Yesterdays Gone: SEASON TWO (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (Yesterday's Gone)

by Platt, Sean;Wright, David

  Episode 11 was the hardest, but it was also the most rewarding. I’m not sure how many readers consider it a favorite, but it might be one of my favorite things I’ve been a part of.

  SEAN: Boricio’s origin. I really wanted to get that right. It’s important to get Boricio just right, and he’s definitely the most specific character I’ve ever written. That scene needed to say everything, and it had a lot of heavy lifting. Boricio is obviously central to the story, and it’s important that readers care about him, even if they hate him. That scene had a helluva job to do, and when I read it out loud to my wife, I knew it did it. It may not be the best scene in the series, but it’s my favorite. So far. Probably.

  MATT: Did you ever feel, individually or collectively, that you were writing yourselves into a corner? If so, how did you work out of that?

  SEAN: Ha, a bunch of times. Not really, but we would have if we weren’t careful. We have our straight lines because of Dave. I’m more haphazard than he is, and would miss the details that help keep Yesterday’s Gone in key. Whenever we had something that looked like it would lead down a dead-end, we untangled it together. That made the final section of Season 2 take a little longer than we’d planned, but the payoff was explosive and totally worth it.

  DAVE: I worry about that stuff a lot. There’s a lot of tiny details to keep track of, and it’s easy to overlook something as you’re writing. Before the season began, I started a chart and even a secret website to keep track of all the data so I’d better remember it. But with the speed we’re writing, I don’t have time to keep track of every little thing. So far, I think we’ve done a pretty good job, save for a few minor continuity errors which I’m fixing as I find them.

  There’s also a concern when killing characters off, where I need to make sure I’m not killing an idea I had for later in the series which required that character. So far, we’ve avoided writing ourselves into anything too bad. Knock on wood.

  Not an easy thing to say given how the season ended.

  MATT: What do you hope your readers interpret from the messages interwoven into your characters and the story arcs overall?

  SEAN: I think everyone sees life through their own prism, and I’m happy as long as people are reading and enjoying what we create. I never sit down with an agenda. I write the characters as people, and have them react how I think they would react in that situation. I think the same is true for Dave. If someone wants to read something into what I’ve written, for good or bad, that’s there side of the prism and nothing more. I’m happy if a reader sees our work as an honest interpretation of life, even if the circumstances in the story are extraordinary.

  DAVID: My primary goal is to entertain, to create a world that you will want to spend time in. We’ve got a broad base of characters and ideas within the story, so there’s no overarching political, religious, or philosophical worldview we’re driving at.

  I love that people have connected with the characters, though, and have found something deeper within the story to enjoy.

  I’m attracted to writing about dark subject matters, and part of that is to better understand why people do what they do or how people respond to horrible situations. I’m fascinated by stories of redemption and corruption for much the same reason. Why do people go bad? Can bad people become good? Those are themes I tend to drift toward.

  And though it’s not intentional, I try to show a sense of hope in the world. However, I’m pretty sure that people who read our books will think I have a pretty twisted idea of hope.

  MATT: Do you feel the reader base is accurately understanding your narrative, characters and all? Or do you feel that there's something that they just aren’t “getting?”

  SEAN: I’ve not seen any evidence that the readers aren’t getting it. The reviews have been wildly encouraging. I’ve only seen one where I’d say the reader didn’t get it. If there was confusion, I imagine we’d see that reflected in reviews or in our Goner’s newsletter, but we’ve not seen it in either place.

  DAVID: Yeah, they get it. At first, I was worried that people might not care for serialized fiction, but that hasn’t been the case at all.

  I get email every day from readers who get it and are enjoying the ride. I’m surprised how many readers have reached out to us. It’s easily the best part of our job, connecting with people. There’s still some people who prefer to read the full book all at once, but they still enjoy the roller-coaster type ups and downs in our story.

  MATT: So much has already been written in this saga. How do you keep it fresh at this stage?

  SEAN: We’re not modeling Yesterday’s Gone after written work so much as televised work. The TV serial is an art form and vibe we’re trying to capture with Yesterday’s Gone, and the upcoming ForNevermore, and all our titles.

  Treating it like a TV series allowed us to do some new things creatively, and I think that’s paid off in the reader experience.

  DAVID: We keep it fresh by following the road we started down and telling the story of these people. We respect the story and the characters. We started out wanting to do three seasons. Sean and I talked it over, though, and realized that we’d need at least four seasons to tell the story properly. I don’t see it going much longer than that, though. There’s too many other stories to write.

  That being said, if we had a great idea to return to this series in the future, or any series, we’d never close the door completely.

  MATT: Do you have a finale already conceived for the series? Or is the serialized storytelling truly serial in that there is an indefinite end point?

  SEAN: We know when it will end and approximately how it will end. It’s serialized in spirit, not necessarily in fact. We don’t want to tire our readers or bore ourselves. There are too many stories to write. Our road is clear, but we’re not sure exactly how we’ll cover the distance in between.

