So many people commented on Yvonne Ventresca’s strategy of reverse outlining last week that I decided to share my techniques for “post draft outlining.”

By the time I type THE END on a first draft, I know all the things that are wrong with it, which may include:

• Important information I never found a place to insert
• Important information I inserted in several places, not sure which place would be best
• Plot holes
• Unnecessary side plots, characters, or clues I never ended up needing
• Inconsistent details in setting or world building
• Wavering character motivation
• Pacing
• Character changes (In the first draft of The Caged Graves, the character of Beulah Poole started out as a teenage girl. I realized about two thirds of the way through the first draft that I needed her to be an old woman!)

Immediately after the first draft, I create a side-by-side outline to guide my second draft revisions. In one column, I list the important events in each chapter. In the other column, I note what changes I’ll need to make. These include all the things I listed above, as well as events to delete or re-order and chapters that need to be combined or split apart.

In the case of The Caged Graves, a historical murder mystery, I also created an even briefer outline of the events in each chapter and color coded them: purple for the mystery of the graves, yellow for Verity’s romance, blue for the mystery of the Revolutionary War treasure. This helped me adjust the pacing and make sure that the main mystery remained in the forefront of the story, with the romance providing a counter-point and the secondary mystery appearing often enough to not be forgotten. If I found that one color took over an entire section of the story, or if one color disappeared for too long, I made notes on how to fix it.

Anyone else have an outlining (pre- or post-) to share?

Keeping it short here today. This past weekend was Parents Day at my daughter’s college. Bob and I drove over 4 hours to visit Gabbey at school. When we arrived, the school had planned some activities, but none them appealed to us.

Field Day for Parents? Pass. I am a grown up. No one can ever get me into a Potato Sack Race again.

Football Game? Gabbey said, “Heck no.”

We checked TripAdvisor for local attractions, and this is what we found:

Yup. Things to Do is grayed out. Gabbey’s college is located in the dictionary definition of BOONDOCKS. The Potato Sack Race was looking better and better.

At least we got to spend a couple days with Gabbey.

When I’m at home, our local attractions are:

• Longwood Gardens (pretty famous)
• Brandywine River Museum of Art (original Andrew Wyeth paintings, he was a local)
• Brandywine Battlefield (re-enactment once a year)
• Go Ape Zip Line and Treetop Adventure at Lum’s Pond (awesome, but now infamous, see earlier post)

If we go a little further afield, we can reach Hershey Park, Hershey World, Lancaster (Amish Country), and anything in Philadelphia.

We live on the southern edge of Amish Country. Getting blocked in by a horse and buggy is not a daily event, but it happens.

What are the local attractions in your neck of the woods?

An interesting conversation has come up several times recently with friends and family members, and I was wondering what my blogging friends thought.

Is it okay to track the locations of your family members by their phone?

Our family uses Life 360, an app that lets you locate the members in your circle. My husband and I are in the circle, along with my daughters, and we added our German daughter as soon as she arrived. Bob reports that some of his co-workers who have seen him using the app thought it was “invasive” and “a little creepy.” A family friend said that he had qualms about using the app with his college-age daughters, but eventually decided in favor of it. My sister, meanwhile, said, “What’s the name of the app? I’m signing up!”

We use the app daily to answer such critical questions as:

• Did Gabbey leave work yet?
• Is Gina’s band bus on the way home from their competition?
• Has Bob left for the airport, or is he still at work?
• How long till Dianne gets home so Bob knows when to have the cold martini ready?

Checking the app for someone’s location is safer than calling or texting them while they’re driving. Gabbey and Gina aren’t allowed to have their phones with them at work or band practice, so if you text them, they can’t answer. And although we might ask the girls to “text us when you get there,” they sometimes forget.

The only time I felt the slightest qualm about using the app was when Gabbey went away to college, and then it did feel a little like spying on her. I asked her about it, and she just shrugged. “I don’t care. Where am I going to be that I don’t want you to see?” I’m glad she feels that way. If she’s going to be taking a bus to the airport every time she comes home from school, it will ease our minds if we can track her progress.

What do you think? Is a family tracking app a technological blessing — or, as my husband’s co-worker called it, “creepy?”

