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I.4.b: A lot of people wrote to tell me that ransacking houses would be their favorite part of the apocalypse. I think humans, collectively, are nosy by nature, and we just enjoy seeing how other people live. We see walls and want to know what lies beyond them.
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I.4.c: I think I toyed with writing a ghost story for a little while. I have always wanted to write a good horror novel, but I find them so difficult to do. I guess I just don’t really have a good mind for terror. I like good horror stories, though. However, like good horror movies or good comedy sketches, it’s hard to find the proper endings for them. Most horror stories tend to fall apart toward the end.
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I.4.d: Another big personal bias: I hate Olan Mills photos. I’m not a big fan overly posed family portraits. I think they just look really fake. I’m also not good at smiling, so I try not to take a lot of photos. My current author headshot that I use is over ten years old as this point. I really should get that taken care of, but in my whole life I think there has only been two or three photos of me that I actually liked.
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I.4.e: I think a part of me wrote this book as a way to figure out how human beings process grief. I know I don’t do it well. My internal mechanisms for grief consist of making bad jokes and ignoring it. I think a lot of this book was a way for me to process my own existential dread. I find mourning a fascinating, necessary, and confusing process. It’s one of those things that makes us universally human, though. All cultures have to process grief. It’s things like that that we should remember when we start dealing with the stupidity of partisan politics or other things where we lack empathy for our fellow humans. We all can have our hearts ripped from our chests and need to somehow carry on with our days. That’s what makes us the most human.
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I.5.a: I actually did this math. I’m not a mathematician, but I think it’s accurate. What surprised me was how many people less than one percent of 312 million actually was. I think it’s important to remember that. If we say something will affect one percent of the population, that’s actually a lot of people.
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I.5.b: On a side note, say what you want about King as a writer, but Randall Flagg is a helluva villain.
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I.5.c: One of the things that bothered me about how Twist was living was the amount of waste he was still creating. If anything, he was actually creating a larger amount of waste than a normal person would on a single day. Wet-wipes, mountains of plastic bottles, empty cans, etc… I never did figure out a good way to address that in the first book. Sustainable farming was the answer, but even then there’s a mountain of issues to address. For instance, I was at Walmart once and I saw Amish people buying underwear. Cartloads of it. Even the Amish needed good rubber waistbands. Can’t blame ‘em for that. At some point in a post-apocalyptic world, you’re going to run out of little things like quality underwear, and then you’re going back to full-body shifts under our clothes, or rope-ties like in the Middle Ages. That just sounds so unappealing. I like my comfort items like waistbands. These are the things you just don’t think about when it comes to long-term post-society survival.
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I.6.a: More personal experience here. I am not a carpenter, either. I’ve done it. I can do it, if necessary. I just hate doing it. A lot of the disdain for building things has come because I moved into a seventy year old home that needed a ton of work, and because the lottery continues to not let me win it, all that work has been done by my own hand. I loathe it. It needs to get done, so I do it, but I loathe it.
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I.6.b: My cousin actually did this to himself.
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I.6.c: I actually did this to myself. Not playing football, though. I had a mountain bike accident. Broke my collarbone, got eight stitches in my scalp because of a stick. Not my best day.
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I.6.d: Of all the scenes I wrote, this is probably the one I see most vividly in my head. It disturbs me. I’ve had a couple of nightmares of this scene. I think of it as part The Walking Dead and part calcified ash bodies at Pompeii. Either way, it both thrills and horrifies me.
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I.6.e: When I first started writing a book about survival, I knew I didn’t want a domino-disaster epic. I like those books, but the “everything that can go wrong and does” sort of stories are great reading, but they often feel hollow to me. It’s like some writing sitting at a keyboard trying to figure out how he/she can torture his/her protagonist some more. I knew that I needed my protagonist to have some downtime. I knew he needed happy memories. Pleasant moments. Otherwise, why bother to continue to live? You need a win occasionally. You need something that isn’t the last thirty minutes of Die Hard.
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I.6.f: One of the things that really worries me about a viral apocalypse scenario is what happens to all the animals. I tried to address that in these stories. I fear a lot of animals being trapped in homes and dying of starvation. I also fear what happens to those domesticated cats and dogs if they are freed by their owners and lack the skills to sustain a life of full-time living in the wild. I also worry about the animals in zoos. I address this more in future books, but it’s something that kept me up at night.
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I.6.g: Wisconsin is famous for unpronounceable town names. Most of the names you can’t pronounce come from one of our Native tribes. Ixonia has a different, fun history. As told on Wikipedia:
The town of Ixonia was organized on February 12, 1841, as the town of Union. Five years later Union was divided into two new towns. The name "Ixonia" was given to one of the new towns on January 21, 1846; as the residents could not otherwise agree on a name, the name was chosen by drawing letters at random.
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I.7.a: This is another little piece of personal trivia. I do this. I watch a lot of prison shows on Netflix or National Geographic Channel. My sister has worked in Corrections for twenty years, so her stories have always been fascinating. It’s truly a different world behind the walls.
