and we couldn’t forget that while teenagers are no longer kids, as such, they’re still not quite fully fledged adults yet either. In short, we’d need to be prepared to cut them a little slack from time to time, especially when they’re trying to cope with all the stresses associated with life as a teenager on top of everything else the world (and, indeed, the zombies) might have to throw at them.

Of course, all this doesn’t just apply to life in a zombie apocalypse, and many adults could probably do with being reminded that goes for the real world, too.

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

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

A Knotty Post-apocalyptic Survival Skill

Tying proper knots seems to be becoming a bit of a dying art. At one time, every boy scout (and presumably girl scout, too, but as I was never one of those, I can’t say for sure) knew how to tell a sheet bend from a sheepshank and would never be caught tying a granny knot instead of a reef knot. However, in the age of video games, bungee cord and duct tape, I suspect few people nowadays could even name a single type of knot let alone know how to tie it properly. At the most, they might know how to tie their shoe laces, but few will know it’s called a bow knot.

Now, you might well ask, does this really matter? Does your average man (or woman) on the street really need to know how to tie a knot properly? After all, when is he or she ever likely to need to do it? The answer here is, emphatically, yes. Why? Because one day it might just save his/her life. We never know what’s just around the corner, or when civilisation might come crashing down around our ears, and if that were ever to happen a knowledge of knots will prove incredibly useful and will help you live while those around you die. Okay, maybe I’m over-stating things a little there, but knowing how to tie knots properly is definitely an important survival skill, and not just in a post-apocalyptic world. Knowing how to tie knots properly can come in pretty useful in real life emergencies too.

Below, I’m going to show you (with the help of some rather useful videos from AnimatedKnots.com), how to tie five knots which I would consider essential to know. Yes, there are others, but these five will cover about 99% of all the possible knots you’ll ever need to use. However, before I do that, I want to consider how you tell whether a knot is good for using in any given situation or not. There are three parts to this.

First, a knot shouldn’t slip in any way unless you want it to. This means that (for most knots), once they are tied they shouldn’t move along the rope no matter how much pressure you put on them. This is particularly important if you are tying a rope around yourself where any slipping can result in serious injuries, but more of that later.

Second, a knot shouldn’t come undone either under pressure or when pressure is removed from it. That is, the knot should remain tied for as long as you want it to. It’s surprising how many tied knots, even if they are tied properly, will eventually work themselves free if you use them in the wrong situation (as anyone who has tripped over their own shoelaces will be able to testify!).

Finally, and this will seem odd at first, you need to be able to untie a knot quickly and easily when you want to. Why? Well, knots, by definition, are temporary structures and are designed to be undone when needed. After all, if you wanted to do something more permanent with a rope, you’d use a splice rather than a knot (but that’s another matter altogether). Instead, knots are meant to be a short-term solution which allows you to use a rope for a specific purpose, and then undo them again so you can use your rope for another purpose afterwards.

The importance of being able to untie knots again was brought home to me when I was about 20 and was sailing off the coast of Labrador in Canada. We were towing a heavy motorboat and as the seas around us rose as a we entered a storm, we needed to lengthen the tow rope to stop the motorboat plowing into the back of our yacht. The only problem was I’d been a bit sloppy with my knot tying and had accidentally used the wrong knot to secure the tow rope to the yacht. There was a frantic twenty minutes as I wrestled with the knot, as the motorboat alternated between threatening to sink and threatening to crash into us, before I finally got it undone and we were able to lengthen tow rope so that the motorboat remained far enough away that we could safely tow it. Needless to say, the bollocking I got from the yacht’s captain for my mistake meant that ever since that moment, I’ve always made damn sure that I get my knots right!

So, what are these five essential knots?

