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III.3.b: I have a teenaged daughter. I think the nine months before her birth were some of the most trying of my life. I was nervous the whole time, struggling with a new teaching job, trying to be all things to everyone at all times. It was so difficult. I remember most the fear of that time. I didn’t make enough money. We were poor. For months, I ate, slept, and lived fear. I worried about her dying before she was born. I worried why kind of father I would be. I just worried constantly. I think most new fathers do that, as well. Most of Twist’s fears he speaks of in this book are taken directly from my own jumble of fears during my wife’s pregnancy and the subsequent birth of my daughter.
Now, that child is fourteen (as I write this), and she’s doing well. She’s got my sense of humor (so, she’s a little strange), and she likes stand-up comedy and animation. However, I still worry about her all the time.
I’m 43 at the moment I write this, and I know my parents (both in their 70s) still worry about me. I doubt it ever ends.
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III.3.c: My own dad was about as good as dads can get, I think. He was just awesome. He was always there for me. He attended every sporting event or play I was in. He put up with my obsessions that he did not care for (like sci-fi, comic books, fantasy novels, British progressive rock, and Monty Python). My dad is just a down-to-Earth good dude.
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III.3.d: I think this passage is the most intriguing to me. I know there are kids out there growing up without social media and television in this country, but they are often treated as social pariahs because of that. They’re held up for ridicule.
This would not be a new way of living in this country, but it would be weird to have a child who did not know what technology was like and parents who did. Could you possibly explain cable TV to someone who had never seen TV? Or a Gameboy? Or satellite phones?
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III.4.a: My wife is fairly unemotional, even robotic at times. She’s never dramatic, never too high or low. She is the textbook definition of even-keeled. However, she had one moment during her pregnancy where she lashed out and had an emotional episode. It was, to this day, the most emotional I’ve ever seen in her in the more than twenty years we’ve been together. She loves pies and cakes, but she developed gestational diabetes in her third month and had to swear off sugar until the baby was born. At some point during her last trimester, we were grocery shopping. I saw a new box of cake mix on the shelf, and I pointed it out. My wife, whirled on me, overwhelming sadness in her eyes, and shouted, “Why would you point that out to me?” She choked back tears. I stood there like someone slapped me. To date, it was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen her do.
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III.5.a: I try not eat sugar anymore, but when I do my sugar of choice is Little Debbie Zebra Cakes. I don’t know why. I just love them. When I have one, I get mad at myself. It’s pure sugar and carbs for nothing. They don’t even taste all that good. There are certainly far better cakey treats out there (Tastykakes, Zingers, etc.), but for some reason, there is something about Zebra Cakes that always brings me back to them. I think it’s because I would occasionally get them as a treat in my lunches when I had a lunchbox as a child. There is something deeply joyful about opening my old Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox and seeing Zebra Cakes next to the PB&J and brown-spotted banana.
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III.6.a: This, too, is a snippet of my life. The first horse birthed on our farm by our mare was a big deal. We all witnessed the birth, and my dad did the thing where you put your hands inside the horse’s mouth and ears, and help rub it down. In theory, it impresses you upon the horse as much as its mother. Well, it worked like gangbusters with this little filly. Within the first week, it was more excited to see my dad than its mother. The filly would follow my dad around the farm without a halter like a Great Dane.
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III.6.b: I go into a lot of detail on this because a lot of the emails and messages I get from hardcore fans of the post-apoc genre wanted to see more of the practical survival aspects. They like the prepper stuff. For those of us not actively working to survive an apocalypse, well—you can skip this paragraph.
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III.6.c: A highly underrated movie, in my opinion. Matthew Broderick is great in this, next to Blade Runner, it’s probably Rutger Hauer’s best film. It’s the film that introduced Michelle Pfeiffer to the world, and it’s got a crazy synth-keyboard soundtrack from Alan Parsons. Sure, the soundtrack doesn’t necessarily fit with the time and setting of the film, but there’s something gloriously 80s about it. And the final battle scene on horseback in the cathedral is incredible. If you’ve never seen this movie, I can’t recommend it enough.