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I.7.b: By the time I was at this point in the writing, I had figured out the main story for the first book, and I knew that the second book was going to be a road novel of some sort. This is where I realized the title of the second book was always going to be Long Empty Roads.
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I.7.c: This is true. Look up Green County Cheese Days in Monroe, Wis. It’s a massive celebration, and it’s only held in even-numbered years. It’s something I look forward to doing every other year, if for no other reason than the fried cheese curds (which are basically a sacrament in Wisconsin). Monroe is a really nice little farming town near the Wisconsin/Illinois border. I really like it. I would like to live there.
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I.7.d: This place really existed. It has closed since I wrote After Everyone Died, but it did exist. I grew up not overly far from it, and as a kid I would sometimes ride my bike there and play pool with the badly warped cue sticks they had. It used to be called Pecatonica Lanes, and was Country Lanes. It really was a little bowling alley surrounded by hundreds of acres of rolling countryside. I always liked that place. It seems like such a weird place for a bowling alley.
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I.7.e: I grew up not far from Hollandale. It’s a tiny little hamlet with a collection of houses, a convenience store, and a bar. That’s about it. Nice little Wisconsin farming town. When AED was first published, one of my students at the technical college at which I was teaching English at the time came up to me with big eyes. He was actually from Hollandale and didn’t know that anyone else knew it existed. I remember riding my bike to Hollandale (maybe eight miles) with my buddy Mark Milestone to get Mountain Dew and gum. Mark is no longer with us, but when I think of Hollandale, I think of him.
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I.7.f: I was thinking of Burgess Meredith in Grumpy Old Men 2 when I wrote this. The scene where he tells Jack Lemon that sometimes he thinks God forgot about h
im is really good. And the scene where Jack comes back to find him passed on later in that movie was really touching. I really like Burgess. Rocky is one of my favorite movies, and he was brilliant in that.
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I.8.a: I should put this out there, but despite my Wisconsin pedigree, I really hate winter. I hate the cold. I hate driving in snow. I hate arctic winds. I put up with it, though. That’s a testament to how much I enjoy this state, I guess.
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I.8.b: If you’re ever in Prairie du Chien, make sure you go in the summer on a weekend. There’s a little burger stand called Pete’s. They boil their burgers on a flattop grill with a layer of water on it. If you’re a burger aficionado of any sort, you need to go once. It’s a truly unique place. You won’t find another place in the country like it.
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I.8.c: I remember writing Winter was coming here and rewriting it as approaching instead, because I think George R. R. Martin ruined Winter is coming forever.
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I.8.d: I’ve lived through some pretty intense cold while I have lived in Wisco. I remember walking to classes in January, the first day of my second semester of my freshman year at UW-Stout in Menomonie, Wis. They had not cancelled classes despite a -60 degree wind chill. This is how we do it in Wisconsin. Bundle up, friends.
I’m not a fan of cold. I don’t understand the people who debate the summer vs. winter thing. Summer wins, hands down. In summer, I’ve been hot and uncomfortable, but I’ve never thought to myself, Gee, if I I stay here for twenty minutes, I’ll die. I can’t say that about Wisconsin in the winter. I know in Canada they say “There’s no such thing as too cold; you’re only wearing the wrong clothes.” Maybe there’s some truth to that, but I’ll take a hundred and humid and a nice shady tree over lethal freezing any day.
Winter in Wisconsin actually gets my physically angry at times. I will walk outside, get a blast of -20 arctic winds straight up the nose and think, This is so stupid! If you’re one of those people that really enjoys winter, more power to you. Give me heat, please.
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I.8.e: This is also true. I have not only golfed during a snow squall myself, but it’s not uncommon for an early snow to stick around a day or two. People do not stop golfing because of that. They will be out there swinging. Not many, but you will see it. Most of those hardcore golfers will just use a neon orange ball so they can find it in the snow. You gotta be a little bit different to live in the Midwest.
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I.8.f:The Long Winter is probably the single biggest influence on these books. It’s easily the best story in the Little House books, and the most historically accurate, according to the Laura Ingalls Wilder scholars. Sure, there’s some fudging of facts and data, but the majority of it is true. I probably reread this book at least once or twice a year. I like it. It reminds me of my childhood, and it’s a good survival story of days when you couldn’t just duck out to the Walmart for supplies. When I wrote AED, The Long Winter was in the back of my head the whole time.
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I.8.g: The fear of the unknown would be a powerful force for me in a post-apocalyptic survival story. It’s bad enough as it is now, with street lights and neighbors. The dark glass of the windows, the unlit world beyond—it’s intoxicatingly terrifying. I would have issues with it, I’m sure.
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I.9.a: As a bald guy, this was the worst part about going bald. I used to have stupidly thick hair. I was always hot. I never really needed hats in the winter. Then, I hit 40, the hair went, and now I’m always cold. I miss my hair.