The first is the bowline. If you need to tie a rope around yourself for any reason whatsoever, this is the only knot you should use. This is because it is the only one guaranteed not to tighten under pressure and accidentally crush your internal organs to a pulp or, indeed, slice you in half! You might think I’m being over-dramatic here, but I’m not and many an inexperienced knot user has come to a grizzly end because they didn’t know how to tie a bowline properly. So here’s how to tie one:

The second is the sheet bend. The sheet bend is a charmingly simple knot that is amazingly strong. In addition, unlike many other knots, it doesn’t require both sides of the knot to be made from ropes of the same diameter. This makes it my go-to knot for joining two lengths of rope together.

The third knot is round turn and two half hitches. This is actually a combination of three separate knots (as the name suggests, a round turn and two knots known as half hitches!). If you need to secure a rope to something, like a branch, or to tie the a boat to a pier to stop it floating away, this is the knot you should use. This having been said, I would generally recommend three half hitches rather than the standard two, just to be on the safe side, and you can even add a fourth if you’re really paranoid. You should, however, never tie this knot around your body because at its heart it’s a slip knot, and it can, and will, tighten under pressure.

The fourth knot is the good old-fashioned reef knot (which is also known as a square knot). This is perfect for joining two ropes of equal thickness, or joining two ends of the same rope together. Again, it’s a deceptively simple knot, but one which is easy to get wrong. If you do, you’ll end up with either two half hitches, which will mean the ropes will separate under pressure, or a granny knot, which is almost impossible to get untied again, especially in a hurry.

The final knot isn’t really a knot as such, but is exceedingly useful. This is the square lashing. With square lashing, you can tie two poles together, and from there you can make a lean-to to give you shelter from the elements, a stretcher for emergencies, secure supplies to roof racks, build a raft and many other useful things. Thus, knowing how to do box lashing properly comes in useful on a surprisingly frequent basis. Here’s how it’s done:

So, that’s knots for you. If you don’t already know how to tie them, get practicing now, and if you do, you can start developing your skills further. How about doing them blindfolded, or in the dark? How about doing them as fast as you can? Or with only one hand? Can you, for example, tie a bowline one-handed? These little tricks might not help you impress potential partners at parties, but they might, one day, save your life!




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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.

Using ‘Easter Eggs’ When Writing Books

There’s been a subject which I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, and that’s Easter Eggs. Now you might think this is strange, given that it’s June, but it’s not that kind of Easter Egg that’s been on my mind. Instead, it’s literary Easter Eggs. This type of Easter Egg is an extra layer to an object, action, piece of dialogue or character in a story which may be hidden to many readers, but which provides those in the know with a little extra kick of pleasure because they’ve got the intended reference. They also provide additional layers to a story which readers might miss the first time they read a book, giving them something else to discover if they return to a story for a second helping.

Some Easter Eggs can have a relatively broad appeal, and so be ones which you’d expect most readers to get. Others may be incredibly subtle and may only be understood by a very small number of readers, often those who know the author personally. Similarly, some Easter Eggs may be self-referential, that is referring to other parts of a book, or books in a series, while others may be external references that link to specific aspects of a genre, or indeed to popular culture in general.

The trouble with literary Easter Eggs is that, just like the real thing, they can be addictive, and once a writer starts using them, there can be a temptation to go wild and include way too many. However, Easter Eggs only work if they are few and far between. Similarly, Easter Eggs have to be carefully woven into the story so that they’re neither too obvious nor provide a stumbling block for readers who don’t get the additional hidden meaning.

As with anything, an example with worth a thousand words, so I’ll use my book For Those In Peril On The Sea to illustrate exactly what I’m meaning by Easter Eggs. This is a particularly useful case study because it contains three intentional Easter Eggs (one of which is very subtle), and one example which some might consider an Easter Egg, but which was quite accidental. Such accidental references are remarkably common in literature and can cause readers to think that writers are much better at creating hidden references than they actually are!