It’s been a whirlwind summer for me, and from what I’ve been seeing on your blogs, the same is true for most of you. Don’t you think we all need an extra summer to recover from the regular summer? (Maybe a secret summer? Like a secret extra day? Wink, wink.)

• My summer started off with a Memorial Day cookout at my house for friends and family which culminated in a text from my recently married brother asking if he could call because he had “some news” to share. We were all pretty sure what that news was going to be, and yes! — I’m expecting a new niece or nephew in December!
• I attended the first annual Chesapeake Children’s Book Festival in Easton, Maryland which started off with a fantastic crab feast for the authors on the night before the event. Many of my fellow authors had never eaten whole crabs before, so I conducted a tutorial at my table on how to open them up and get the good stuff out.

With Tara Lazar

• In not so great events, my father unexpectedly had to have a pace maker installed in July. It was kind of an emergency, but everything went well, and he is feeling much better now. So all’s well that ends well.
• My oldest daughter landed a plumb role in our community theater production of GREASE. She was Marty, one of the Pink Ladies. The show was a heck of a lotta fun, although it was disconcerting to take her grandparents to a show where Gabbey cursed, smoked, drank, flipped the bird, and adjusted her cleavage on stage. Nevertheless, she nailed her solo, Freddy My Love, so all was forgiven.

• No sooner had the two week production of GREASE ended than we were off to St. Croix for a fabulous family vacation and diving adventure.
• Then of course, there was the contractor fiasco and a two-week scramble to get the bathroom finished by ourselves. We did get it done just in time to dash off to the airport and greet our German daughter. She’s been here over a week now and is starting school with my younger daughter today. Last week, we had fun showing her around the town. I attended the first football game of my life on Friday (no, really, it’s true) because she wanted to see our high school team play. Since our team trounced the other team, it was actually pretty fun.
• Unfortunately, we had another awesome event planned for her that got abruptly cancelled. You may have seen news stories about the woman who died on a zip line course in Delaware last Wednesday. Well, my husband and the girls were scheduled for the zip line the following morning, but the company called Wednesday night to cancel our reservation. They didn’t explain why, but it was all over the news, so we knew. According to witness accounts, the woman disregarded the safety instructions and disconnected both her safety lines at the same time. My daughters and my husband, who have been on the course before, say they can’t imagine why anyone would need to do that. The trainers drill the correct procedure into the heads of all participants before they enter the course. I suppose we’ll never know what caused this woman to make that tragic mistake. It was very sad, and my heart goes out to her family, especially those who were there when she fell — and I’m also relieved that my girls weren’t there on that day. There’s been some grumbling about “more regulations being needed” since the accident. I do hope the company is allowed to keep the course open and running because sometimes an accident is just an accident.

My girls and their friends on a previous excursion to Go Ape Zip Line and Tree Top Adventure

• Last but not least, Gabbey left for college. So we added a daughter, subtracted a daughter, and the net result is a status quo of two teenage girls in the house.

I wish I could say that things will quiet down this fall, but looking at my calendar, that’s not going to happen. So I’m kind of feeling like this:

I’m excited to kick off the release tour for Joshua David Bellin’s book Scavenger of Souls, the sequel to Survival Colony 9, which releases Tuesday, August 23. Josh is here today to talk about the challenges of writing a sequel.

1. Josh, congratulations on the upcoming release of Scavenger of Souls! Can you give us a brief summary of your first book, Survival Colony 9?

Survival Colony 9 takes place in a future world where human civilization has been devastated by a series of wars and environmental disasters. And then, following on the heels of these cataclysms, a mysterious threat appears: creatures called Skaldi, which have the ability to consume and mimic human hosts.

My narrator, Querry Genn, is a fifteen-year-old boy living in Survival Colony 9, one of the small, mobile bands that came together in the years after the wars. In addition to the severe problems all the survivors face in a desert world crawling with monsters, Querry faces two that are unique to him: he lost his memory in an accident six months before the action of the book starts, and the leader of his colony is a very demanding man who doesn’t tolerate Querry’s disability. The story takes place during a critical two-week period in Querry’s life as he tries to recover his past and fight for his colony’s future.