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I.9.b: Easily one of the best movies ever made. My favorite fact about The Princess Bride is that Andre the Giant used to make people watch it on VHS. He carried a copy with him everywhere, allegedly. He would just pop it into video players and sit down. People were forced to see it because who is going to argue with a seven-foot-tall, five-hundred pound Frenchman?
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I.10.a: This is the only time in the first book that Twist kills anything. That was done by conscious choice. I did not want to write a Hunger Games novel where lives are held cheap. I did not want to write a standard novel at all. I wanted to write a book about boredom, and isolation, and loneliness. I was tired of the books where the main characters are gunslingers, or where two factions go to war over a resource. I just wanted to see how a kid would handle the world alone.
Strangely, this is a large part of what kept this book from being picked up by agents. When I first wrote it, I probably sent query letters to more than a hundred agents and publishers. Those that responded all pretty much said the same thing: We want more characters and more action.
Well, more characters and more action is not the book I wrote. They were asking for their version of a story I did not want to tell. After getting this same refrain many, many times, I eventually had to go the self-publishing route. I’m glad I did. After Everyone Died really took off. Even with a lot of really great reviews (thank you, everyone who took the time to write a nice review—it means a lot to me), to this day, I still cannot get any interest in this series from traditional publishers because of the lack of characters and action.
However, most of the people who have taken the time to write to me personally about the series have been grateful for the change of pace. Most of the people who have read these books are fans of the post-apocalyptic survival genre, and they seem to like my realistic, simple, slow take on it.
I guess, in my mind, in a truly decimated post-apocalyptic world, things will move a lot slower than we’re used to, and not everyone is going to be an action hero. Twist certainly isn’t.
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I.10.b: My family are not really hunters. When I was young, one of my dad’s best friends was a Dane County sheriff’s deputy. He responded to a call of a car/deer accident (fairly common in southern Wisco), and called my dad to see if he wanted the deer. My dad accepted, and I have vague memories of my dad field-dressing the deer in our garage. I remember the blood being everywhere. I remember my dad not doing the best job at it. I can’t imagine it’s a skill where you’re going to hit a home run the one the proverbial first pitch. My hat is off to the guys and gals who make it look easy.
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I.10.c: When I write, or even when I don’t write, I tend to watch a lot of Food Network. I’m a big fan of Alton Brown’s show Good Eats. His Dutch oven episode was great. I really like the Dutch oven as a vessel, and I wish I had more cause to use one. In a small house without a fireplace, there just isn’t a ton of need for it.
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I.11.a: Why is February the shortest month? Because it helps keep us from losing hope. February is always the worst month in Wisconsin. December and January are cold, no doubt. But, December gets a pass on the cold because winter is still new. And there are the distractions of the holidays to keep you from dwelling on it.
January is usually when we get some decent snow. And it’s not just filled with relentless cold. January is strange in that it tends to have a mix of cold and mild days. Last January (2018), we actually had a massive thaw in Wisconsin in January. There were a few days approaching 50 degrees. It was incredible.
And then February came…and February takes no prisoners. It’s a short, wretched, hateful month filled with cold. And there is rarely a lot of snow in February. For decent snow, you need temps around 32 degrees. In February in Wisconsin, it’s usually in the 20s or worse. It’s just twenty-eight days of kick-you-in-the-teeth cold.
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I.11.b: I watched one of those What If…-type shows about what would happen if all the humans on the planet just disappeared one day. The narrator talked about the survival of domestic animals. Bigger dogs would form packs, and they would probably be okay. Their inner wolf would take over. Small dogs, especially toy breeds, would cease to exist fairly quickly. They’re good pets…they’re not great survivors. Poor Chihuahuas.
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I.11.c: When you write a book, you tend to put a
lot of yourself in it, whether through conscious decisions or not. I freely admit there’s a lot of me, personally, in these things. There are a lot of aspects of Twist that are me. There are a few that are not, but there are definitely some elements that are. And a lot of Twist’s journey reflects what I would like to think I would do if faced with the same situation. I’d definitely procure an RV, first thing. If I ever won the lottery and money and a job was no longer a worry, I would love to get a decent RV and just drive around the county a few times. I’d like to tour Canada, too. Even Saskatchewan, which is so flat it makes North Dakota look like the Grand Tetons. I like seeing the country. I love driving. And I’m not really a fan of hotels, so having my own bed each night is greatly appealing to me.
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I.11.d: As someone who suffers from pretty severe depression, this is how I sum up a lot of my life: Existing, but not living. It’s a bleak statement, but I think that’s how a lot of depression sufferers get through their days. You’re there…but you’re not really there, if that makes sense. It only gets worse in winter.
I try to keep mindful of the fact that I can control aspects of my life that help me get out of that frame of mind. It’s not always easy, though. Being too busy to worry about it helps. Physical exercise helps, too.
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I.11.e: A nice lady once emailed me to tell me she liked After Everyone Died. And like so people do, she gave me a few criticisms along with the praise. One of the things she said was Twist’s vocabulary wasn’t always realistic. What high school junior uses the word ‘ennui?’
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