For those not familiar with it, For Those In Peril On The Sea is a tale of survival in post-apocalyptic filled with zombie-like creatures referred to as The Infected. The first Easter Egg is the fact that the disease which creates the infected starts in Haiti. As any well-read student of zombie lore will know, zombies as we understand them in western culture originated in Haitian folk history, so starting the disease outbreak in Haiti (and indeed calling the disease the Haitian Rabies Virus) is a nod to this aspect of zombie tradition.

The second Easter Egg is another nod towards the wider zombie genre, and specifically the films of George R. Romero, who is recognised as the founder of the modern zombie movie. This Easter Egg is hidden with a piece of dialogue where one character tells another:

‘Given what’s happened, I’d much rather be on a boat at sea than holed up on land, cowering in my house, or in some suburban shopping mall, waiting for the food to run out or the infected to break down the doors.’

For those in the know (and I suspect most people will have got this), this refers back to the film Dawn Of The Dead, where the characters are holed up in a shopping mall during a zombie apocalypse.

The final intentional Easter Egg is one which I’d expect very few people to get. Despite the fact that the entire book is set on and around boats, none of the boats are refered to by name, and instead are referred to in terms of who each boat belongs to. This is except one, which, it is mentioned in passing, is called Gone With The Wind. For pretty much every reader, this will seem inconsequential, but those who knew me when I was out in Abaco in the northern Bahamas (where much of the second half of the book is set) will know that this the name of the sailboat I lived on a few years in the late 1990s.

What about the accidental Easter Egg? Well, one of the characters in For Those In Peril On The Sea is called CJ, and some might think that this is an homage to the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead, where one of the lead characters is also called CJ. However, this was purely accidental, and it was something I only realised well after the book was published! Rather, this character’s name started out as Camilla, but this didn’t really fit with the flow of the book, so it was shortened to her initials, meaning Camilla Jameison became CJ purely because it didn’t disrupt the flow of the book as much.

So, these are literary Easter Eggs. Would I recommend other authors to use them in their writing? I think the answer here is yes, as readers generally love feeling that they’ve got some hidden meaning that others haven’t. However, you should only include them if you think you can do it well enough that it doesn’t ruin the story for those who don’t get it, and if you don’t do it too often within the same story. If you don’t think you can create a subtle enough Easter Egg, then don’t do it, and similarly, if you find you are starting to include one on every other page, then you need to rein yourself in.

If you want to try your hand at using Easter Eggs, and you’re worried that they won’t work, then get someone to read it over, but don’t tell them why. This will allow you to see if they spot your intended Easter Eggs, and whether they think it disrupts the flow of the story if they don’t. This way you can ensure that any Easter Eggs you create will be proper surprises for the well-informed reader and not simply MacGuffins that ruin things for everyone!

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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 Zombie Defence – Why The Undead Can Get Away With Murder In Our Legal System

When people end up in front of a judge, we usually only think there’s two ways they can plead: innocent or guilty. However, while they’re rarely used, there are other options, too. Probably the most interesting of these is what I like to call The Zombie Defence. It’s real legal name is Automatism and it means an act which is done by the body without any control by the conscious mind. There’s two versions of it. The first is insane automatism and is used when someone loses control of their body because of a mental illness. If this is accepted by the courts, they are generally locked away and forced into treatment.

More interestingly, from the zombie point of view, however, is the second, called non-insane automatism. If someone uses this defence, they are claiming their body did something, like kill someone, but while they’re sane, they had no conscious control over their body at the time. Now, you have to admit a body walking around doing things without any conscious control, is pretty close to most people’s definition of a what a zombie is, and it has some pretty interesting implications in terms of how zombies, if they were ever to appear, would be viewed by the courts.

The recognition of automatism by the legal system means that it differentiates between the conscious being and the body which contains it, and it views only the conscious portion as being legally liable for anything it does. In contrast, the non-conscious part gets a free pass. Since zombies are basically humans (either dead or alive depending on your personal preference) without consciousness, it means there’s nothing a zombie can do, up to and including to killing and eating half the neighbourhood in a single sitting, which it would be legally liable for.