2. When you first sat down to write the sequel, what was your strategy for approaching it?

I’m not much of a planner; I usually just sit down and write. But with a sequel, I knew I had to be somewhat more systematic than usual. So I jotted down lots of notes, planning out possible narrative trajectories for my main characters, creating brief biographies for the new characters who appear in the book, drawing maps of the territory where the action takes place, and so on. I left a lot of things open, because I’ve found that I do my best writing when I let my characters and my story lead me to unexpected places. It was just a matter of finding a good balance between planning and winging it!

3. When I wrote the sequels for The Eighth Day, I found that I had to dig deeper into my world building and go beyond what the reader learned about the setting in the first book. How did you delve deeper into the world of Survival Colony 9?

One of the things I wanted to show in Scavenger of Souls was that Querry’s colony was not alone in this world. It seemed to me that, with the almost complete collapse of global civilization, various survival colonies would develop along very different lines depending on any number of factors: who led them, what access to technology they had, where they were situated geographically, and so on. So in Scavenger of Souls, the reader meets a number of different colonies that coexist with Querry’s, but that are very different from—and sometimes in conflict with—Survival Colony 9. Those new colonies were fun to create, and they also gave me a chance to introduce one of my favorite characters in the Survival Colony series: Mercy, a feisty teenage girl living in one of the colonies that Querry encounters.

I also had to delve deeper into the origin of the Skaldi, because I felt that readers would really want to know where these creatures came from and why they were here. Trust me—the answers are not what you expect!

4. What did you struggle the most with while writing Scavenger of Souls? (I’m assuming you struggled. If not, what made it a breeze?)

Oh, I struggled all right! I struggled with how much backstory from the first book to include in the second, how to tie up the loose ends from the first book, and how to bring it all to a close while still leaving the reader with a sense that Querry’s story continues beyond the final page. My biggest struggle, though, was that I had originally conceived this series as a trilogy, and when I decided along with my agent and editor to transform it into a duology, I had to make some very tough decisions about what to cut. Never easy to do. My only consolation is that maybe I can use some of the material that didn’t make the final cut in a spin-off story or something!

5. What’s next for you?

I’ve completed a third YA novel that I’m super-excited about, a deep-space action/romance titled Freefall, which is due out next year. After that, I’ve got a couple of manuscripts partially written, one of them YA science fiction, the other YA historical. I’ll work with my agent to figure out which one to focus on, and that’ll be my writing project for next year!

Woo Hoo! Looking forward to Freefall as well as Scavenger of Souls! Meanwhile, see below for information about the book, the author, and a giveaway.

About the book:

Querry Genn is running out of time. He may have saved his survival colony and defeated a nest of the monstrous Skaldi, but that doesn’t mean he has any more answers to who he is. And Querry’s mother, Aleka, isn’t talking. Instead, she’s leading the colony through a wasteland of unfamiliar territory. When they reach Aleka’s destination, everything Querry believed about his past is challenged.

In the middle of a burned-out desert, an entire compound of humans has survived with plenty of food and equipment. But the colonists find no welcome there, especially from Mercy, the granddaughter of the compound’s leader. Mercy is as tough a fighter as Querry has ever seen—and a girl as impetuous as he is careful. But the more Querry learns about Mercy and her colony, the more he uncovers the gruesome secrets that haunt Mercy’s past—and his own.

With threats mounting from the Skaldi and the other humans, Querry must grapple with the past and fight to save the future. In the thrilling conclusion to the story that began with Survival Colony 9, Joshua David Bellin narrates a tale of sacrifice, courage against overwhelming odds, and the fateful choices that define us for a lifetime.

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Age: 12+

Release date: August 23, 2016

For order links, visit http://joshuadavidbellin.com/my-books/

Praise for Survival Colony 9:

Tantalizing mysteries abound among the human and inhuman inhabitants of the bleak landscape, and the post-apocalyptic plot is satisfyingly full of twists.—Booklist

Joshua David Bellin brings serious game in a post-apocalyptic thriller that collides breathless action with devious world building and genuine heart. A terrific novel!—Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Rot & Ruin and V-Wars

Set in a gritty post-apocalyptic world, Survival Colony 9 is both an adventure and an exploration of what it means to be human.—Margaret Peterson Haddix, New York Times bestselling author of the Missing Series

About the author:

Joshua David Bellin has been writing novels since he was eight years old (though the first few were admittedly very short). He taught college for twenty years, wrote a bunch of books for college students, then decided to return to fiction. Survival Colony 9 is his first novel, with the sequel, Scavenger of Souls, set to release on August 23, 2016. A third YA science fiction novel, the deep-space adventure/romance Freefall, will appear in 2017.

