Theme became important to me. I want each book to have one big idea that each chapter continued to run back to. Book I was survival. It was about doing whatever it takes to live and pondering how far our own humanity will let us go to protect not only ourselves, but those we love. In this book, I wanted everything that was fought so hard for in Book I to be taken away. Worst of all is how the loss comes to fruition. However, at the end of the day, each of them has family to pick them back up. We all will experience loss, but it is those we love that make it bearable. Therefore, along with loss, bringing a family back together took center stage.
Facade of Order is really meant to raise the ante in the Humanity Gone Saga. I wanted everything to be bigger in the second book. Many sequels, from The Two Towers to The Empire Strikes Back, everything becomes bigger. The initial stories concentrate on a very tight group, and then the entire world explodes on the pages in the sequel story. Facade of Order was meant to do just that, yet I wanted it to still maintain focus on the central characters throughout the narratives. Considering the addition of nearly a dozen new characters, it was not easy to maintain the focus on the original five “heroes.” However, the different perspectives and the references to the old book glued it to a familiar ground that hopefully the readers loved the first time through. Still, it was a personal struggle to work with a much larger picture. After the Plague was naturally easier because it dealt with a single thread whereas Facade of Order felt like a knotted mess until the very end. Initial drafts of this book were too plot driven as I tried to cover so much ground. It took a while, but I learned to spend some time on the characters that I spent so much time developing.
Making connections between the two books was always essential in its creation. Despite the addition of many new characters and much larger problems, I wanted the similarities between the two to be jarring at a few key moments. In several examples throughout the novel, some narration is nearly verbatim to After the Plague. Yet, they have a whole new meaning or give minor foreshadowing into the events ahead. At least that is what I hope I managed to do.
Working with Dean in the last book helped to give me the courage to write this book by myself. However, his input in the final stages of this novel still was essential in assembling the final creation. My constant ability to gloss over tense errors still fries my mind. Most of all, fellow author and zombie enthusiast, Jay Wilburn, has been instrumental again in helping to make this worthy of being read. The initial draft was borderline rubbish at times, and hopefully my adaption of his criticism raised it to be at least recyclable.
Thanks to my editor Sandra Finley for making this work shine just like After the Plague. This needed her polish too.
I hope you enjoyed the tale and join me one last time for the conclusion to the Humanity Gone Saga in Book III.
All bets are off.
Derek Deremer
4/21/2013
About the Author
Derek Deremer continues his pursuit of educating America's youth. He hails from the outskirts of Pittsburgh. After learning that he could actually major in writing stories and reading books, he studied English at Westminster College. Typically you can find him reading, playing a video game, diagramming a sentence, or something else nerdy.
Follow him on Twitter: @DerekDeremer
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