If someone enters plea of not guilty due to non-insane automatism, they’re admitting that they did whatever they’ve been accused of, but they’re claiming that they were a mindless, unthinking zombie at the time they did it. And the court accepts this, they will be acquitted of all charges.

So why, you might be thinking, don’t more people use this defence? Well, it’s a very difficult to defence to pull off. This is for a number of reasons. The first of these is that by far the most common reason that someone will enter an automatonic state is because of the excessive consumption of alcohol (drinking a mix of alcohol and caffeine is a particularly common way to induce automatism) or because they’ve taken drugs (like the notorious ‘Bath Salt’ zombie - although, despite the initial reports, it seems that this might not have been drug-induced after all).

From a legal standpoint, if you chose to take the drugs or drink the alcohol then you made a conscious decision to risk entering an automatonic state, and you’re still liable for all that you do while in it. The situation is a bit less clear if you consume the stuff without your knowledge, such as in a spiked drink, and technically you might get away with it, but rarely is this the case because many people who end up in this state had already started drinking or taking drugs of their own free will, and the spiking only increases the amount.

However, not all non-insane automatism is drug or alcohol induced. Sometimes, an automatonic state is caused by a disease (and again we’re shifting towards something which is very close some definitions of what a zombie is). For example, brain tumours can radically change a peson’s behaviour. If it happens to be in the part of the brain which is responsible for impulse control, it can make the person lash out or do things the wouldn’t normally do. The court’s view of this is that if it’s the tumour that makes someone do something, then they shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of their body (as long as they get treatment to remove the tumour as soon as they know that it’s there – if they do nothing, then they are deciding to remain in that state and then they become legally liable).

So, could automatism be caused by an infectious disease? I think the answer here is definitely yes. In fact, this is just what diseases such as rabies do. If we had a zombie outbreak where the zombies were living people infected by a disease which caused them to attack and kill other people, and we found a way to cure them, under the current laws, they wouldn’t be legally liable for anything they did while they were in their infected state. If this was a widespread event which caused a lot of death and destruction, I think this would cause a huge uproar from those who’d lost friends and family. This is because while most of us like to think the legal system is about justice, when something happens to someone we love, we don’t want justice. Instead, we want revenge. This would create a massive amount of friction between those who’d lost people and those who were infected, and I’d guess we’d see a pretty fast change in the law which would do away with the defence of non-insane automatism, or at least it would be made much harder to use it. In many ways, this was one of the most interesting themes of the BBC TV series In The Flesh, although that involved dead zombies and not living ones infected with a disease.

By this point you might be wondering, does the zombie defence ever work? Well, it’s rare, but every now and then it does. Of these, the most common are in the cases of crimes people commit in their sleep. This is where we venture into the territory of sleep disorders including sleep-walking and night terrors. Usually when we dream, a switch is flipped in our heads which paralyses our bodies. This stops us physically acting out our dreams. However, in some people this switch doesn’t quite work and this means that when they’re dreaming about killing zombies (as we all do from time to time!), they act it out, and if there happens to be another person in the room (such as their partner) they can end up killing them. When this happens, they will wake in the morning and be shocked by what they’ve done. It can be hard to prove in court that this is what actually happen, but it has been done.

So, that’s the zombie defence for you, and you can rest safe in the knowledge that if you become a zombie, you’ll be safe from prosecution, no matter how many people’s brains you eat. However, if you’re reading this article and thinking that it’s a great way to get away with murder, then be warned, you’re very unlikely to get away with it!




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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.

Guns, Razors, MacGuffins And Other Useful Rules For Writing Zombie Apocalypse Novels

I’m not big on rules, especially when it comes to writing, and I think that sometimes would-be writers spend too much time trying to learn about the rules of writing rather than just sitting down and getting on with it. After all, the best way to learn to write is by doing it and then seeing if you, or indeed anyone else, likes what you’ve created. However, when it comes to zombie apocalypse novels, there are a few rules which, if remembered, can greatly improve your writing. They’re not hard and fast rules, but they’re always useful to have in the back of your mind. So what are these rules?

