How to make snow
A quick, basic guide to creating “machine made” snow. For a silly idea I may incorporate into part three of Pickers.
Source: SMI Snowmaking Basics
Lost Picture Show
Coming soon- Pickers
Pickers breaks down perfectly into four parts of roughly equal lengths, so I’m releasing it as a serial before collecting it into a single volume. The serial will only be available from Amazon, but it will be in their Select programme. So, if you have Prime or Kindle Unlimited, you can get it for free.
Part 1: The Find and Part 2: The Trip are available to pre-order now. They come out on July 4th and July 18th.
In a climate changed future, Pickers travel the badlands between towns and farms, finding what they can to salvage from before the collapse.
One family of Pickers is about to start a search for a prize that could change everything.
Part 1 of 4- The Find.
Remy, his daughters, and his son in law, are on the hunt for a seed bank, hidden away before climate change crashed everything. The trail has led them to a hidden bunker, and what they find inside is going to set them on a long journey, back to the community they ran away from ten years ago.
Part 2 of 4- The Trip.
Remy, his daughters, and his son in law, have been travelling the badlands for years. But now they have found out about a hidden seed bank in the French Alps. With a grain blight ravaging crops in France, the seed bank could be the only hope of finding resistant strains and saving the country’s remaining towns from starvation.
Remy, Maxine, Veronique and Tony are determined to break into the vault and liberate the seed lines. However, they are in Spain, and they will have to cross the country and get over the Pyrenees before they’re even in France. And then, there is another obstacle. Only one valley over from their destination is the community they ran away from ten years earlier. The people of The Valley would be ideal recipients for a bounty of seeds, but will they welcome Remy and his family back after all these years.
The wonderful world of Mad Max rip-offs
As I’m writing a story inspired by Mad Max and the whole post apocalypse road warrior genre, I’ve been watching quite a few eighties era rip offs of the original.
A fair few of them are mentioned on this list, and I’ve gone searching for the ones I haven’t seen yet. Be warned, you are not going to encounter high production values, subtle acting or coherent storytelling if you follow me down this path. But most of these films are enjoyable in their own clunky ways.
(Don’t tell anyone I told you, but many of these films can be found, complete, on YouTube. Often ripped from VHS copies, the reproduction can leave a lot to be desired. But, as so many of them are currently unavailable any other way, this could be your best chance of seeing them.)
Source: The 10 stupidest (and most shameless) Mad Max rip-offs
A portable solar cooker, just what every Road Warrior needs
I keep finding cool kit that I could incorporate into Pickers. This solar grill is just the sort of thing you might need if you were trekking around a harsh wilderness. No fuel, no smoke (unless you overcook your meal), light, and portable, my characters would probably have one stored away somewhere.
Source: The GoSun Grill Is a Portable Solar Cooker | Digital Trends
Indoor Farms- a vegetable patch in a cupboard
These indoor farms look cool. They’re not hydroponics, which the builder thinks is too complex for general adoption, but use a “smart soil” to regulate water use and nutrient release.
I don’t think they’d work in the world I’m building for my current story, but I could imagine them in some of the better off parts of the world I created for Sounds of Soldiers.
Source: This Indoor Farm Can Bring Fresh Produce to Food Deserts | WIRED
Chosen Ones and Source
Chosen Ones / Source is available through Amazon and Smashwords.
Two short tales putting a spin on some common stories.
Chosen Ones
What happens to teenaged heroes once they’ve fulfilled the prophecies and saved the world? Well, the lost prince of Atlantis is going to speed dating events in Manhattan, and having a surprising meeting.
Source
The stories all suggest that the US military would get the cool alien space tech, and we’d have to trust them to do the right thing with it. More likely, the recipients would be random ordinary folk- like a guy out shopping and the woman he’s trying to chat up.
Making Alcohol Fuel With a Solar Still
So I was writing a scene earlier today, based upon the idea of a solar powered still producing ethanol for fuel. By the power of teh internet, I have found that it is possible, and that people have already built there own- Making Alcohol Fuel With a Solar Still – Renewable Energy – MOTHER EARTH NEWS.
