As the train rolled across the northern plains I started imagining the route I would take if I had to point my bicycle straight for home. I pulled out my little notebook laptop computer and started to make a rough version of the story. The friend I was meeting was actually a male bicycling companion. He would turn 70 on this ride. I was 49. I was a married woman with husband, kids, and grandkids, and I already knew that my urgent quest to get home to my family was going to be a key point of the book. I wondered what readers would think if I was riding with a man, even though he was a married man. His wife knew, as my husband knew, that there wouldn't be any fooling around. We were friends and bicyclists, nothing more.
I didn't want readers to be side-tracked by having the married female lead character traveling with a man who wasn't her husband. So I changed my real-life friend, Bob, to Jackie. I picked the name Jackie after one of my best friends from where I used to live in Kentucky. Jackie wasn't a bicycle enthusiast but she was adventurous and supportive.
So I had to decide what event would send 'Sue' on the road toward home, instead of toward Michigan where Bob/Jackie lived, and I decided to use an EMP. I'd been reading books by Jerry D. Young, the prepper author, and I had learned a little about EMPs and what how that author pictured people responding to situations like that.
Now I had my event, and I had to pick a likely place for my characters to be when it happened. I picked Jackson because the train was stopped there and I was taking a break outside, pacing alongside the train to get the blood circulating in my legs after all the sitting. It was late March and still cold in the north, and as the train headed south this was the first stop where I'd gone outside and it was warm enough to not need a jacket. When I got back to my seat and the train pulled out of the station I opened my computer and typed Jackson in as the city where the story would begin.
I spent a lot of time staring out the window of the train and planning out some of the events I wanted to have happen in the story, and only had a few pages typed when I got off the train in Hammond, Louisiana. We got off the train around 1:30 in the afternoon and retrieved our bicycles from baggage. We had to put our bicycles together and load the bags onto them. It was beautiful there! Flowers were already in bloom. We had to ride through residential areas to get to the highway north.
Although it was almost 3:00 when we rode out of Hammond we still pedaled 52 miles to a state park in Mississippi, where we camped. It was pretty dark when we got there.
The first couple nights I didn't work much on the computer but I wrote scenes in my head while we pedaled, and thought about what could happen if the story was really happening. We bicycled over to Natchez and started up the Natchez Trace trail. I worked out scenes in my head while we pedaled during the day, and in the evening I worked on writing them on my little computer. Sometimes I'd jot down notes during the day or even type them onto the computer. I told my husband about the book when we talked on the phone, and I started emailing it to him as I wrote it. We used WIFI at places like McDonald's or public libraries.
I had traveled over the countrysidein the book many times over my life, and I had a pretty good idea of what my character would encounter. One of the big ones in my mind was the Ohio River and the Mississippi River. I mulled over the possibilities and thought any river crossing was going to be hairy if any kind of crisis scenario was happening. I could have had her head straight west and make one crossing over the Mississippi, but then she would have had to continue across southern Missouri or have to cross the Missouri River farther north. She would have had to stay south and west of the Missouri River, which would have sent her up through Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming to get back to Montana.
The other possibility was to send her straight north through Illinois and Wisconsin, where she could turn west above Minneapolis and follow Hwy 2 across the lightly-populated northern plains. I'm a native of Wisconsin and I've traveled that route across the north between Montana and Wisconsin so many times I could do it in my sleep, to visit my parents (who are now both deceased) and my sister (who still lives in Wisconsin). I felt a bit more familiar with it, and decided I liked the thought of the empty north country. It's the route I would have chosen if it were me in real life.
Sometimes when I'm writing, things write them selves out of my fingers that I didn't see coming. I didn't know she was going to meet up with that couple and that he would give her a ride across the river. So I ended up unexpectedly changing the route. That might seem like an odd thought but it has happened a lot when I'm deeply focused on my writing. All of a sudden I'm wondering where the idea for a scene I just wrote came from! lol That was one of them. Another was when she came across Tommy at his grandparents house. I had no idea I was going to create a little boy to end up accompanying her, and I had to suddenly think "what would I do? How would I keep us safe and fed?"
I didn't know when I rode over that hill (as the character of the book) that I was going to find dead bodies, a crying woman, and small children. It just kind of wrote itself. Some of the more lame scenes, like when a sheriff questioned her in the street of a small town, were scenes where I was forcing myself to write in more action and interaction and it felt forced. It didn't flow the same and I couldn't find a way to make it flow better. People sometimes worry about the length of a book, and I argue that quality trumps quantity. But I did feel the need to fluff this one out more so it would be a little longer or at least have more things happen. Those 'extra' fluff scenes were written after I got home and had lost the 'feel' of the road. The reader might not be able to tell the difference but I could.
I could feel my heart thumping on some of those scenes when I was so deeply immersed in my writing. I was laying in my tent in a strange woods typing away on my notebook computer and before long I would have myself thinking I really was on a race for home during tumultuous times! That atmosphere lent itself well to the emotion I tried to lace into the book.
One of the scenes near the end involved a Pepsi truck that had gone off the road and was on it's side over the bank of the hill. In real life I had come across such a scene in gloomy weather when sleet was coming down. No one was pillaging it but people were standing around it. That memory popped into my head when I had my characters going over Marias Pass (south border of Glacier National Park), and I thought how fun it would be to just take cases and cases of pepsi products! So I had my characters do that.
