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II.13.b: And here is where the title of the third book sort of originated.
This was a difficult scene to write. I’ve actually had these sorts of awkward conversations with women. I had a friend in college whom I tried to make a move on once and she burst out laughing because she thought I was into guys. However, when you write a scene like this, and you’re trying to be accepting of all people who might read this, it can come off as insensitive or even phobic to a degree, and I didn’t want that. I made sure, after I wrote it, to send it a gay friend of mine. He read it and said, “I don’t have an issue with it. If someone does have an issue with it, they probably have bigger issues than this scene.” I hope he was right. So far, out of all the emails and messages I’ve gotten about this series, no one has mentioned this scene.
I also wanted to bring up the fact that pregnancy can be lethal in a post-apocalyptic world. Modern medicine and hospitals and trained doctors have gotten first-world mother and infant birth mortality to very low levels, but even with all the technology and training, women still die giving birth. Babies still die during the birthing process. It’s scary. As a nurse, I would think this would be something that Ren would think of a lot.
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II.13.c: This revelation is actually me correcting my own lazy research. When I wrote After Everyone Died, did not immediately think it would be a series. I hoped it would turn into more books, of course, but I wasn’t certain. It wasn’t until something like 5,000 people downloaded during a free promotional week on Amazon that I thought this book might have the legs to be a series.
Anyhow, when I was finishing AED, I needed someplace for Twist to move to down South. I opened up Google Maps, saw Lake Pontchartrain, and saw Madisonville right there on its banks. It just fit in my mind. Boom! Easy-peasy, right? I wrote the scene, the book went to press, no worries.
It was not until this moment in the writing of the second book did I think to check on whether or not the water in Pontchartrain was even potable to any degree. A little bit of research told me that it was brackish water, and probably not the best place to resurrect a dying civilization. Could I have made it work? Yes. However, I believe that life in a post-apocalyptic civilization would function much like electricity, and people would look to take the path of least resistance. Life is going to be very difficult in such a scenario, so why make it harder on yourself. Find freshwater. Go there, instead.
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II.13.d: If you’ve already read the previous iterations of these books, you might notice that there are some slight changes to the texts here and there. One of the things I tried to do for this omnibus was to clean up the pages a bit. This is Cormac McCarthy’s fault.
If you’ve ever read a McCarthy novel, you’ll know two things: he doesn’t like to use quotation marks, and he’s smarter than you are.
McCarthy’s distaste for quotation marks came from his time as a copy editor. He said he didn’t see a need to clutter up a page with little marks. I have tried to emulate that, making more use of the modern ability to italicize things instead of using quotation marks. After seeing the differences in the text and how it looks on the screen, I think McCarthy might be onto something there. It makes the pages look cleaner. I’ll still use quotation marks for dialogue (I’m not going full McCarthy), but I’ve actively tried to get away from all other uses of them. I know a lot of eBooks have even switched to a single quotation mark for dialogue instead of a double.
“Now see here.”
‘Now see here.’
Maybe someday I’ll even get around to trying that out. It would be difficult to train myself out of automatically going to the standard double-quote, though. It took me years to train myself out of double-spacing after a period. (For those of us who learned to type on typewriters…)
I’ve also tried to cut back on my use of the word said. This is Craig Johnson’s fault. Craig is the author of the wildly popular Longmire series. They are some of my favorite books. And Craig is as good a guy as the day is long. Seriously solid human being.
Anyhow, Craig actually has an advanced degree in playwriting. Because of this, he tends not to use the word said. He tends not to use dialogue attribution at all, except when absolutely necessary. I’ve tried to clean up some of my unnecessary uses of the word said, as well.
Writing is a process. And you’re always refining and defining your style. Maybe now, after twenty-some years of trying to do this, I’m finally starting to figure it out.
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II.13.e: This statement, sadly, came from a real-life experience I had. Back in 2009, I was working for a hospital in a non-medical capacity. In 2009, there was an H1N1 outbreak, and it got pretty serious. A couple people in the Madison area passed away from it. One day, while I was going about my duties, I overheard an older man getting agitated about something. He yelled out, “H1N1 is a government lie! It’s a manufactured virus created to kill the poor!” Security escorted him out shortly thereafter.
That moment stuck in my head, though. It made me thing of King’s The Stand, of course. Maybe this was the moment where the real foundation of these novels lay. If you listen to enough Coast to Coast AM late at night, and hear some of these conspiracy guys weaving their webs enough, you start to think some of what they say might be plausible, and then it’s a quick leap to governments releasing killer viruses, I guess.
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II.13.f: This tiger scene was something I’d wanted to write for a long time. There are YouTube videos and stories of tigers in the Sundarbans near the Bay of Bengal, stretching between Bangladesh and India. Those tigers do not mess around. Every year, somewhere between five and fifty people are killed by tigers in that region. I remember reading a story about how some of the farmers in the Sundarbans actually wear a human mask strapped to the back of their heads while they work, because the tigers, like most ambush predators, won’t attack if they think they’re being watched. That blew my mind when I read that. If I ever got to a point where I had to wear a mask to fool an apex predator into thinking I could see it, I’d probably just get a different job. Those are some incredibly tough farmers. My hat is off to them.