I hope the security services aren’t recording my YouTube history
So, I’m working on the next book to be published under the Garth Owen pen name. The working title is Pickers and the high concept pitch is “Mad Max goes green.” Having broken it down into chapters and major scenes, then looked at my current writing pace, it’s not going to be ready by the middle of next month to tie in to the release of Fury Road.
A slightly longer synopsis- Pickers* wander through the (mostly) abandoned badlands after a climate change driven collapse, finding old equipment and technology that they can rescue, repurpose or recycle, selling it on to settlements. The story is about a family of pickers- father, two daughters and the husband of one of the daughters- who have been chasing a particularly precious treasure trove, and the journey they take once they find directions to its location. The treasure isn’t oil, or even water, and the action takes place in Spain and France, rather than unspecified desert.
I’m setting it up such that guns and ammunition aren’t yet vanishingly rare, but other, older weapon technologies are more likely to be used first. So I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos about bows and catapults. Which is how I found my new hero Joerg Sprave.
Joerg’s a jolly bald fellow with a crazy imagination, lots of skills, and one of the scariest laughs ever**. He builds things like pump action pencil launchers.
Or, at the other end of the spectrum, a machete launching “crossbow”.
It was an aside in one of his Slingshot Channel videos that inspired me to arm a secondary character with a catapult that she uses to launch darts fashioned from nails. I’m not sure how many of his other creations I could realistically use in the story, but you never know.
I’ve also been researching stuff such as thermite and napalm, but those probably aren’t things I should mention on an open channel.
*I admit it, the title’s inspired by the TV show American Pickers.
** It’s not the laugh itself that’s scary. The laugh is rather jovial, and occasionally gleeful. It’s just the way that he lets it out just after demonstrating another piece of destructive hardware.
My Kindle books are now available in Germany
But not in German. Sorry guys, but I can’t yet stretch to a translator.
Here’s Slashed at Amazon.de.
And here’s Sounds of Soldiers at Amazon.de.
Slashed is now available for the Kindle
Slashed is available in for the Kindle. You can buy it from Amazon UK
Slashed is an energetic and over the top homage to the slasher movies of the eighties and beyond.
What happens when the madman in the mask isn’t the most dangerous person in the house?
When eight teenagers turn up unannounced and determined to have a party at Warden’s Lodge they are warned away by the grizzled old owner of the gas station nearby. Of course, they don’t pay any attention to him.
Over twenty years ago Warden’s Lodge was the scene of a horrible massacre when a prisoner on a work gang went crazy. He killed the three most powerful men in the county, as well as the guards and his fellow prisoners, then he disappeared. Ever since then the locals have kept their doors locked and their guns close.
When the teenagers set up camp in the Lodge it seems obvious what will happen. But they’re not what they seem, and there’s something waiting in the woods for them and the hidden killer. In one long night a lot of blood will flow, and Warden’s Lodge will never be the same again.
A house with a grisly history.
The killer who calls it home.
Eight teens planning a party.
But who’s hunting who?
Slashed is now available from Smashwords
Slashed is available in Epub, pdf, RTF and more from Smashwords. The Kindle edition should be available in the next couple of days.
Warden’s Lodge has a blood soaked history dating back to before the Civil War. After a violent massacre it has stood empty for over twenty years. The locals keep their doors locked and are never far from a gun, fearing what they think lives in the lodge.
When eight teenagers turn up, determined to have a party in the lodge despite the warnings, blood can’t be far away.
In one long, violent night the lodge is going to claim more lives.
A house with a grisly history.
The killer who calls it home.
Eight teens planning a party.
But who’s hunting who?
Slashed cover concepts
Here are a few of the ideas I’ve been sketching for the cover of Slashed. I’m thinking of going with one of the ones featuring the mask. Scream 4 is released next month and I reckon I can get the book out at about the same time and be cheeky and milk it a little.