Why Toxic City?

I've written under several genres.

The Pantinium Blade is epic adventure fantasy
The Resident is a thriller/horror
DCI Forrest is crime
The Oddly Lit collection is children's horror fiction
And Nowear Left is a gothic fantasy.

But for as long as I've been writing, there's one genre that has always floated my boat and that was post apocalyptic

I crave it!

My first experience was a book called Z for Zachariah. 

I read it in my early teens and it was a diary of a girl in an American town after a nuclear war. She was all that was left. It was lonely, quiet, and uncertainty was everywhere.  She tried to live as normal, waiting for her family to come home and one day someone came to visit. She wanted to trust this man but there was an instinctual fear that kept her at arms length and it played out as true. As desperation overtook his humanity, she had to fight to keep safe. It ended with her taking his hazmat suit and walking off to find civilisation.

I always remember that this book left me feeling cold. I was at the beginning of the Harry Potter series and I'd not long left behind Steven King's famous works such as Hearts In Atlantis, Needful Things, and his Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Hell, I was still reading the goosebumps series!!

All of those gave me the chills. But nothing fed me the gritty reality of true abandonment than that diary had.

From where did it stem? 

I love magic. I was a practising witch for a decade (don't laugh!). I loved faith based things like Buddhism and Shamanism, I yearned to tap into something really special and uplifting. But it was all fantasy and I knew it, and whilst I still benefited because it helped fuel my fantasy novels, it also left me wanting.

That space was filled with radiation.

I love magic for its mysterious affect on the natural world. What I didn't realise was that the magic existed in science, and radiation was the mysticism I was craving!!!

This led me to other books, cartoons, and comics relating to post nuclear wars, fallout, and the apocalypse.

As of books, I've read many. None met the same realism that I'd craved since my first experience. I was an adult by this point and I wanted it to feel true.

Comics were mainly Judge Dread, Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, and a few shows that escape me now.

But I would say my first true rush came when I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R shadow of Chernobyl.

GSC Game World PC

At first it was just a game. I never expected it to be life changing. I soon grew engrossed with the scifi nature, of anomalies, deadly storms, blood suckers and these freaky pig things on skinny legs. The whole Russian theme was alluring; the language, the themes, the way the people of that world had settled into it with the typical Russian resolve that we attribute to them even today.

I played for hours and hour and hours. But as much as I thought the game was amazeballs, it was what came after that blew my mind.

The team behind S.T.A.L.K.E.R weren't just some office-bound games developers. They were danger-dancing adventurers who really pulled out all the stops when it came to making this game a true Post Apocalyptic nightmare!

The team went to Chernobyl, to Pripyat, and mapped what they saw. The streets you walked in the game? They were the same streets of the Dead Zone around the deadly factory. The chambers and reservoirs where I'd ran from bloodsuckers and braved anomalies to capture relics were the exact same landscapes as in the real town!

I was overcome. I played the following games with vigour.

I'd found it. After years of never thinking I would, I'd found the gritty realism I'd yearned for. 

What this led to

Mainly just musing. For a long time I'd had an idea for a story. I didn't have a main character or a cause, but I had a world. I knew how they world had ended, I knew why, and I knew the dangers my characters would face, such as disfiguring effects of radiation, struggles of power between factions, and difficulty in remaining a 'good' person when survival involved doing bad things.

I knew I wanted anomalies, but I wanted everything to be as real as possible, and the storms that inhibit human survival (though very similar to the storms of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R world are actually the result of something else, but that's another story).

I needed more inspiration.


Bring on the next video game!!

Look at all that grit. look at it!! nnnng 

I can forgive PC players for not playing STALKER, but for any kind of RPG enthusiast to never have played even one of the Fallout games is reprehensible!

I loved the camp, jovial nature in which this game delivers its characters and plots, and also the magnificence of Bethesda writers to bring you crashing down to earth in such engrossing adventures that you'll remember them forever. 

By the third Fallout, I already had Toxic City penned, at least the first draft, and I had experimented with several characters before settling with Val.