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II.13.g: Bengal tigers have the strongest jaw pressure of all the big cats, even more powerful than the lions of the African savannahs. The scariest thing about tigers is that they don’t kill through gore. Despite their sharp teeth, their attacks are not about shredding their prey or causing blood loss—they prefer to clamp down on their victim’s necks and strangulate them. They crush the throat of their victims and wait until they stop kicking. Have fun going to sleep tonight when that tidbit of info pops into your mind.
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II.13.h: My initial plan for Long Empty Roads, when I started writing it, was to have Twist die. The world is a harsh place. Heroes die sometimes. Twist was going to die, and then Ren was going to take his place as the writer of the journals. I eventually rethought that plan of attack because I actually liked writing for Twist. I liked the possibility of writing a relationship in the post-apocalyptic world, and I also figured that killing off Twist would have pissed off a lot of people. Looking back, I think did the right thing in keeping him alive. He deserved to live.
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II.14.a: I’m told that a pulled abdominal muscle is right up there with the most painful injuries because you can’t do anything without your abdominal muscles contributing in some way. I suffer from a bad back and have for years. I know that pulled muscles in my lower back are absolutely debilitating. When you wake up and can’t put on socks, you’re in some serious pain.
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II.14.b: For some reason, I really wanted Twist to earn some serious scars in this book. I know he had the palm-slash scar from the mishap building the shed in After Everyone Died, but other than that, he’d been relatively unscathed physically. His emotional scars ran deep, but he needed something tangible to mark him and his journey. I wanted him to carry a reminder of struggle.
&nbs
p; BACK
II.14.c: Actually, the current record is now something like 26 hours, 28 minutes. You can, in theory, with a fast car and no trouble from the police, make it across this country in a little more than a day. That is an incredible feat.
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III.1.a: I think, for most of us older folks, our first exposure to the word nimrod was through Bugs Bunny cartoons. (For the younger people, it’s probably because of the Green Day album.) I think most of us probably drew the connotation that nimrod meant moron, because that’s why Bugs was laughing at Elmer Fudd. Ol’ Elmer was a maroon and was being rightly mocked by Bugs.
Of course, Nimrod goes back to the Bible. He was a king in the of Shinar, the son of Cush, and the great-grandson of Noah. The Bible states that he was a mighty hunter.
Everything I knew about the world changed significantly when I learned that. I would much rather have remained ignorant about the origin of the word, because I enjoyed calling my sister nimrod when she did something stupid.
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III.1.b: Again, this is based in fact. When I was in high school, it was not uncommon for people to miss a day or two of school during the hunting season. When I taught high school in a small Wisconsin town, I remember a number of guys missing the first two or three periods of the day, and then arriving to school still in their blaze orange with bloodstains on their hands, eager to tell stories of what they bagged that morning just after dawn.
Wisconsin is a unique place.
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III.1.c: My dad used to say this phrase a lot. Our old farmhouse didn’t have great A/C. We had a single window unit that did its best, but it could not cool down the upstairs, where all the bedrooms were. My dad loved when fall rolled around and nightly temps dropped. I am the same way. I keep a fan in the window to dredge in the cool night air as long as I can every fall. A few years ago, I saw a Swedish study that determined humans actually sleep best in rooms that are 55 degrees (Fahrenheit), with heavier blanket covering us. I think that is probably correct.
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III.1.d: I think this might be the wisest thing I’ve ever written. Life is too short to get into a tizzy over everything. Don’t play the drama games. Just stand there and chew your cud.
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III.1.e: Obviously a Dr. Seuss reference. I think everyone recognizes that. Who among us has not been influenced by the good doctor at some point in our lives.
My daughter had a Dr. Seuss book that she liked when she was a toddler, and I used to read it to her a lot. She liked The Sneetches the best. She would get excited when the Fixit-Up Chappie would come into the story to start bilking the poor, stupid Sneetches. One of my fondest memories is of watching her get excited for that moment.
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III.1.f: I’m not a hunter in real life, myself. I have nothing against it morally, I’m just more of an indoorsy person than an outdoorsy person. I’m not a hunter that I did not really know the phrase game trails until I started trying to write books about people who had to hunt. I just called them paths through the woods.
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III.1.g: I like how the pendulum would swing from a technological society back to an agrarian society in the event of an apocalypse. Things like cars and bicycles would eventually become no good to us, and we’d be desperate to get back to things like horses and wagons for transportation. There’s a romanticism about that. A sort of poetic connotation.
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III.1.h: Growing up on a horse farm as I did, I know this to be true. Horses are expensive, time-consuming, and a lot of work. They are a truly impractical hobby, and you have to be driven to it by some sort of weird personal demon that tells you that you must!