The first is known as Chekhov’s Gun Theory, after the Russian writer Anton Chekhov who is credited with creating it. To quote Chekhov himself:

‘Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.’

This is a very useful rule when writing zombie apocalypse stories, and can be rephrased as follows: If you mention that someone has a weapon of some kind, then you are creating an expectation in the reader’s mind that it will be used. If it’s not, it will leave the reader wondering why. The same goes for other elements within the story, such as vehicles, scavenged objects and even characters. If they’re not essential to the story, you need to get rid of them, no matter how interesting or cool they are, or how much it shows how intelligent or well-read you are.

The second rule is related to the first and is based on Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanation which is consistent with available evidence is the most likely explanation. In terms of writing zombie novels, this means that your characters’ actions need to be as simple as the circumstances you have created allow. As a result, if you are going to have characters acting in complex or unexpected ways, this can’t just happen out of the blue as this will leave your reader wondering why they did it rather than something more simple or obvious. Instead, you need to change the circumstances to justify what the characters do and effectively paint them into a corner so their actions are the only logical ones available to them, even if they seem overly complicated. For example, if someone has to fight their way through a horde of zombies, you need to justify why they didn’t just turn and run away (which, let’s face it, is what most of us would do in the same circumstances!). The same goes for getting out of cars or other vehicles, going into buildings which may contain zombies and so on. This isn’t to say that you can’t have characters doing these types of thing, just that you need to tweak the circumstances to justify why they do them. For example, you can have a car run out of fuel so that people have to get out and walk, or someone develop an illness which means that a supermarket has to be raided to get some medicine or else they’ll die. After all, we all know never to enter a darkened building if there might be zombies inside – unless you have no other choice.

The third rule is to avoid MacGuffins at all cost. A MacGuffin is a plot device with little or no narrative explanation. In zombie stories, this can be things like introducing a character just to provide some background information, or so that they can get killed in a spectacular or gruesome way. Oddly, MacGuffins can work quite well in films (think of Twinkies in Zombieland or the briefcase in Pulp Fiction), but in prose, they tend to just annoy the reader. This is because MacGuffins violate Chekhov’s Gun Theory and Occam’s Razor as they are generally irrelevant to the main story or plot. This doesn’t mean you can’t have little throwaway lines, asides, or even the occasional ‘Easter Egg‘ (I’ll say more that particular subject in another post), just that they need to be worked carefully into the story so that they don’t stand out as something which needs to be explained. After all, there’s nothing worse than leaving the reader scratching their head and wondering ‘why on Earth did he mention that?’ or ‘what was the point of that character?’

The final rule I want to talk about here is foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is the introduction of elements into the story which prepare the reader for what will happen later on. In zombie apocalypse stories, foreshadowing can be really important and can cover things like how a character knows how to handle a gun or a specific weapon, where a weapon which will be used at a crucial moment comes from, how characters will respond to specific events and so on. They’re also really useful for setting the rules for your world and specifically how your zombies will act and how they are created. I’ve written about these before (where I called them plotlings) and they are the really important seeds that you need to plant in your reader’s mind before something becomes critical to how your story unfolds. If you don’t get the foreshadowing right, you’ll find the readers are left wondering how or why something happened, and the story will seem much less believable. It is particularly important to foreshadow major plot twists in some way, but you need to get just the right balance between providing hints as to what might happen and having your words jump out at the reader screaming ‘I’m a plot device: remember me, I’m important later!’.

As I’m sure you’ve realised by now, these four rules are all related and, indeed, can be viewed as variations on the same basic theme. This is that you shouldn’t mention things in a story if they don’t turn out to be critical, and you can’t use characters or other things, such as weapons, at crucial moments without introducing them earlier in the story.

