welcome to the virtual tour for
IMAGE 1: The photo that inspired the main plot for this book:
It's the cruise liner used by the united nations as a floating administration centre (each time a country is "liberated" by the UN or USA, it's usually needed whenever "rebels" destroy the most important government facilities and power supply while retreating, because parking a mobile admin centre off the coast allows the UN to help the country's economy to get going quickly again.)
Here it's under heavy guard in East Timor, although I've also spotted it in the background of other media pics related to Afghanistan and Kuwait - and in each country, the old counterfeitable currency was replaced by new encrypted notes to help stop terrorists from being able to print their own money.
So putting two and two together, I couldn't help but wonder how much money it must have on board and how much mischief a bunch of do-gooders could get up to in robbing it (in the interests of world peace, of course!)
MAGE 2: The maintenence platform used by Ratface to smuggle Jayson Locklin aboard. Have u noticed the inspiration for this sub-plot actually came from a different ship? The blue hull gives it away. But nearly every large cruise liner has one of these to help with minor maintenence while the ship is travelling between ports.
Obviously, I couldn't get on board the "real" ship for security reasons, so this is actually the stern (back-end) of the Pacific Sky, the luxury cruise liner that I *was* able to get aboard for a few days, and therefore provided most of the inspiration for the internal descriptions of decks on "The Lady Peacemaker." And okay, I admit it: I wasn't too happy about boarding her in the beginning. I'm terrified of the ocean. (At least I USED to be, until I forced myself to take a trip on this ship!)
Talk about torture! (NOT!) Five course meals every day, perfect weather and luxury to die for. After all, my characters all travelled first class, so naturally I was forced to travel first class too so I'd be able to describe their journey's accuractely... And being an author who's known to write at any time of the day or night, I needed a whole cabin to myself - which made a family cabin rate about $1000 cheaper than paying for two single beds in one cabin. So naturally, my husband and two sons were forced to endure the torture of a pacific cruise with me... and with three extra research assistants on board, we certainly managed to get into all the nooks and crannies.
IMAGE 3: Somehow I managed to get 126 pics of lifeboats during the cruise. (Obsessive? Moi? Never! hehehe.) Here's one of my favourites: A crewman performing the daily safety check (right outside my cabin window).
Note the semicircles painted onto all of the bench seats. These are to show passengers where to put their bottoms in the event of evacuation, but unfortunately you do NOT get one semicircle for each cheek!
The young deckhand pictured is also the inspiration for the character of Lennie Hagan, who had a wickedly dry sense of humour and recommended that due to cramped spaces on lifeboats,in the event of an emergency, you should abandon your partner and stay close to someone very skinny who smells nice.
IMAGE 4: Here's one of the luxury shopping areas on board "The Lady Peacemaker." Pretty scary to think of what could happen to all that glass in the event of a major shake-up at sea...
And as it turned out, a commercial was being filmed on the same cruise with olympian swimmer Lisa Curry-Kenny, so while 1500 passengers danced around the pool deck to be on tv with her in the hopes of winning another cruise, my family were at the nose of the ship, experiencing the terror of having an entire ship shake and bump as if hit by a major earth tremor! So when you read that scene in Project Apocalypse, you'll know where the inspiration for that came from too!
IMAGE 5: The communications array and radar domes on the top deck of "The Lady Peacemaker."
Imagine trying to parachute onto THIS in high winds in the dark! Of course, that's all I could do... was just imagine. You can plainly see the torturous weather we had to endure off the coast of Queensland... talk about show-offs! No wonder they advertise the days as wonderful one day and perfect the next!
You can also see the jogging track and top of the ship's bridge, where a lot of the action takes place. And man oh man, you haven't jogged until you've tried jogging around a ship that's not only heaving forward and back as it lurches through waves, but is also teetering from side to side, cruising forward at a fair speed AND perched 12 stories above the waves! No wonder my poor hero got sea-sick!
IMAGE 6: As luck would have it, a few containerships were being loaded at the same time as our cruise ship was leaving the Port of Brisbane. So here's the old rust bucket that inspired "The Nereus"
A few extra hours research after my sunburnt return a week later and I soon knew how fast I could dump the containers overboard at sea, how fast she could go empty, and how big an explosion I'd get from a high speed collision! Yahoo! What fun research can be!
IMAGES 7 (a,b& c): Mount Tambora from space. An awesome sight! I've added a few extra sightseeing notes which relate only to Project Apocalypse, but you can google it yourself for free and zoom in by sattelite (as close as you want and even spin it around to look at the island and peak from any direction) Just go to google-earth.com then download the free program and zoom in to the co-ordinates shown on the bottom of this photo.
Handy hint #1: as extra fun, try turning the planet to your own country and zooming down on your own house from space. It's so amazing. I can see the bottom step of my swimming pool from space! (Therefore never going skinny dipping again! har har)
Handy hint #2: Google-earth.com is a fantastic for helping you to research settings for your own stories, as well as getting overhead images of places and large monuments for school projects! (Also pretty good for getting overhead pics of traffic intersections for insurance claims and explaining why you didn't deserve that last speeding ticket!)
