Tuning Into the Universe: Zombies! Zombies, Everywhere, and Not a Brain to Eat!

It never ceases to amaze me just how easily things start to fall into place once you've made a decision to focus on something. I am thinking of my current plot and the plot I've chosen for my NaNoWriMo Project at the moment. Zombies. Now, any given day of the week you can pop into the video store and rent a zombie movie, and there are some pretty obscure zombie novel titles out on the market, but we live in Smalltown, Pennsylvania. All too often, even the most popular topics and items don't show up here until two months after everyone else has moved on. Even our local Borders Store didn't stock the latest Neil Gaiman book without a request. Sick. I know.

So, when I began immersing into zombie culture, I expected little, to no help from the local library, video rental store or Borders. When I first started looking three weeks ago, the library had nothing. They still have nothing. I can probably order titles from one of the other branches in our county system, but even the system has NOTHING on zombies. Not even the Haitian voodoo zombies. The video store has actually gotten in some pretty obscure titles, even a few foreign zombie flicks. I was shocked. The greatest shock came from our local Borders store. In the last three weeks they went from having nothing more than the Max Brooks Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z books to putting out an entire display of zombie books, including Zombie Haiku: Good Poetry for Your Brains and The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead.

The section containing survivalist books had also added quite a few titles, making recent trips to Borders somewhat expensive. All in the sake of research--completely necessary, of course. It's also nice to expand your horizons and your library, so I'm certainly not complaining.

Now here's the thing. Either the universe is completely tuned into what I need right now, or everyone better start preparing because the zombie apocalypse is coming. I'm giving credit to the universe, but if zombies do attack, at least I'll be prepared. ;)

Zombie Defense Training and Zombedies

I already know that if I want to get my characters out of zombie infested areas, I'm going to have to do some serious zombie defense training. The inner-researcher has prompted me out into the garage twice to look at the machete we found after we bought the house almost four years ago. I keep thinking about how good it would feel to exercise my right arm on some of those pumpkins next door. Maybe a watermelon would be more realistic. Max Brooks' says that the best zombie defense weapon outside of your own physically fit body is a steel crowbar. Not only is it incredibly solid, but it's multi-functional in a world gone mad.

Some of the research I have been doing has been really interesting. The survivalist book I started with, How to Survive Anything, Anywhere by Chris McNab has some incredibly useful information for every day situations too. We hike, sometimes in state gamelands where there aren't marked trails, and it really pays to know how to set up an emergency shelter, but how many people know to trap a fish with a plastic soda bottle...

In honor of my zombie training, I rented the zombie comedy (zombedy) film Fido: all about a boy and his er... zombie? My daughter and I recently saw the previews on the Irish zombedy: Boy Eats Girl. I can't wait to watch it, but since tonight is Wednesday, I am going to tune out for two hours with TAPS and Josh Gates from Destination Truth. Maybe tonight, Josh will find the truth...

BTW, I haven't forgotten about posting my shepherd's pie recipe. I will definitely add it in later this evening.

And before I head out for a couple hours, I'd really like to hear anyone's thoughts about surviving a zombie apocalypse. What would you do to survive?