I've always felt like the story wrapped up and ended too quickly. Some day I might reread the book and see if I can flesh that out a little more. But for now, when I read the book, I just want to get on my bicycle and go on another cross-country ride! Instead of thinking of plot additions I find myself pulling out the road atlas and the calendar and dreaming.
Bob and I had planned to pedal all the way up to Michigan but as we neared the Kentucky state line we ran in to winter again. Campgrounds were closed and the weather cooled off enough to be uncomfortable. Bob decided to head for home, and I turned around and pedaled back down across Tennessee and into Mississippi again. I was heading back to Jackson by a different route of county and state highways, to see more scenery. It took about five days to ride back down there. Most nights there wasn't a campground near where I stopped, so I 'stealth' camped in the woods out of sight of the road.
There are two of my stealth-camping spots. The first one was cropped and used for the cover of the kindle book.
A lot of things in the book were based on real-life experiences along my journey. I rode through a lot of little towns and people weren't quite sure what to make of me. Most people were really nice and were interested and asked questions. At campgrounds people at nearby sites often brought me food. They'd share their dinner, or bag up some fruit or sandwiches and bring it over as I was about to ride off in the morning. They never seemed quite sure whether someone on something "healthy" like a cross-country bicycle trip would actually eat junk food. Sometimes they'd hint or outright ask, and hesitantly offer me cookies or brownies or something. When you're on a ride like that you're going to burn off everything you could shove in your mouth that day, so all food is fair game! The only struggle was trying to reach out politely to take the junk food, rather than grabbing it and hugging it to my chest.
But I also I had people holler at me from passing cars and pick-up trucks, usually crude comments, and I had to pick different routes and cross the road to avoid trouble a few times. There was an element of danger being alone and obviously not local, riding through rural countryside. I felt heightened emotions sometimes, especially a couple of times when I ended up riding after dark to get to a safer place to camp. I used those emotions to describe how "Sue" was feeling in the book. Those five days alone were really helpful in giving life to Sue's character.
It only seems fitting that near Yazoo, Mississippi I got caught in a series of thunderstorms and tornadoes. I holed up on a hillside a couple miles outside of town in pouring rain, with my ground cloth over me and my bicycle. It was thundering and hailing and I was sure a tornado would come over the hill any minute. I called 911 and a deputy came out and talked to me. He didn't have a way to haul me and my bicycle but he told me if I rode back two miles and turned right, there was a little motel there where I could stay the night.
That was a long two miles of riding in that terrible thunderstorm but I made it just as it was getting dark. I got a room and took my bicycle right into the room. Fortunately I pack in garbage bags inside my bicycle bags, so my gear was dry. The clothes I was wearing were the only thing soaked. This evening I wrote the scene where Sue comes across the woman with the children, who's husband had been killed in a shoot-out along the road. This is where the story takes a shift.
In real life, one of the motel maids and her boyfriend gave me a ride into Jackson the next morning and dropped me and my bicycle off at the train station. I bought a ticket and boxed up my bicycle and a few hours later I was on the train riding past Yazoo and the storm damage from the tornadoes that roared through while I slept in my motel room. I felt safe and foreign after 3 weeks on a bicycle. In the book, Sue and the woman took the pick-up truck belonging to the dead bad guys who had shot the woman's husband. She was in a truck then, making better time and somewhat safer than she had been on a bicycle.
I surprised myself when I shifted gears and had her in a truck. I spent some time thinking about whether I wanted to do that; to take her off the bicycle and put her in a truck. It's kind of like I am in real life. I'm out there, enjoying the adventure, but when it's time to point it for home, I just want to get there. That's what happened to Sue. She ended up in a truck with that woman and her kids, and the little boy Sue had picked up along the way, making hasty time toward home. There were still adventures and mishaps, but you can feel the story shift to a 'hurry up and get home' feeling.
Some adventures did pop up in those last pages of the book, which I hope leaves the reader satisfied that they had excitement clear up to the end. The last pages of the book were written after I was safely home. For a while the real journey and the book were kind of rolled together in my mind, since I had lived both along the way. I knew what was real and what wasn't, but I couldn't shake the feeling of how LUCKY I was when I got off the train in Whitefish, Montana and my smiling husband was there to greet me. And it felt all the more precious to see my kids and grandkids again.
That led to the writing of the sequel, "The Rally Point", which followed the story of my husband, and our kids and grandkids, as they bugged out up to our house after the same EMP that occurred in "The Long Ride Home". The kids had enjoyed my story and wanted me to write theirs. But...that's another story and therefore will be another blog post! :)
The cover of the kindle version of the book.
The cover of the print version.
If you would like to look at the book on Amazon the link is:
If you would like to read the actual blog from my real-life trip, which did not include an EMP but did include tornadoes, among other things, this is the link:
I use the name "Gypsy Sue" a lot because I'm a wanderer who is into adventure and the journey, and not always the destination.
I hope you've enjoyed reading a bit of history and back-story to this book. Please feel free to leave comments or questions below.
Thank you!
Susan
Very fun to read how you developed the story! Especially how you incorporated your real life emotions into it! It wasn't just from your head, but from your heart, too.
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