Davos Couldn’t Write
I had a project manager on my team — I'll call him Davos — who was one of the best that ever worked for me. He could motivate a burned-out team and walk a hostile stakeholder back from the ledge. He could not write to save his life. Six months later, we were celebrating his promotion to Program Manager.
The Back Page
I write the date inside the back cover of every book I finish — and make everyone who borrows it do the same.
Filed to Points
Why the scariest sentence is the one that doesn't explain itself — a subway story, an incident report, and the found-document trick I lean on in The Revenant Strain.
Three Influences on The Revenant Strain
Thirty+ years in corporate IT taught me that nobody builds anything from scratch — you look at what worked and steal the parts that fit. The Revenant Strain came out of an oral history, a monster movie, and a midlife-crisis comedy.
Only one of them has a zombie in it.
The Elixir, and the Rest of the Buffet
Netflix's Indonesian zombie hit The Elixir is a solid swing — smart family drama wrapped in an outbreak. But watching it got me circling back to the genre's real ancestors: Shaun of the Dead, Train to Busan, The Walking Dead, and the one I actually steal from on purpose, 28 Days Later.
The Misogi I Didn't Know I Was Doing
A Shinto ritual, a personal trainer, and forty years of a career built to avoid failure — on what it means to finally do something with a real chance of not working.
So, This is a Blog Now
Right, hello. I'm Q.B. Ashworth, and this is — apparently — a blog. I've spent the last 12 years buried in a manuscript about four guys on a boar hunt who stumble into the end of the world, so forgive me if my "welcome to my website" energy is a little rusty.