Of course, it’s not only useful to know these rules, but also when to start applying them. I’d argue that it’s not when you’re writing the first draft, but rather when you’re editing it after you’ve got the basic plot and structure of your story down on paper. This is because you’re likely to change things quite substantially as you edit your story down, and if you start seeding your story with foreshadowing and Chekhov’s ‘guns’ too early on, you may find that they might turn into MacGuffins as you change exactly what happens within your basic framework. Indeed, in my own writing, the way I end up with MacGuffins in my early drafts is precisely because I’ve changed something as I’ve re-worked the story and I’ve failed to go back and remove related elements that were previously important for foreshadowing what was going to happen. This means that when you’re starting to bash your first draft into shape you need to make sure you’re thinking whether every character, every weapon or object mentioned, every line of dialogue and every scene really is needed or whether the story would work just as well without it. If it will – not matter how attached you are to a specific element you’ve created – leave it out. Similarly, you need to be thinking whether anything comes suddenly out of the blue and whether you need to go back and add a bit of foreshadowing to prepare the reader for it ahead of time. The time you spend doing this will be more than repaid by the improvements it makes to your manuscript and how well your story is received by your readers.




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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.

My Ever-growing Book Pile …

Some light bedtime reading …

I’ve been working so hard on getting the follow-up to For Those In Peril On The Sea ready for publication that I’m getting a little behind with the other books on my ‘to read’ list. Well, this isn’t really a list, more a pile of books on my bedside cabinet which has now grown to such a height that my girlfriend’s starting to worry it might collapse on me in the night, leaving her the unenviable task of having to dig me out when she wakes up the next morning.

I should say that not all these books are ones I have to read. The medium-sized pile at the back are ones I’ve already read, but that I’ve run out of space for on any of my book shelves – which is starting to become a real problem in our house. The books at the front on the left are ones I’m currently working on in one form or another. I’m on of those people who usually has several books on the go at once, generally a mix of fiction and non-fiction books, just so that I always have something to read no matter what sort of mood I’m in at any given time. The pile on the right are ones that I’ve still to start, or that I’ve already read and that I’m planning on reading again at some point in the near future.

If you look a the titles, you’ll see that these book are a fairly eclectic bunch. Unsurprisingly, there are a number of zombie books there, like World War Z, Flu and Charlie Higson’s The Enemy, as well as some other post-apocalyptic fiction, such as The Earth Abides (for something which is meant to be a classic, this is one book I’m struggling to finish). Being Scottish, it’s also unsurprising that there are books by various famous Scottish writers, like Iain Rankin and Christopher Brookmyre (who, if you’re not familiar with him, is a kind of Scottish Carl Hiaasen). There’s also a few Ray Bradbury books in there simply because I’m trying to fill in a few gaps in my reading knowledge of what are considered classic works of fiction within their genres.

A bit more unexpected, perhaps, are the books like Antifragile, SuperFreakonimics and The Undercover Economist. These reflect my interest in what’s going on in the world at the moment and how most of us are effectively being screwed by the top 1% who then try to tell us that times are tough, that we’re all in it together, and that we all need to tighten our belts, while all the time they get richer. The sharp-eyed amongst you will also notice a book called Thinking In Numbers, which is there because of my love of recreational mathematics (this will be of no surprise to those of you who are familiar with my Maths With Zombies posts).

Then there are the biographies and travel books. The two most interesting here (from my point of view at any rate) are Fatal Passage, which is the story of John Rae, a Scotsman who explored much of northern Canada and who discovered the fabled North West Passage while trying to find out what happened to the Franklin Expedition, and Amateurs In Eden, which tells the story of the Durrell family’s life in Greece in the run up to the outbreak of the second world war. This is unlikely to mean anything to many people out there, but this was a small English family which produced not one, but two, amazingly talented writers: Gerald Durrell, the noted naturalist and author of one of the iconic books of my childhood (My Family And Other Animals), and his brother Lawrence Durrell, who I have to admit I’ve never actually read.