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III.7.a: My father liked distance/endurance races with our horses. We raised Arabians, and later Anglo-Arabs (a cross between Arabians and Thoroughbreds). Usually the distance races were either 50, 75, or 100 miles. Some of the longest distance races in the world go up to 150 or 160 miles. Those can usually be completed in 16 hours or so. An 80-mile round trip is not out of the question for a single day, but not when the horse is pulling a cart over uneven ground. I remember reading about the settlers heading west in the Conestoga wagons. It was said that they could cover twenty or thirty miles on a good day, and up to forty over good terrain, if they pushed their team. In rougher terrain, you were lucky to make ten miles a day. And larger caravans would usually only get 10-20 miles a day. It’s amazing we ever settled this country at that pace.
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III.7.b: Growing up on the farm in the sticks, in an old farmhouse, I used to have to sleep with my windows open in the summers. At night, I could hear the coyotes in the back pasture. They used to drive our Australian Shepherd, Barney, nuts. As a little kid, hearing the coyotes used to scare me. Their howls sounded so lonely, so mournful. As I got older, I learned to appreciate that sound.
Despite being on that farm for more than a decade, I never once saw a coyote in the wild. They are elusive little buggers.
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III.7.c: Rhodesian Ridgebacks are a pretty cool breed of dog. They originated from a breed of dog bred in South Africa by the Khoikhoi people to keep lions at bay. When the Dutch boers began to settle in South Africa, they quickly adopted these dogs into their service, as well. Overtime and selective breeding with other animals, they came up with the breed that we call the Rhodesian Ridgeback now. They are beautiful dogs, fiercely loyal to their owners, and stupidly brave, willing to throw themselves at adult lions hundreds of pounds heavier than they are without a second thought. I’ve said it before: we don’t deserve dogs.
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III.7.d: Everything is bigger in Texas, especially the storms. Anywhere that there is a lot of sky, the storms always look more terrifying.
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III.8.a: The stupidity of humans in times of strife never fails to amaze me. I have no doubt that there would people who would do this.
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III.8.b: My mother is/was a nurse. She’s retired now, but she spent more than her fair share of hours in scrubs. I know how difficult nursing is, and how demanding it can be. I spent a lot of time thinking about how overwhelmed hospitals would have been during something like the Flu. Just knowing what I know about health care professionals in this country, I’m willing to bet that most (not all, they’re not saints—but they’re close…) would have gone down with the ship, dying alongside their patients. We could not ask for more than that from them. Here’s a big hat tip and a hearty thank you to the doctors and nurses and orderlies who help take care of us when we’re sick. Nurses, soldiers, teachers, and police officers are probably the most underpaid people in our society. We ask the most from them, and in return, a lot of them get treated pretty poorly by politicians and the public at large. We should do better by them.
I’ll get off my soapbox, now.
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III.8.c: I don’t speak Spanish outside of a few years of basic Spanish in high school. I love all languages and
accents, really. I love to listen to rapid Spanish being spoken. I love listening to Spanish-language broadcasts of soccer matches. But, I don’t speak it. If you do, and I butchered the attempts at Spanish in this chapter, let me offer my sincerely apologies. I tried my best.
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III.8.d: One of the things I marvel at is how humanity has made it so far in a world where there are so many different elements trying to kill us. Cold, heat, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, floods, viruses, bacteria, infections, animals—you name it, we are either too stubborn or too stupid to give in to the myriad of dangers around us. It really says something about the human survival instinct. I think that’s one of the reasons people are so drawn to the post-apoc genre in fiction. We want to know that we would be able to survive, and even recover as a species in the event of a global catastrophe, I think.
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III.8.e: With a father who was an officer in the Marine Corps, Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome was something I heard more than once in my house growing up.
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III.9.a: Let’s just take this time to recommend the Blu-ray, anniversary edition of Lawrence of Arabia if you have not seen it. Get it. Watch it on a big TV with good sound. If you can, go see it in a real theater. What an incredible film. Watch the documentary on the making of it, too. They had to go through an ordeal just to get it onto film. It is one of the greatest films ever made, just from a production standpoint. They’ll never do another like that. Nowadays, they’d just CGI it all and call it a day.
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III.9.b: My college roommate, Scot, and I had a cactus named Robert Plant. Because what else would you ever name a plant?
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III.10.a: I am amazed by this phenomon. I live in a mid-sized town, and when I drive through the side streets, I always see houses, sometimes with two- or three-car garages, and driveway filled with vehicles. I always wonder why they never park the cars inside. Then, you drive past their home one day, the garage doors are open, and you see why. Floor-to-ceiling stuff. It’s probably some form of hoarding, and I don’t want to be disrespectful to anyone with that particular mental illness, but it seems to be a perfect metaphor for America: we have so much stuff, we have to sacrifice the health and safety of some of our other stuff. It’s the perfect image for a highly materialistic culture.
