Fresh New Voice of YA- Amanda Ashby Guest Blog

NEWS
Check out the myspace blog here for reviews of The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Zombie Queen of Newbury High.

GUEST BLOG
First up, a big thank you to Book Chic for inviting me to come and play this week. Especially since he’s had me here once before and so he knows what I’m like. All I can figure is that he’s very brave or that he’s got his finger hovering over the delete button just in case!! (NOTE FROM BC: I think it's hilarious how both Amanda and I think we're gonna be booted from each other's blog when we do guest blogs/vlogs, lol). Anyway, since I’ve been given a carte blanche to talk about what I want (oh the power, how it tickles) I thought that considering my book is all about zombies that it might be appropriate for me to make a few confessions.

The truth is that I’m not a fan of horror movies. Well, I say not a fan, but that’s not entirely true – it’s just I normally find them so completely terrifying that I spend a good eighty minutes of any one movie, hidden behind the couch while asking my husband if it’s safe to look. I blame Doctor Who entirely. You see I grew up watching Doctor Who (we’re talking seventies and eighties here so please rid your mind of David Tennant and the gorgeous Christopher Eccleston and instead think Tom Baker).

Anyway, I spent my youth petrified that some weird alien with hairy eyebrows would come up to me and say ‘contact has been made’ and then I too would turn into a weird alien with hairy eyebrows. And don’t even get me started on the daleks. I actually carefully planned the two potential places that I could hide should there be a dalek invasion. Unfortunately, since I’ve got no firm assurances that there won’t be a dalek invasion in the future I can’t tell you where these places are in case I need to use them myself (did I mention that I’m not a sharer?)

Then as I got older the horror movies came and they were even worse than the hairy-eyebrowed aliens of Doctor Who. Especially the zombies who, no matter what you did, NEVER seemed to die and were eternally hungry. Not to mention all the blood (which by the way, when I was talking to a woman who was an extra in Peter Jackson’s Braindead, she told me the fake blood was actually a lot like Maple Syrup. I know. Crazy, right?!). Anyway, as my seventh grade teacher will tell you, when blood is around I WILL faint.

Right, so we’ve got a girl who doesn’t like horror movies and who faints at the sight of blood. No wonder my husband laughed his ass off when I said I wanted to write a zombie book. But the truth is that I wanted to write it from a normal girl’s perspective and I really wanted to make her reactions to the whole thing as normal as possible – which considering that I’m scared of zombies and so is my heroine Mia Everett – it really wasn’t that hard to do! So there you have it, my secret zombie confessions. But if you promise not to tell anyone else about them, I might - just might - let you know my secret dalek hiding spot, because I’m pretty certain it will work just as well when the zombies come…