Finally, there’s Jon Ronson’s Lost At Sea, which is a collection of his columns and essays about the weirder side of modern life. For anyone wanting to learn about how to write these types of article, I’d heartily recommend reading Jon Ronson’s work (I’d also say if you ever get the chance to hear him speak, grab it with both hands as he’s thoroughly entertaining to listen to). You might not think you’re familiar with his work, but if you’ve ever seen the rather brilliant film The Men Who Stare At Goats, he was the one played by Ewan MacGregor (since he was the investigative reporter who wrote the original book on which it was based).

Anyway, I’m not too sure what sorts of insight this little tour of the pile of books on top of my bedside cabinet gives into my life, other than the fact that I’m a bit of a book fan (which is only to be expected of a writer), that I have a pretty eclectic taste in reading materials and that, at the moment, I run the risk of death by paperbacks each and every time I venture into my bed. But then again, I could think of worse ways to 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.

How To Kill Off Characters In A Zombie Apocalypse Novel

In a good zombie apocalypse novel, the reader should never be left feeling that any character is completely safe. After all, in a zombie-filled world, the threat is ever-present and attacks can happen at any moment, and this means that anyone could end up dead at any time. Indeed, it’s often the feeling of not knowing who will survive until the end of the story, and who won’t, that gives a zombie apocalypse story suspense and keeps the reader turning the pages when they should be doing other things, like getting up and going to work.

However, handling exactly how characters die can be a difficult balancing act. Death and destruction cannot be arbitary, and you cannot simply kill off a character, especially if it is one of the main ones, completely out of the blue. This is because readers have some level of expectation as to how a story will go, and you cannot build a character up and then have them die without some hint that this might happen.

On the other hand, you also cannot end up with a ‘men in red’ situation. This term comes from the original Star Trek series, where if you ever saw an unnamed character dressed in a red top, you could be pretty sure they’d die before then end of any particular scene they featured in. This means that you have to avoid having characters where it’s clear that the only reason they’re being introduced is to act as cannon fodder (or maybe, in this context, that should be zombie chow!).

So, how do you get the death of characters exactly right? Well, there’s no firm rules on this and it will depend on your exact situation, but the following guidelines are likely to help.

1. Characters that die can’t always be minor ones: Most zombie novels have a core set of characters which the story revolves around, and often when authors are looking around for someone to die, they will reach not for one of these characters, but a more minor one. However, if it’s always minor characters that die, this will get repetitive and you will lose the element of suspense because it will quickly become clear that the main characters aren’t really under threat. Instead, you should always aim to kill off at least one of the main characters at some point within your story. This will give the reader that ‘oh my god, no!’ type of moment which helps keep them on the edge of their seat. It also leaves them wondering whether any other main characters might die, too, and it can act as turning points within the overall story arc, signifying that it will change direction from what has come before.

2. Don’t kill too many main characters: Once you accept that you have to kill off a main character, there can sometimes be a tendency to go too far in the other direction and turn the whole thing into a blood-bath with a never-ending chain of people being introduced and then killed off. Killing off a main character only really works if it is unexpected and beyond what the readers were anticipating. This means killing too many of them off will quickly become predictable. There’s nothing worse than reading a book and thinking, ‘oh here’s another character – they’ll be dead in twenty pages, just like everyone else.’ So, the killing off of main characters is something which must be used sparingly.

3. Don’t kill off any of the main characters too soon: If you are going to kill of a main character or two, or even three, you can’t do it too early in the novel. The reader will invest in the main characters and they will feel cheated if they’ve spent the whole first chapter getting to know a character only for them to die at the end of it. This leaves the reader feeling like they have wasted their time and that they are effectively having to start the book again when they get to chapter two. This is a great way to alienate them and they are just as likely to give up as carry on reading.