NOTE: To read the short story that was based on the deleted scene from Project Apocalypse, CLICK HERE... but prepared to choose your own death! (evil laugh)
Some more amazing pics of the volcano:
7b) another cool snapshot courtesy of google-earth's fabulous free satelite imaging.
7c) Looking down into the mist of the crater itself:
IMAGE 8: Here's the photo that inspired the "Flamebearded" bad-guy from Project Apocalypse. From memory, the pic came from a magazine advertisement for electric razors - such a clever job at shaving! But I'm very sorry to say that I didn't keep the rest of the ad, so if anyone know's who took this very clever photo, or which company it was advertising, please let me know so I can give them a proper credit. It's amazing!
IMAGE 9: Here's the third cruise ship which helped to inspire the robbery of "The Lady Peacemaker."
It's the biggest cruise ship on the planet and just happened to be in Sydney on the same day as me. A very nice taxi driver tried to get me close enough for a photo, but due to rigid security, this was as close as we could get (which by coincidence is right across the street from the publisher of Project Apocalypse!). The cab driver even tried a quick loop of the taxi stand at the Sydney Opera House (which is just out of camera shot to the left of the photo). But the police had closed off every street in every direction (except this park across the harbour.)
First thing that popped into my head when I saw it was "gosh, it looks top-heavy!" So I figured it must have a lot of hidden mysteries below the waterline to provide counterweighting and stop it falling over sideways in the wind... not so, I discovered during follow-up research. The hull and levels below the waterline are therefore very similar to those described for "The Lady Peacemaker."
And since the arrival of the ship often brings each port city to a halt for many blocks, the second thing that popped into my head was "Hmmm... I wonder how you could smuggle everyone off a big ship like that without anybody noticing?"... and that's where the inspiration came from for *that* scene.
IMAGE 10: Here's the home-made deckplans of "The Lady Peacemaker" which I made to help plot each chapter and keep track of Locklin while the bad guys chased him all over the ship.
Q: Why didn't I publish this in the book as well?
A: My favourite english teacher once taught me that a picture is worth a thousand words, so an author who can describe a scene in less than a "picture" is worth their weight in gold. A good fast paced description is also one of the hardest things you can attempt as an author (and still have your readers understand what's going on), so I wanted to make sure I could do it without "cheating" ... Inside secret: I'm also lousy at drawing deckplans! :)
IMAGE 11: Here's the harbour "pilot" coming aboard to pilot the cruise liner out through the shipping lanes.
It's standard procedure at every harbour around the world (according to a ship's captain that I was lucky enough to sit next to on a flight from Brisbane to Canberra while writing chapter three), but in Project Apocalypse, there are so many ships trying to leave the harbour after the disaster that the pilots have to be airlifted to each ship using military helicopters... well, in this story, anyway!
IMAGE 12: My sons exploring Deck 11 of The Pacific Sky, alias "The Lady Peacemaker."
That's one of the main entertainment decks that you can see through the doorway (where the pool party is held in Project Apocalypse) Also note the louvres along the wall, which sucked at your clothes if you brushed against them. Deckplans showed these were air-conditioning vents, but a large mysterious "void" inside that wall (which was also directly under the jogging track) provided the inspiration for the hiding place for my 3 shipping containers full of $15 billion each.
Also note the sickeningly gorgeous weather and calm ocean... Have I mentioned it yet? I can't wait for this book to become an international bestseller... I'll charter the whole ship and have a book "launch" to out-do Harry Potter!
IMAGE 13: Black smokers in action. As described in the scenes where the submarine uses the heat and magnetic interference to hide on the relatively shallow floor of the Java Sea.
The colour comes from the types of minerals that are percolating up through the ocean floor - caused by the heat from magma deep below the seafloor that boils the water inside and between rocks of the ocean floor. (Heat rising, not magma rising, so the magma doesn't actually touch the sea water.)
Note: Usually, only white smokers occur in areas where one continental plate is subducting under the other - as is the case with the location for Project Apocalypse - which would have made it less believable that a submarine could hide here, but extensive research with the help of specialist Aussie and Indonesian geologists revealed that black smokers do actually exist in this region!
IMAGE 14: Subduction diagram which inspired the plot for the red-faction's plan to set off every volcano around the ring of fire.
By blasting a whole in the bottom of the harbour's trench and allowing seawater to access a live magma chamber, a cataclysmic explosion would occur, somewhat similar to the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883 (which killed 36,000 people and was heard up to 5000km away!)
IMAGE 15: The sonar dome at the front of "The Lady Peacemaker"... looks like there's enough room to land an assault chopper, until...
you look up and see all the running lights and other deck clutter... so that's why Locklin had to parachute onto the deck , being very careful not to rip his own legs off on the way down (at night). Those cables are strong enough to cut a guy in two!
IMAGES 16 (a&b): Finally, here's a couple of draft covers that didn't make the final production run because they made the book look as if it was for guys only. What do *you* think? Would you have chosen one of them?
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