We recently had a chance to review Colin’s For Those In Peril On The Sea. After quite enjoying the novel we’ve also had a chance to sit down and speak with the author himself to conduct an interview with him!
1. Tell us something about yourself.
I live in Glasgow in Scotland with my girlfriend, two guinea-pigs and way to many ukuleles. The ukuleles have become a bit of an obsession and when I’m not writing or working, I’m usually playing one of them. I’d always wanted to play a guitar but never managed to get to grips with it, but a few years a go I decided to give the ukulele a go and just fell in love with it pretty much from the start. I’ve found playing an instrument is a really good way to clear your head, and when I’m stuck with a bit of writing, maybe a scenes just not working or there’s something wrong with a character that I can’t quite put my finger on, if I go away and mess around on a ukulele for a while, I’ll find that when I come back to the writing I’ll suddenly see how I can get it to work.
2. I note that you are a marine biologist. How, if at all, did this influence your writing of For Those in Peril?
I think this has had a big influence on the book. In particular, I worked out in the Bahamas, where the book’s set, studying whales and dolphins for a while and really got to know the place. This meant I had really clear pictures in my mind of what everything looked like when I was writing it, and I think this gives it a more authentic feel. Also, a lot of the sailing bits are based on real passages that I’ve made over the years. If I wasn’t a marine biologist, I’d never have got to go to lots of really fascinating places and do all sorts of interesting things. In particular, there’s some scenes involving hurricanes in the book, and these are based on my own experiences going through two hurricanes (a small one called Dennis and a really nasty one called Floyd) that hit the Bahamas in the late 1990s. There’s also descriptions of being at sea and seeing dolphins and flying fish and all these sorts of things that I could draw on. They don’t really drive the narrative forward, but they do help add colour and background interest, and I think this makes it all feel more real.
3. You were lucky enough to be an extra in World War Z. Apart from ‘Wow’, can you share a bit about your experience?
Yeah, it was pretty cool, and I was really lucky to get to do it. Some 7,000 people applied apparently and there was only about 700 of us extras on set. Mostly we were just a crowd people running around in the background, and there was a lot of running. The whole thing took something like three weeks just to film one of the big stunt sequences right at the beginning of the film, and us extras spent up to 12 hours a day either waiting for someone to shout action or running at full pelt down the road while trying not to get in the way of the main actors or the stunt people. I’ve got a much better appreciation of what goes into making action sequences in films now and how hard, and expensive, it is to get it right. But of the entire time I spent on set, the best bit by far was when there was a sudden rain storm and we were just standing around trying to stay dry when one of the continuity people told us to go stand under this gazebo thing so we didn’t get soak, and next thing I knew we were standing next to Brad Pitt and Max Brooks as they talked about the film. We eventually ended up chatting to Max for about twenty minutes about the book and how he’d come up with the ideas for various bits of it. He’s a really nice bloke, and talking to him inspired me to finally sit down and write the zombie book I’d been thinking about doing for years, so I guess you could say that if it wasn’t for Max Brooks, I’d never have written ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’.
4. What’s next on the agenda for you?
At the moment, I’m working on an anthology of short zombie stories, mostly ones I’ve posted on my blog, which should be out before the end of the year, but I’m also working on the next book in the ‘For Those In Peril’ series. There will be three or four in total, I’ve not quite decided on that yet, and they’ll all be set in the same world as ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’. The second one, the one I’m working on at the moment, is going to introduce a new set of characters and will start with an outbreak of the Haitian Rabies Virus in Glasgow. It follows group of people trying to get out of the city as the army try to contain the disease but then moves onto the west coast of Scotland. Again, a lot of it is going to be set on boats and on or around the water. The west coast of Scotland is another place I know really well, not just through my work as a marine biologist, but also because I spent a lot of time there when I was going up. Like the Bahamas, it’s got great scenery and interesting places to set this sort of post-apocalyptic survival story in. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft and I’ve got the rest story all worked out, but it’s been a lot of hard work to make it distinctive and different from the first book. I think I’ve managed it though. I know some people will be disappointed that the same characters won’t turn up in the second book, but rest assured they’ll make an appearance in the third one where the groups from the first and second books will finally meet.
You can find out more about Colin by:
Visiting the website: http://www.forthoseinperil.net/
Visiting the blog for Colin M. Drysdale: http://cmdrysdale.wordpress.com/
