Introduction

This wiki exists to promote and annotate the Zombie Blogroll project which ran from December '08 to January '09 and is hosted at Blogger.com

What is it?

The Zombie Blogroll is a writing experiment conducted by 3 professional writers and their zombie-obsessed friends. It seeks to explore new possibilities in fictional blogging by following not one but five connected stories, but above all it's zombie thriller fiction at its finest. The blogs outline a suspicious invasion of 'sick' people on the sleepy college town of Ada, Ohio, and the town and authorities' subsequent reactions. It includes the perspectives of a CDC investigator, a couple college students and a townie stuck in the quarantined town, and the original zombie herself (before she reanimated, of course).

How would the government react to such a sensitive event? How do real people cope with having to 'kill or be killed'? Will Ada ever be the same again? With the help of Max Brooks' zombie series, The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, as inspiration and research materials, the Zombie Blogroll attempts to answer these questions.

Who are the characters/where can I read their blogs?

The five blogs that make up the blogroll can all be found at Blogger.com. Below are brief character sketches for each. Click the images to go to their respective blogs.

Maxine Alexander

Max is the original zombie, and her name is a little nod to Max Brooks. She's a typical college kid, from small-town Egypt, Massachusetts life to small-town Ada, Ohio. She's got a close-knit circle of friends, including Jared Watson (see below), and the purpose of her blog is purportedly to keep in touch with her family while she's at school, but she also uses it to alleviate boredom when Jared loans her his old webcam. She's infected by relatives with the 'flu' during Thanksgiving and the deterioration of her mental and physical states after that are very apparent in her posts.

Sara Bowers

Sara is a single 30-something and an insomniac to boot. She works as an investigator for the Center for Disease Control by day and compulsively buys from infomercials by night. When the call comes in over the Christmas holidays that she'll have to spend some time in Ada investigating the very contagious 'flu' outbreak there, she's just looking for some excitement out of life. What she gets is a town overrun by zombies and frantic residents, and when she's handed a gag order she finds she has no choice but to get the word out covertly, over the Internet.

Jared Watson

Jared is a college guy, a frat guy, a nerd in the most complete sense, and Maxine's best friend. He's got a little unspoken crush on her, and a big, big thing for zombies. He's read all the literature, he's seen all the movies, he even has a zombie-whackin' crowbar that he painted to resemble the one from Half-Life. He's all dressed up with no place to go, that is until Max brings the zombie virus back to school with her. As one of the first people to realize that the 'flu' is not half as benign as the CDC is making out to be, Jared goes into full zombie combat mode and is in heaven.

Jim Leichner

Jim's a resident of Ada, and a struggling musician. He gets some gigs here and there and enjoys a decent following, but he's not quite ready to pack up and go to Hollywood with the show just yet. As he's perfecting his musical talents, he also enjoys the night life and the popularity that come along with his occupation. When the college kids start dropping like flies, he finds it a minor inconvenience, and when the town is quarantined, the exits barricaded, he thinks it's a serious cramp in his style. It's not until a zombie smashes his window and Jim very nearly becomes brain food that he begins noticing the chaotic world around himself.

Casey Crawford

Casey is another college student, an English major with a definite propensity to philosophize in his existential blog posts about his favorite obsession, Bugle chips. Like Jim, he seems very caught up in his own existence and disconnected from the world, but this changes when the town shuts down and his girlfriend, Hailey, goes missing. He's got enough pop-culture learning to recognize a zombie outbreak when he sees one, and enough common sense to hole up in his dorm room with Bugle chip traps set for intruders, but can he save Hailey, an obvious hypochondriac, from becoming a quisling and joining the ranks of the undead?

'Solanum'- Our Version

'Solanum' is the name of the zombie virus as outlined in Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide, and it is the term the Zombie Blogroll uses to identify the agent which causes the zombification, but there are some unique characteristics to the Zombie Blogroll version.

There are two ways a person can contract the virus:

• A - the person has contact with bodily fluid from an infected person (this is how Maxine gets the virus). The person then has flu-like symptoms for a week to two weeks, then goes into a coma for up to 12 hours. After this, the pulse dies and the person reanimates as a zombie. Sometimes, as in Max's case, zombie character traits are slow to awaken and may take up to a few days. Other times, the person will reanimate and immediately begin an aggressive campaign for human flesh.
• B - the person is bitten by an infected and skips the flu-like symptoms. They appear to die immediately, and then reanimate anywhere from a few minutes to an hour later, craving braaains.

"When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."

-Dawn of the Dead