I made dis :3 

I had a general idea of how it was going to start and how it was going to end, and I used Fallout as a vehicle for adventure, to see just where I might take my character. Did I want her to be sneaky and intrusive, or impulsive and closed off? Did I want her to yearn to fight, or to slink off and let others deal with it? 

RPG games allowed me to see how different attribute classes would allow me to deal with the same situation. I'd often replay scenes as different characters in the game to get a full effect, and I did this with Toxic City, constantly starting over from scratch to play out various scenarios. 

What I came away with 

There's a lot I can say I took away from S.T.A.L.K.E.R, such as the crippling effects of radiation, the anomalies, and the very idea of Walkers (though that development has a story to itself), but what did I take away from Fallout? 

Pipboys!

Check this 3D printed baby at http://ytec3d.com/pip-boy/ 

S.T.A.L.K.E.R already introduced me to PDA's and I've loved this idea for ever, but Pipboys brought out a real sense of character. Val owns a much more refined, but no less kickass RDAC (Radiation Detector and Anomaly Counter) which takes pictures, shines light, has communication lines and, of course, a built in radio. Which brings me to the next inspiration

RADIOS!

I've been in love with the radios on every single Fallout game for as long as I've played the game. Even to this day I sing bongo bongo bongo I don't wanna leave the jungle oh no no no nooooo and it makes me smile. Even though I never got a real sense of loneliness in Fallout, I can imagine it must be a hard environment to live in, especially when 90% of people want you dead, and then you slap on the radio and have that playing in your ear. I loved it!

After Fallout? 

Well, we have Metro 2033

This game came very late on in my writing of Toxic City and it mainly compounded what I'd already achieved with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. It was also very restrictive. Less a sandbox game and more linear, which is fine, but it didn't allow me to grow as a character like RPG games often do. Still a good game, just wrong time. 

But an unlikely influence? 

It was 2015 and I had finished the final draft of the Toxic City plot. I'd ended up cutting out whole chunks of the story by the end of 2016, but that was fine, it was all for progress. But I was starting to crave survival sci-fi stories again! 

So what did I pick off the shelf? 

I'd always been recommended it but I'd never given it a chance. Not to mention I didn't view it as a Post Apocalyptic story. But that's exactly what it was. It has full-on world annihilation, with barely a handful of humans surviving, and having to make it in an environment completely new and positively deadly! But it was a little out of the usual spectrum.

Still, it was gold! 

It used comedy to ease the edges of what should've been rather dire. I tried re-reading the book without the quips and thought it honestly depressing. Not because it was badly written (because it was not) but because it made it a bit too realistic. 

I'd like to say I took from this book the comedy element. I'm really not that talented. I can't really say what came of it other than aching sides and a new outlook. But I make references to it and will do my best to get as many of my readers to grab a copy.

Conclusion

I never once stopped to think 'well that's a lot like S.T.A.L.K.E.R or Fallout' when writing this book because, frankly, that is exactly what I wanted to happen. These games, as well as the books and comics, moved me in ways I haven't experienced with other genres. Sure, Hearts in Atlantis is still one of the greatest books I've ever read, and Douglas Adams had me crying with laughter, but none of them filled a hole that, frankly, I didn't know needed filling. 

And most of all, I followed the one sound bit of advice that I will plug as my motto for eternity

If you can't find the book you want to read, then write it. 

I failed to find the true, nitty gritty, down to the bone, utterly heart breaking and realistic post-apocalyptic story that I craved, and so I've endeavoured for the past eight years to write it. And if it gets anyone to read HHGtotheG, to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R, or to find Z for Zachariah, and to be even remotely as amazed as I was, then I'd feel like I at least achieved something. 

Hopefully through the amazing guidance of Britains Next Best Seller, I'll have Toxic City Volume 1 and 2 available for purchase by the middle of 2017. 

Think you have a story the world wants to see? check them out here for your chance to get published!!!

 Clickity clack ---> Bnbsbooks

Also you can find me at twitter! @DangelAngello  

Thanks for reading!!!