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III.10.b: I’m a big Star Trek fan. My mom was an original Trekkie, and she passed down her love for that series to me. We used to watch The Next Generation together. Loved that show. I loved DS9, too. I was lukewarm on Voyager and Enterprise, and I’m not overly impressed with Discovery or the movie reboots that JJ Abrams did. But, I still support it, because Star Trek is worth supporting. (I was pleasantly surprised by Seth McFarlane’s The Orville, though. That ended up being the more Star Trek than anything the owners of the ST franchise have pumped out recently.)
When I came up with the story for AWH, I knew that I wanted Twist to meet (and get shot by) another survivor, and when I started really thinking about the scene, the idea of someone in a Star Trek command gold shirt made me laugh. The idea for this character was born, and I ran with it.
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III.11.a: My Bachelor’s degree is in Radio, Television & Film Production, with a concentration in writing. Guglielmo Marconi was something of a patron saint to those of us in the radio program. I originally got into radio because I wanted to do something sports-announcing related. Tough, almost impossible field to break into, though. (Like publishing is easier?) I got a couple of minor opportunities to slog my guts out for pennies at radio stations in the middle of nowhere, but I opted for a different life. I really liked radio, and I really liked being on the radio. I liked having that venue at which to perform on a daily basis. I still hold out faint hope for an opportunity to do real radio, but I’m not holding my breath or anything.
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III.12.a: I did not know this until I started writing this book. It turned up in a piece of research I had been doing. I had no idea that cucumbers could get a sunburn. Seems unfair, really. Anything with legs can move to shade. Cuke just gotta lay there and take it.
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III.12.b: I always enjoyed Steve Irwin’s TV shows. He always stressed that if he got bit by something, it was always his fault—never the animal’s. They are just doing what they do. It’s your dumb fault if you interfere. Chris Rock said something about that too, in one of his bits. He said something about someone saying a tiger went crazy or something like that. The tiger didn’t go crazy, it went tiger.
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III.12.c: This is another experience from reality. When my daughter was five, I was trying to teach her to catch a ball. Like most little kids, she insisted on basket-catching in the glove, palm-up. I told showed her how to catch properly, but she refused to listen. I showered her again. Still basketing it. I said, “If you don’t catch it properly, the ball is going to pop off the heel of your glove and hit you in the mouth.” Literally, the very next throw did just that. She exploded in tears, threw down her glove, and to this day has never tried to play catch again. That was enough for her. She walked away from the sport forever.
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III.15.a: As a man, I’ve never given birth. And I was present for only one birth, that of my daughter’s. I have really tried to present the drama of a post-apoc birth as realistically as I could, and my female friends who have children seemed to like this scene. I hope I did it some justice. That was always a big concern of mine when I wrote it. I wanted Ren to be the badass I saw in my head and handle this on her own. I wanted her to be tougher than anyone has a right to be in this situation, but still be real at the same time.
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III.16.a: Presas are massive animals. If you’ve never seen them, Google one. They are beautiful, scary-looking dogs, but like any dog, it’s a bad owner, not a bad dog, that makes them dangerous. One thing I love about really big dogs like Presas, Great Danes, and Mastiffs is that when they’re raised properly and humanely, they never seem to outgrow their puppy mindset. Nothing like a large, heavily-muscled 150-pound animal that thinks it’s a lap dog.
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III.17.a: Victor’s stillbirth was one of the most painful things I’ve ever written. Even Rowdy’s death in After Everyone Died was not as tough on me. I had known from the beginning of the story that would happen, though. A perfectly happy, successful birth would have been too easy, and killing their only child would have been too difficult. Twins was the answer, but I had to take one of them. I hope people are moved by this scene, and by the book in general.
We come to the end of the appendix, now. I thank you for reading these books. I hope you enjoyed the additional annotations.
Please, tell your friends if you enjoyed this book. Share it on social media. Blog about it. Tweet about it. Write reviews. Make art. Tell your local library to purchase copies of the three individual paperbacks for this series. Ask your local indie bookstores to carry them. Everything helps.
All the best,
Sean
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The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3] Page 67