Sort of like writing…
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III.1.i: As someone who has been around horses a lot, let me offer some advice to those of you who haven’t: First, stallions can be very unpredictable. Most males that aren’t going to be bred are neutered for a reason. Geldings are far more docile and easier to deal with than a stallion. Second, if you ever see wild horses, please remember the word wild. Wild horses can be downright evil. They will give you every opportunity not to get hurt. They will run from you. However, there are videos on YouTube of people trying to approach wild horses. If they feel threatened, especially when it comes to a stallion protecting his mares, they will attack. They will bite first. Their bites can gouge your flesh. Then, if necessary, they can kick. A well-placed kick to the head can kill you. Stallions also enjoy charging into you and basically knocking you down and trampling you. So, please, do your best to leave wild horses alone, should you ever see a herd out west.
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III.2.a: When I sat down to outline the third Survivor Journals book, I knew what I wanted the story to be. I just did not know how I was going to tell it. I realized very quickly that I wanted Ren to have a voice now. She was an established character. She and Twist were tied together in this world. She needed a chance to speak, too. It was an easy leap in logic from there to give her every other chapter in this book. Twist, then Ren, and back to Twist. Given that as I write this annotation, the third book is not even released to the public yet, it will be interesting to see how people react to it. I hope they like it.
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III.2.b: I subscribe to this wholly on a personal level. Writing is a way to process thoughts and feelings in a way you simply cannot do through speech or meditation. It allows you to vent harmlessly. It lets you actually see your issues on a page. I write a lot. I put a lot of stuff that bothers me into writing that will never, ever get seen by anyone. They’re just Google Docs files on my Gmail account. They just help me feel better about myself when I need that pick-me-up. I strongly encourage people to write when they feel down or get stressed. Write it out. It’s good for you.
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III.2.c: If you’ve never seen Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson movie, or if you haven’t seen it in a while, it’s worth another viewing. My sister and I watched the bejeezus out of that thing when we were kids. It’s a good survival story, and it has some fun moments. I don’t think there is anyone alive who has seen that movie and not wanted to live in the Robinsons’ tree house.
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III.2.d: I think we need better terms for various stages of relationships. Significant Other is a good start, but it’s so sterile and bland. Also, boyfriend/girlfriend feels like something that should stop being used by the age of 25. When my grandmother started seeing a man late in life, it felt very strange to address him as my grandmother’s boyfriend. I know there are various terms out there (beau, suitor, consort, etc.), but none of them feel right to me.
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III.2.e: I wonder this about anthropologists and archaeologists, sometimes. They come across burial sites, dig up old graves. What does it do to them when they find infant burials? How to do they feel seeing tragedies like that centuries later? Anytime I see pictures of mummified children from eons ago in National Geographic magazine, I am always of two minds. I’m fascinated by the story behind them, but I feel terribly for the tragedy their parents must have suffered. I know that many (if not most) first responders say that any accident or crime scene with dead children is the hardest for them to work. I could not imagine the pain they must feel in those situations.
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III.2.f: Somewhere toward the end of writing Long Emtpy Roads, the entire story for All We Have hit me. It was a single bolt from the blue. In one instant, I knew pretty much the whole story. I knew that it would have to concern pregnancy in the apocalypse. It was a natural progression of putting two young people with strong feelings for each other into an empty world together. No matter, Ren’s feelings toward pregnancy at the end of LER, it was bound to happen. Life finds a way…
Jeff Goldblum and Michael Crichton were right.
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III.2.g: The video Ren references here was something I had to watching in high school. I forget what class it was for, maybe Health—it was more than twenty-five years ago, forgive the spo
ts in my memory. Anyhow, we were shown the video to show how birth is treated in third-world countries. It was a jaw-dropping experience for privileged American kids in the suburbs. Birth in many countries is just another happening. I’ve never forgotten that. To this day, that video is very clear in my mind, even if the class in which I watched it is not.
It really makes me dislike a lot of aspects of how birth is treated in America and other first world nations. It should be a big deal and celebrated—to a degree. I think a lot of people go way overboard with it, though.
I worked weekends, holidays, and summers in a retail paint store for many, many years to help supplement my meager teaching income (because teachers don’t get paid enough—but that’s a whole ‘nother political ball game), and hands-down, the WORST customers were all the same. We’d see an expensive SUV pull up (like a Mercedes or a Range Rover), and two women would get out, clearly a mother and daughter, and the daughter would be six-to-eight months pregnant. They were always coming in to get paint for the nursery, and they always acted like they wanted you to believe that the child had a chance of being the new messiah like they did. Without question, well-to-do pregnant women in America are the worst retail customers. Hands down.
But, I’m grinding an old, personal stone. Back to the story now.
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III.2.h: This was my own father’s reaction to my mother telling him that she was pregnant with me. I was not exactly planned, but not unwanted either.
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III.3.a: I’m a pessimist at heart. I am always envious of people who can open up excessive optimism like this.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus Page 66