4. Main character deaths can neither be completely unexpected or completely predictable: Killing off a main character is a difficult thing to handle properly. It cannot come completely out of the blue, so that one moment they’re there, the next they are dead. However, it also can’t be completely predictable either (think about all those old movie clichés: the cop who’s one day away from retirement, the soldier showing off a picture of his girlfriend and kids back home before going into battle and so on). This means that you have to work up to the death of any main character, building suspense and anticipation as the reader tries to work out exactly what’s going to happen or who it’s going to happen to. Often this involves a series of seemingly unimportant decisions or actions which, with hindsight, the reader can look back on and think ‘if only they hadn’t don’t that, they’d have lived rather than died.’ This can be something as simple as forgetting a weapon, wasting bullets when they should have been conserving them or having to go after someone who has stormed off in a huff. Basically, think of The Butterfly Effect here and focus here on small, insignificant actions which have big, unexpected, but logically consistent, consequences later on.

5. Main character deaths have to be memorable and unique: There are lots of ways to end up dead in a zombie story, and many of the have been so over-used that they’ve become clichés. These should be avoided wherever possible, and when it comes to any of the main characters, their manner of death has to be both memorable and unique. This means you have to put a lot of thought into exactly how it’s going to happen. However, don’t confuse memorable with gratuitous. A character death needs to pull at the emotions, and no just turn the reader’s stomach with graphic descriptions of blood and gore. This usually means the death cannot be quick as there needs to be time for the other characters to see what’s happening and have time to react to it, or try to do something to save them. It’s also often useful to put the characters in a position where they have to make a choice of some kind which could lead to the death of either themselves or another character. For example, they might choose to close a door to keep most their group safe while leaving a straggler outside to be killed by a pursuing horde of undead. Similarly, one character might decide to throw themselves onto a zombie to save another character from being attacked, only to end up being bitten leading to a slow lingering death and feelings of guilt in the person they saved. These are the types of actions which make the reader stop and think about what they’d have done if they were in the same situation.

6. In real life, the good guys don’t always win: Zombie books need to feel realistic. This means that just like real life, the good guys can’t always win, and just because you like a character, that doesn’t mean they should necessarily make it through the story unscathed. In fact, some of the best twists in zombie novels come about when one of the good guys ends up dead just at the crucial point where the reader might have expected them to survive. While it’s widely used, the simple revelation that someone has been bitten by a zombie, and so is doomed, just when you think they’ve survived a dangerous, and possibly deadly, situation, is a great plot device. However, because it has been widely used in the past, it has to be handled carefully to make sure it doesn’t slip towards becoming a cliché.

7. Unlike real life, the bad guys should always get it in the end: Zombie novels need goodies and baddies, and while the unanticipated death of a good character can really add to the story, if a bad buy doesn’t get his comeuppance, then the reader can be left feeling cheated. This is because the reader expects the dichotomy between good and bad to be resolved, with the bad being punished, even if the good don’t necessarily win.

Of course, these guidelines are simply hints to help you understand what the reader might be expecting, and how you can play with these expectations to build the required suspense and anticipation to keep them reading. You can break one or two of them, or even all of them, within you own writing, but if you do, you need to think about it really carefully and make sure that you handle it appropriately. Yes, it’s different to kill off three characters that the reader was expecting to be able to follow through a whole book on page four, but there are good reasons why you haven’t read novel where that happens before, and that is because it will put many readers (and, indeed, agents and publishers!) off. Similarly, having the bad guy walk away unharmed while all the good guys die at the end may seem edgy and new, but it will leave the reader feeling that they’ve been cheated out of the ending they were anticipating.

Really the key take home message here is that the choice of which characters you kill, and they way you kill them, can make or break a zombie novel. Get it just right, and the readers will love it. Get it wrong, and the whole story will start to fall apart. Striking exactly the right balance of death and destruction always requires a lot of hard work, but it’s well worth the effort.




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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.