Keeping Fit While Fighting Zombies …
As a writer, I spend a lot of my time sitting in front of a computer, sometimes writing, sometimes just staring at a blank screen waiting for inspiration to hit me around the back of the head with a baseball bat. Either way, it’s not a particularly active life style, and it’s certainly not one that will help you develop the level of fitness you’d need to survive a zombie apocalypse.
Herein lies my conundrum. I know I should try to keep myself in shape, but dragging myself down to the gym is too disruptive to my writing when I finally get into the zone and the words and ideas start flooding out. Running works, and is easier to fit in, but pounding the streets is ever-so-boring. If only, I often wonder, there was a way to keep myself inside the zombie zone while keeping fit and making running a lot more fun?
Well, it turns out I’m not the only person who has wondered this, and others have not only got there first, but they’ve actually done something about it. What have they done? Created an app, of course! The app is called Zombies, Run!, and it allows you to play an interactive zombie apocalypse-based game, including running away from pursuing zombies, as part of your regular (or, in my case, irregular) running routine.
I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet, but if it lives up to its promise, then I could see this being something I’d use on a regular basis as it would be the perfect way to enliven an otherwise boring activity. The fact that it would help me stay fit would be an added bonus, and you never know, it might also inspire me to write better zombie scenes as it’ll give me a more personal experience of what it’s like to be pursued down the street by a zombie horde.
Of course, I’ll need to make sure I don’t get too drawn into it as I don’t think ‘I thought she was a zombie!’ would work as a defence for accidentally knocking a little old lady over when she came up behind me unexpectedly during my cool down session. Maybe it should come with its own t-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Danger: Runner In Zombie Apocalypse Mode – Approach At Your Own Risk!’, just to make sure others know you’re immersed in a very different world from the boring, everyday one they’re inhabiting.
Anyway, once I’ve had a chance to give this app a go, I’ll report back and let you know if it really does live up to expectations. In the meantime, it’s back to writing. After all, there’s a lot more scary thing than a zombie horde pursuing me at the moment, and that’s a deadline for getting my next book finished. It’s rapidly approaching, and there’s still a lot of work left to do, but at least the end is finally in sight.
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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.
