I said I was going to be quiet, but…
I now live in a world where the local supermarket needs to put a guard on the toilet rolls. If I wrote that in a book, people would say it was unbelievable!
Also, the British have now given up any right to that “Keep Calm and” meme. Seriously, Italy now has more deaths than China, and the Italians aren’t stripping supermarket shelves like mutant locusts.
/EndRant
Witches and Ray-Guns 
Depends on where you are, I guess.
Some places are apparently post Zombie Apocalypse (actually, why haven’t you written a zombie apocalypse book yet?
Around here , there’s just a bit less fresh meat in the Co-op fridges than usual. And someone bought all the chocolate chip shortbread. Fiends.
I’m pleased to hear it’s not as bad everywhere. Though I am horrified to hear about the shortbread. Bastards. (I bought chocolate chip shortbread today; there was plenty. I guess some places have no toilet rolls and some shortbread, and some places it’s the opposite.)
To answer that question you asked: I’ve never done a zombie apocalypse story because I hate zombie apocalypse stories. The market is utterly saturated and no one is coming out with anything new in the genre. I can’t think of anything new either. It’s all been done to death, pun intended.
Well there was that stint with the Chucks on Sapphira but that was a little one sided on account of Aneka being a super cyborg with rapid fire machine pistols and a bloody starship!
I forgot about the chucks. They were more like a parody. Technically, there’s an element of zombie apocalypse in the Gunwitch setting too. The mutants in the underground are zombie-like.
Thank you for sparing us yet another zombie anything!!!!
PS: Chocolate Chip Shortbread? I live in the States. Never heard of it.
Shortbread… Soft cookies. Tend to be crumbly, so eating it means picking up fallen crumbs a lot. There doesn’t seem to be an American name for the stuff, which I find a little odd. Very popular in Scotland since it came from there. It’s nice stuff once in a while. Bad for your waistline, especially with chocolate chips in it.
We can get Walker’s Shortbread cookies here in US. I wonder if I can find any suppliers of chocolate chip shortbread here.
thanks for the response
Not counting the Chucks – they were actually pretty funny and part of the story. BTW: Aneka REALLY needs to dig into that company that set her up for abduction, as well as that biomedical firm responsible for releasing the Chucks on Sapphira.
Well Downunder we are sort of at a midpoint. During the week there weren’t a lot of people around in the Sydney CBD, maybe 1/10 of normal. More were around today. The bus in had 6 passengers rather than the usual 30 or more. We’ve had the panic buying here. Started with paper products for two weeks then moved onto food. Still plenty of Easter eggs though. When I was in the city today buying cables and models I just felt deeply sad because in a months time it probably will be a ghost town like The Quiet Earth film. Most of the city will be in lockdown by then. Stay well Niall.
It does make me wonder about humanity in general.
Irrational hysteria is the latest fad, I guess. And cookie hoarding, amongst the most vile human traits.
As of right now public schools in Washington State will reopen mid-April. North Carolina is looking at mid-May. Either way, there won’t be a vaccine yet and once the kids are packed back into their classrooms the disease vector blows wide open again. There is no “keep six feet away” in an elementary school class room. So far no one is seriously considering canceling schools until a vaccine is developed, tested and distributed globally, sometime next year if we’re lucky. In that scenario there may well be an entire generation graduating high school in their twenties.
What I haven’t heard any politician or medical “experts” explain is the likely number of infected and post-infected people globally.
Does anyone doubt that in the last several months tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens were infected? That tens of millions of Europeans were? Infected, felt a bit down for a day or two and then completely recovered.
Less that one percent of Americans have been tested for Covid-19 – our government literally says, “Do not seek medical attention or testing unless you’re having difficulty breathing.”
They say that as of this moment, there have been 441,093 confirmed corona virus cases with 19,764 deaths globally. That’s a 4.5% mortality rate, which is much worse that typical flu, and that’s the number that the scare-mongers are touting.
And yet, I’d be willing to bet that the global infections number way, way north of 100,000,000. Still with only 19,764 deaths attributed to the disease. That changes the dire doomsday prognostications to … well, here in America you’re more likely to die in a traffic accident than from Covid-19, and we haven’t shut down the planet for that.
We need to realize that this is not near as serious as past global epidemics, and like small pox and polio, this won’t magically go away until a vaccine is created and distributed globally.
… Then in a few years or a few decades, the next “new” bug will appear and us idiot humans will do this all over again.
Until then, fight against irrational hysteria, be as safe as you can and for goodness sake, share the cookies.