Future Tales: Crafting a Book for Tomorrow’s Teens!

Crafting a story for tomorrow’s teens is an energizing challenge. For my first book I had planned on writing a novel for an adult audience who preferred speculative fiction, but the story to which I felt most drawn was that of Tommy, the main character in my forthcoming novel, The Long Walk Home: When the Power Dies. The ideas underlying the book, Tommy’s unsure overconfidence, overcoming unexpected adversity, reconciliation, and rediscovery, felt natural in a young adult setting. When we are early teenagers we feel like we know it all and we feel like we know nothing. What happens to a young man learning how to interact in society on his own when the entire world is turned upside down?

When I sat down to begin writing my book I had only a vague idea of the direction the story would take. I knew I wanted Tommy to have just completed a challenging, but fulfilling, experience at summer camp in the Hill Country of Texas and I wanted Tommy to fly home and stop for a layover in Denver when all usable electricity stops and then have him figure out how to get home. But I didn’t know a lot of other things. I didn’t know where he was from, I didn’t know what adventures he was going to have in Denver International Airport, and I certainly didn’t know what greater, life-changing, adventures he was going to have getting home.

There’s an overused saying that “you should write what you know.” I was born in Denver, Colorado and grew up in San Antonio, Texas, so I reflexively decided to set the beginning of this novel reflecting that. I have experienced power blackouts in my life and experienced them more frequently now that I live in a small mountain town. I wanted to expand on that idea and with my love of books like Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet on the fiction side and Bradford Angier’s How to Stay Alive in the Woods among many other wilderness survival books encouraged by my own experiences at Bear Creek Scout Reservation in the Texas Hill Country, I wanted to explore the challenges of wilderness survival in that context.

As I began with those ideas in my head I sat down to discover Tommy’s journey home. I knew I needed a destination, and I chose Sacramento, California because the route from Denver introduced many of the challenges I wanted to explore. Tommy begins in the airport where we begin to get to know him and those who he befriends and leads us into the Rocky Mountains, through the Great Basin and over the historically charged Donner Pass.

How do you write what you don’t know? The world we don’t know is essential in speculative fiction, because it hasn’t happened yet. No one has ever experienced the world into which I put Tommy, but there is much that we do know that can be applied to that world. It is a world of discovery of new things and old things in a new context. Tommy is our guide into the unknown and we get to grow and learn along side him.

Keep your eye on this webpage to keep up to date on the release date and subscribe to my newsletter for the latest as I schedule events and begin to write the sequel prospectively titled Free from Shadows.