Josh loves to read, watch movies, and spend time in Nature with his kids. Oh, yeah, and he likes monsters. Really scary monsters.

To find out more about Josh and his books, visit him at the following:

Website: http://www.joshuadavidbellin.com

Blog: http://theyaguy.blogspot.com/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheYAGuy

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/joshuadavidbellin

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7393959.Joshua_David_Bellin

 
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Sorry I didn’t get around to any blogs last week. My family and I were vacationing on the remote, paradise island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

St. Croix, photo by Gina Salerni

On arrival, we learned that the drinking age in the Virgin Islands is 18, so my daughter Gabbey (age 19) was old enough to join my husband and me in a celebratory rum punch.

People drive on the left in the Virgin Islands, although the steering wheel in the cars is on the right. There are a lot of precarious switchback curves along the coast with a speed limit of 35, but experience proved that 15 or 10 mph  is more appropriate.

My husband found the numerous potholes aggravating at first. Then he realized how much traction they offered in the rain. Our Ford Fiesta rental would never have made it up some of the hills without those potholes. (Although we did think the pothole that had its own waterfall was getting a bit silly.)

Driving in the daytime, we had to look out for chickens crossing the road. And mongooses. At night, we were confronted by crabs. Yes, crabs, scuttling sideways across the highway. The very first one we saw was as big as a dinner plate. It faced off against our Ford Fiesta, threatening us with its claws. “Dinner!” exclaimed Gabbey.

“You go get it,” replied Bob.

Nobody left the car.

On our first full day on the island, Gabbey, Gina, and I signed up for a Discovery Dive program with the Sweet Bottom Dive Center. (Bob is already a certified diver.) After a brief skills lesson in the pool (brief, because we were familiar with the equipment from snuba and comfortable in the water), we moved to the ocean for our first dive. 45 minutes at a depth of 40 feet.

Gabbey and Gina, Photo by Bob Salerni

Me, Photo by Bob Salerni

Gabbey Wading Out, Photo by Bob Salerni

The next day, we hiked out to the Carambola Tide Pools, literally uphill both ways. We climbed up and over this 1,200 ft peak (through the rain forest) to get to the pools — and then, after a lovely swim, turned around and climbed back over it again.

The Peak We Climbed (The Beach was Our Starting Point)

View From the Peak, Photo by Gina Salerni

Tide Pools, Photo by Gina Salerni

According to Bob’s workout app, this excursion was 6 miles round trip. My Garmin-brand fitbit said it was 10,000 steps. Neither app accounted for the 1,200 foot incline coming and going. When I got back to the hotel and collapsed, it seemed like no time at all before my bracelet started beeping. Apparently, I’d been inactive for an hour, and it suggested I get up and move around.

I would’ve smashed the fitbit with a rock, except for the energy it would have taken to find a rock and also perform the smashing.

Clearly, we needed a day of rest after that, lounging by the pool and the beach. We could still make ourselves useful because the island was infested with Pokemon, especially Zubats.

Unfortunately, there was only one PokeStop on the whole resort: The Captain Morgan Libation Hut. There wasn’t anything to do but hang out there all afternoon, collecting Poke Balls every 10-15 minutes. And what to do while we waited? What to do?

If the resort looks deserted, it’s because it was. We shared the beach with about four other people. It was almost like having our own private island.

On our final day on St. Croix, we booked a second dive trip with Sweet Bottom, diving off the pier at Fredericksted, St. Croix. This one was 65 minutes, 25 feet in depth, and colorful.

Photo by Mark, of Sweet Bottom Dive Center

Photo by Bob Salerni

Photo by Bob Salerni

Both my daughters are gung-ho about getting fully certified now (and woo-hoo! it would count toward Gabbey’s college phys ed credits!). I am seriously considering joining them. It’s only taken my husband 10 years to inch me toward this. I think the snuba adventure in Key West this April was the breaking point when I realized I was no longer afraid of being under water.

Meanwhile, I’ve returned home with my creative energy restored and regenerated. Let the writing begin!