  DAVID: I know what will happen to a few key characters. I’m waiting for the others to show me their endings. There IS an end-point to this series, though. But there’s also a lot more to happen between now and then!

  MATT: Is serialized fiction turning out the way you had hoped and dreamed it would? How about for your readers; is the reader response what you were hoping it would be?

  SEAN: It’s been exactly as I hoped, and I CANNOT wait to get started on Season Three. June 19 seems so close, yet so far away! Reader response blows me away, and I can’t wait to kick the story harder in the balls for the third season. The reader response makes me want to impress them more. Least we can do to say thank you for all the support.

  DAVID: Sean was always more optimistic than I was. I was afraid people might not want to wait for the story to be continued. I knew I loved the format, and hoped that others would, but I couldn’t be certain until we put the story out there and found out.

  And response is turning out even better than I’d hoped! Even more impressive, is the number of people who are rooting for us to succeed! These are people who are connecting with us through this story. They’re buying our books, telling their friends, writing to us, and leaving reviews. In doing so, our readers have made our writing dreams a reality. We’re humbled and thankful for how readers have responded.

  Thank you!

  MATT: If you could start over from the very beginning of Yesterday's Gone, including the pilot, what would you do differently?

  SEAN: I would remove some of Luca’s infantile language. That’s one of the only things some readers have questioned, and understandably so. I’ve seen a few comments about how the author must not know any 8 year olds and that Luca must be slow. My son is Luca’s age, and my daughter is two years older. My son, Ethan, is extremely bright. But he turns small when he’s sad or scared. And if his world went away, he would be terrified enough to see the world in terms of “terrible scary.” Knowing what I know now, I would spend more time developing the thought that he was feeling infantile, not slow.

  DAVID: Like I said earlier, we didn’t really give much thought to op
ening sequences before this season. This is even more evident in Episode One, which quite frankly, opens up pretty damned slow for a post-apocalyptic book.

  While we’ve drawn a large audience, I can’t help but think that the slow open is not representative of the overall series, and we likely lost some readers in the opening pages. I’d love to go back and just change the beginning of Episode One a bit, just to bring the action in earlier, set up the stakes right away.

  In fact, I might just do it in the next few weeks. I won’t change anything which affects the timeline or history, just the opening sequence. If I do it, I’ll leave a note in the Author’s Notes to indicate what I did, in case anyone is re-reading it and thinking they lost their mind, “This isn’t how it originally opened!”

  Other than that, I love how the series is playing out. I can’t wait to take what we’ve learned with Yesterday’s Gone and bring it to Young Adult paranormal genre with ForNevermore next week!

  * * * * *

  FORNEVERMORE

  THE NEXT SERIAL THRILLER FROM SEAN PLATT & DAVID W. WRIGHT

  From the writers of the groundbreaking post-apocalyptic serial Yesterday’s Gone, comes a dark new fantasy horror serial, ForNevermore.

  All 17 year old Noella Snow ever wanted was a normal life.

  But normal died with her mother, minutes after she was born. Then again when her father was murdered before her eyes on her seventh birthday. Now she spends her days in quiet misery, an outcast at school, harboring a secret crush on her best friend, Sam.

  Noella’s only happiness lies in her dreams, in a world where her father still lives and Dante, a mysterious stranger with a deadly touch, guards over her.

  Now those dreams have turned to nightmares as Noella begins hearing voices, witnessing murders she can’t possibly know of, and seeing the monsters from her sleep merging into her waking life.

  Noella doesn’t want to return to King’s Point, the psychiatric hospital where she was forced to go after an “episode” two years earlier.

  She tells herself she’s better.

  But then one night Noella sees the impossible... Dante, watching her from afar, as he has for centuries – nearly as long as he's loved her.

  Is Noella losing her mind? Or is she linked to a hidden world, destined to be normal ForNevermore?

  ForNevermore is a bold new paranormal serial, with awesome cliffhanger endings that will make you feel like you’re watching your favorite TV show right on your Kindle.

  * * * *

  Check out the first two exciting chapters of this new paranormal serial.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Aurora Falls, New York

  Friday, October 26

  9:50 p.m.

  On the short list of things worse than what had already happened to Noella Snow today, being murdered was definitely one of them.

  It was her 17th birthday, and was officially her worst birthday in 10 years. Considering what happened on her 7th birthday, that was saying a lot.

  She was working the counter at Keefer’s Koffee, Aurora Falls’ pathetic excuse for an echo of Starbucks, and wondering why she’d even agreed to cover Tammy’s shift. She looked at the clock for the hundredth time. Ten minutes until closing. It seemed as if the clock was conspiring to keep her from the bed she couldn’t wait to fall into, where she could pull the covers over herself, and try to forget this day ever happened.

  Noella was wrapping unsold brownies in thin sheets of ice blue cellophane so they’d be “fresh” for the morning rush, while ignoring the urge to shove one, or five, in her mouth. Sure, it would dull the day’s pain . . . for a few minutes. But once she swallowed, the dull ache would return, stronger, accompanied by her old friend guilt.

