Four ways to totally satisfy your Walking Dead withdrawal

So we are a little over a month away before AMC's epic "The Walking Dead" starts up again, hopefully with a high body count and much samurai sword wielding goin' down in the zombie apocalypse. We can blame the Nielsen sweeps for such lulls put upon us by the holidays, but the fact is, if you're like me, blame only goes so far. So what can we do in the meantime?

1) My first suggestion is to read The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor.

Seriously. This novel had me on the edge of my seat for two nights as I consumed page after page following the first days of the outbreak. The Governor (known as Philip) and his brother (plus a couple of friends and his daughter Penny) are just like everyone else: caught unawares when the world "mysteriously shifts" and the dead rise up to eat the living.

This book is dripping with gore. My favorite scene is when this small group commandeers a luxurious Cadillac Escalade and try to make their way into downtown Atlanta where there's supposedly, a government refugee camp where they can get supplies, help, medical attention, military protection, and perhaps an explanation as to what the hell is going on.

As a little background, in the early days of the outbreak, power is still available in many areas. There are still television broadcasts going on along with updated news programs. But as the hours march on, more television stations drop off the air, and broadcasters turn to previously recorded shows. The way the author writes it, it's eerie in a very normal way. So really, there's no reason for our group to know that Atlanta has been overrun. Just that it seems suspicious that the television stations are all so quiet.

Well this Cadillac Escalade is essentially a rolling tank. And Phillip gets caught downtown watching zombies come out of skyscrapers like clowns coming out of a clown car. There's literally thousands of them, and they get cut off on all sides. So he slams his Escalade into four wheel drive, revs it up to sixty miles an hour, and just cuts a swath through the walking dead, blowing them up, running them down, and creating so much "zombie grease" under the tires and carriage that it hydroplanes through a building and gets wrapped around a concrete pillar. And behind them, the zombies are roaring, relentless, and hungry.

2) You should watch all of the episodes of High School of the Dead on Hulu. You don't have to have a Hulu Plus membership. It's totally free. You just have to sign in using Facebook to show that you're old enough to be watching anime with such "adult/gory" content.

High School of the Dead is exactly how I would picture The Walking Dead in Japan. Only here we have young adults being eaten alive. The outbreak starts simple enough at a school with a zombie being mistaken by the principle as a trouble maker trying to break into the school's secure grounds. When confronted, the principle gets bit and quickly spreads the contagion. So the faculty ends up eating young adults. A particularly chilling part of the anime is when the voice of someone in the office is shouting "Stop! It hurts! It hurts! Stop!" and then screams when the mic goes dead. After that, there's a stampede as kids try to get out of the high school. A pair of girls (vowing to protect each other) gets separated, and the one stands over the other horrified, watching her friend get torn to pieces by zombies. It's great! And yes, for guys out there who like to see Japanese school girls in their school uniforms, there's lots of that going on.

3) Watch 13-year-old Nick Mastrangelo's animated video of The Walking Dead's Daryl Dixon in action. It involves machine guns, a magic crossbow, and even robots. You should watch this and then ask yourself what you were capable of doing with a computer in the 8th-grade.

4) Watch the new "Evil Dead" trailer which is being billed as the scariest movie of 2013. This trailer is Not Suitable for Work. It is for mature audiences and features gore, swearing, and a disturbing scene where a woman cuts her tongue in half. But for the "Evil Dead" purists out there, it should be quite satisfying. It looks less campy than the Bruce Campbell/Sam Raimi version, and the Necronomicon looks pretty convincing. In case you don't know, the Necronomicon is an H.P. Lovecraft prop used in most of his Cthulhu mythos stories. It's not something you'd ever want to read from. In the least it rouses the dead, and that's never a good thing.

Housekeeping:

Next week I shall be attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I decided that I am going to take a laptop so I will strive to blog about C.E.S. And yes, I am going to grab as much free stuff as I can possibly get. I'm going to point out to every vendor that I work for the State of Utah and we do demonstrations for people all of the time SO HOOK ME UP homey! :) Mostly I will be going to the Silvers Summit and taking a look at Smart Home Technologies and basically anything that "differently-abled" people could use to make their lives more independent. That's my career (using assistive technology to provide independence and a more meaningful life to those who could use some help). I install cameras and environmental controls that are voice-operated, I install voice-operated computers in people's homes, and strive to stay on the cutting edge of technology.

Anyway, I hope my laptop doesn't get stolen in the airport. I think I've taken every precaution.

If you have time today, please visit Laura Eno's blog as it's a stop on my book tour. You can find her HERE.

Additionally, on Saturday I will be at the Indie Book Blog. I think Oculus is getting a review. You'll find that blog HERE. Oh well, I guess that's the chance we authors take, right?

FREE MONEY>>>Also, the $50.00 Amazon Gift Card promotion is still going on. Go HERE for the daily tweet which has been updated. The gift card giveaway ends this Monday.

Have a great weekend. Monday, I shall be doing a cover reveal for Ellie Garratt's new book.