Over on the Babel Clash blog, Holly Black and I are debating Zombies Versus Unicorns. You should go check it out. We slay us.

Holly on why unicorns are better than zombies.

Me on why zombies are better than unicorns.

Holly about why we love teams. Jacob vs. Edward, cake vs. pie. You know. And then holly tells us what teams she’s on.

Me on how just adding zombies makes everything fun.

Holly on why hope is a good thing.

But my latest post at Babel Clash is a bit more serious, because it’s about apocalypse survival. You’ll see at the bottom why it’s so important at the moment, so I repost it here:
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In my last post we discussed the zombie-survival-suitability of various architectural masterpieces, in particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. But what happens if the zombie apocalypse goes down while you’re reading Zombies Versus Unicorns at home? ARE YOU PREPARED?

Take a moment to look through your abode, and rate it for zombie-survival characteristics. Do you have food? Water? Weapons? Strong doors? Better to find out now what you’re lacking, rather than waiting for the zombie apocalypse or the (relatively unlikely) natural disaster/terror attack/meteorite strike.

I’ve done a quick survey of my Sydney flat, to help you get started:

WATER

Remember the old saying: humans last three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without oxygen. How much water do you have around?

I’ve got two liters of water in the fridge, and 17 bottles of wine. (Um, good for disinfectant.) But the bathtub can be filled before city water dribbles to a halt, and the average bathtub holds about 200 liters (when full to the brim).

Minimum survival requirement are 3 liters per day per person, but I’ll say 4 for cooking that pasta (times two of us), so we have about 25 days after the apocalypse before we are forced to go outside, plus whatever rain we collect. With a bit of scrimping, we can JUST make the 28 Days Later scenario.

HOWEVER: In summer, Sydney can get up to 35C (95F), a temperature at which daily water requirements double. Pray for a winter apocalypse!

Facty chart ganked from here.

FOOD

Ten cans of beans and tomatoes, and cans last FOREVER. (Save them for currency!)

Several kilos of polenta, pulses, and pasta. Well done, me.

Lots of cheese and vegetables to eat before the pasta and polenta diet begins.

An astonishing amount of herbs and spices, and some mango chutney. Don’t laugh. For 300 years in the Ottoman Empire, the price of pepper was fixed at its weight in gold. In the post-apocalypse, Tabasco will be liquid platinum!

A “vanilla butter luxury cake” made last night.

Cinchona bark for making home-made tonic water. Full of quinine! No malaria here, dudes.

Overall, our food will run out more or less when the water does. But we’ll probably want to make a run for it in three weeks or so, while we still have the strength to clobber.

WEAPONS

Um, not so good here.

A set of Furi knives that are great for chopping, not so much for braining.

Two CO2 canisters for carbonating home-made tonic. Can swiftly be converted into short-range rockets, unless Mythbusters has lied.

PHYSICAL DEFENSES

Excellent news here:

Top floor of eight-story building.

Security gate on apartment door.

Stairwell door well locked.

Elevator needs electronic fob to activate.

Only one other tenant on floor. Easily subdued. (He listens to Elton John. I can take him, especially if he’s already dead.)

OTHER

Short-wave radio, for listening to those last transmissions from Julia Gillard’s bunker or the Center for Disease Control.

Lots of remotes with half-used batteries in them. (WELL DONE, SIR!)

Meade 8″ Telescope, for street recon from the balcony. (And for calculating the equinox after the calendar notebook gets lost.)

A garage full of cars to steal for our eventual getaway to zombie-free Tasmania!

SUMMARY

In all, I think we have a chance. So what apocalypse provisions and defenses do you have at your humble abode? ARE YOU PREPARED?

REALNESS
As I write this, it so happens, people up in Queensland, Australia are experiencing a real apocalypse, flooding that has killed eight people, displaced tens of thousands, and had dire economic consequences. So yes, this survival stuff can be real. To help them out, go here and donate.

Those of you who enjoy delicious zombies might want to check out this debut by Carrie Ryan, called The Forest of Hands and Teeth.

I would tell you more about it, but I already wrote a signature review for Amazon, which starts like this:

Teenagers love a good apocalypse. Who doesn’t? All those annoying rules suspended. Society’s pretenses made irrelevant. Malls to be looted. School out forever.

But in The Forest and Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan’s marvelous debut novel, the post-apocalypse is defined more by constraints than freedoms. The book begins seven generations after the Return, an undead plague that has ended civilization as we know it. Of course, a zombie outbreak usually means shotguns and mall looting–the very essence of freedom. But more than a century on from the Return, the malls have already been looted, and shotguns are a distant memory. The novel’s heroine, Mary, lives in a village surrounded by one last vestige of industrial technology: a chain-link fence, beyond which is a vast forest full of shambling, eternally ravenous undead–the forest of hands and teeth. No villager ever goes outside this fence, unless they want to die. (And given this bleak scenario, some do.)

Mary’s world is bounded not only by the fence but by the archaic traditions of her people, which are enforced by a religious order called the Sisterhood. Marriages, childbirth, death, every stage of life must be controlled to sustain the village’s precarious existence. Even the houses are circumscribed–literally–with passages of scripture carved into every entrance to remind the inhabitants of the rules that sustain human life amid the horrors of the forest.

After so long an isolation, the village is beginning to forget . . .

Click here to read the rest of my review.

That’s it, except . . . it’s only 13 more days until Extras comes out in paperback. W00t!

Over at Inside a Dog, YA writer Maureen Johnson has just extended and expanded her Insert a Zombie, Win a Prize contest.

The basic concept is that any scene in any book would be better with a zombie, a truth universally acknowledged among certain of us genre fans. (Scroll down to the blue text in this post for Maureen’s own example, featuring a zombie in Pride and Prejudice.) To enter the contest, just take a scene from any book and add a zombie to it.

For the contest’s new and improved iteration, celebrity judges Meg Cabot, John Green, E. Lockhart, and Justine Larbalestier will choose the winning entry!

Here’s my entry, though I probably won’t win, given that I’m married to one of the judges.

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Zombies.

It was the best of apocalypses, it was the worst of apocalypses. It was an age of brain eating, it was an age of shotguns. It was the epoch of damaging the head, or of removing it from the body. It was the season of light infantry weapons, it was the season of dark pursuits through abandoned sewers. We had everything at the local mall before us, but there were too many zombies in the way. In short, the period was so far like the present period—except for, you know, all the frickin’ zombies.

Go and enter!

Here are the roolz:

1) Keep it to one paragraph. (250 words or less. Less is better.)
2) Make sure to give the title and author, so we can know whose work is being zombified. If these are not given, the zombified work will not be considered!
3) E-mail the entry to maureen@maureenjohnsonbooks.com. Please use the subject line: ZOMBIE INSIDE! You may enter as many times as you like. (So, if you want to zombify 30 stories, you can! But they must be different ones each time.) The deadline is February 14th. You can go right up to midnight (US, east coast time).
4) All of these wonderful entries will be read by Maureen and the other judges.

Round one: this week on insideadog . . . deadline, end of day, February 14th. The first five semi-finalists will go up to voting on the 15th. The prize for winning this round is the final copy of Maureen Johnson’s Suite Scarlett.

Round two: next week on Maureen Johnson’s blog . . . all entries submitted between February 16 and February 21st, with the next semi-final on February 22nd.

This all leads up to the crowning of the ULTIMATE ZOMBIE on Monday, February 25th.

5) You know who picks the winner? YOU DO! It’s ZOMBIE IDOL!

This just in: Justine adds a zombie to James Joyce’s Ulysses.