  Treat yourself, it’s your birthday, girl.

  It was her birthday, and she had grown into a slim young woman, but neither changed a childhood of name-calling, with barbs such as Thunder Thighs, Chunky Monkey, and Patti Fatty, crushing trust and reducing her confidence to crumbs.

  Noella slid the tray of brownies into the cooler with a decisive shove, just as the front door dinged and split the silence of the nearly empty coffee shop. She looked up, and felt a cold snake of terror slither across her shoulders, then down her spine.

  Noella wasn’t sure how she knew, whether it was the voices she’d taken pills to silence, or a hunch, but she knew for certain that death had entered Keefer’s.

  The weird thing was that guy didn’t look dangerous.

  He was young and handsome, even in soft wash jeans and a moody-looking leather jacket. His blue New York Mets hat and thick mop of brown hair made him look like any one of the hundreds of guys who came into the coffee shop. But there was something in his eyes that bled into Noella’s, something that said:

  He is here to kill me.

  Most nights there were at least four or five people scattered among the 10 booths peppering the front arc of Keefer’s. They usually lingered around, hooked to the Wi-Fi, and taking a million years to leave, keeping Noella from closing and getting on with what little life she had. Tonight, of course, the place was tumbleweeds. She hadn’t had a customer in 15 minutes, punctuating both the loneliness of her birthday, and her new vulnerability.

  Tony, the shift manager, was out back taking the evening’s trash to the dumpster, though Noella knew he was really just sucking down yet another cigarette. Tony smoked more minutes than he worked, making him a generally useless co-worker.

  Useless or not, I could really use him right now.

  “Welcome to Keefer’s,” she said, trying not to sound nervous. “What can I get you?”

  Mets Hat said nothing as he drifted toward the counter, his eyes studying the menu on the wall above and behind her as if he were trying to figure out a menu written in Swahili.

  But his eyes weren’t really reading the menu. They were reading Noella.

  That wasn’t uncommon. Though Noella considered herself plain, that didn’t stop any number of creepy guys from coming in, undressing her with their eyes, and worse. Sometimes they’d comment on the faint heart-shaped birthmark on her left cheek, as if they were the first in the world to notice it, and wanted a medal for coming up with some lame come-on line involving hearts.

  Perverts were everywhere, and Noella had more or less learned to ignore the bore of their gazes. But this guy wasn’t a pervert. Or at least just a pervert. This guy was terror on two legs.

  Noella’s mind flashed to the recent reports which lit the maudlin smiles of every local TV news anchor for the past several months — 12 murdered or missing girls in the last half year. Unsolved crimes with no suspects or clue what the killer looked like. Another chill shot through her core and something whispered in her mind.

  He looks like this guy right here.

  Noella scanned the counter looking for anything she could use as a weapon. Her eyes settled on the closed drawer where she’d set the knives they used to slice bagels and sandwiches.

  Hurry up, Tony!

  Noella was aware of the murders, as it was impossible to live in the town and not be. This was upstate New York, not exactly a hotbed of crime, let alone serial murders, so corpses left in the streets tended to attract attention. Hardly a day went by in the shop where someone wasn’t talking about their connection, no matter how tangential, to one of the victims. But the murders weren’t anything Noella gave particular attention to, or worried about. Until now.

  Mets Hat stood silently in front of her, hands in his jacket and anxiety all over his face. The longer he stood there, staring, the more convinced she became that she was staring at the serial killer everyone was looking for.

  Where in the hell are you, Tony? It doesn’t take that long to smoke a cigarette!

  Noella wanted to flee, turn and run as fast as she could, out the back door without so much as a glance behind. But she felt foolish. Her logical side – the side the pills made stronger – whispered: He’s just weird, not a murderer at all. Also, serial killers aren’t usually cute, are they
?

  If Noella ran from the store, she may as well draw another bull’s-eye on her head. She didn’t need to give the kids at her school yet another reason to make fun of her. And certainly word would get back to them if she ran out of the shop like a crazy person. So she stayed put, praying to whoever might listen that Tony would return and calm the crumbling walls of resolve around her. She glanced back through the door behind her, and into the storage room where the exit door was propped open.

  No sign of Tony, yet.

  Come on, man. You smoking the whole pack?

  Noella’s leg began to shake. She had to pee.

  “Find anything you like?” she asked.

  The man’s eyes looked past her, toward the back room. The side of her brain that the pills couldn’t calm began its chatter again.

  This is it. He’s got a gun in his pocket.

  Mets Hat turned his head in an odd way, as if he’d heard the voices in her head. Their eyes met again, and the hair on her arms went angry and standing. Noella glanced at the closed drawer with the knives, then down at the panic button on the floor, maybe four feet away, trying to decide which she should run to first. The knife would help her immediately, if she were able to defend herself. But the button could bring the police, and their guns, eventually.