The Rally Point

This book was written after "The Long Ride Home" but takes place during the same time.  "The Long Ride Home" follows 'Sue', who is basically me, riding my bicycle across the country after an EMP, trying to get home in a country that is just starting to realize things have changed...maybe forever.  "The Rally Point follows my husband, kids, and grandkids during the same event, as my husband prepares for everyone to arrive, and the kids and grandkids bug out to our homsestead. 

At the time I wrote this book all of the kids lived within 75 miles of our place in NW Montana.  All but one had moved to "the city" (Kalispell) to get jobs.  One had been lucky enough to get a job at a golf course.  He was 20 years old and still living in our home at that time.  Now he's married and lives in a small town 18 miles from us. 

This son, who went by the name of 'John' in the book, didn't need to "bug out" because he was already at our home.  I needed some adventures to write into the book for him, so I initially planned to have him go after one or more of his siblings that needed help to get to our place.  Then I thought about him being on the volunteer fire department and Search & Rescue and decided to put a couple of scenes in where he was called out in that capacity, in a SHTF scenario.  One of those scenes, the chemical truck accident, still brings tears to my eyes when I read it.  I suppose an author shouldn't admit that about their own work! 

Another son went by the name 'Charlie' in the book.  He, too, wasn't married, so I wrote in a girl that he meets as he bugs out and brings along.  I tried to keep the characters close to the real kids in what they liked, how they lived, and what jobs they had.  'Charlie' is an anime fan and collects swords, and I made the girl half-Japanese, and had him carrying a Katana on his back, which the real-life young man would do. 

When I started talking to the family about this book I told them to think of what names they would like to be called in the book.  Those that didn't provide a name ended up being called by their middle names.  The kids and grandkids were excited about the book and I talked with each of them about what they pictured if they had to bug out to our place.  It was a good learning experience for them to think of it as a real situation and plan it out.  Some almost hung over my shoulder to see what I wrote about them, others wanted to wait until I was done to read it. 

My husband chose the name "Walter".  He's a funny and somewhat crotchedy.... like the Jeff Dunham ventriloquist dummy by that name.  It was Mr. Dunham's early years when he first "got big" and he was less vulgar.  So if you look him up now to see who I'm referring to, you might find newer content with more bad words.  Still funny though.  Anyway, we had a name for him now.  If our place was as organized as I wrote it to be in the book, it might be true that my husband could actually find the things to make chili and other things I had him doing in the book!  But alas, every time I get something organized I have to dig for something else and usually make a bigger mess. 

The kids that had horses in the book, have those horses in real life.  The ones with bicycles or other things, have those in real life.  I wanted this to be something they could actually do if a bad event ever really did happen.  I also worked some of their personalities into their characters.  At least, the way "mom" sees it!  If they're like I was when I was their age, they probably hear me talk about them and wonder who I'm talking about! 

One of the hardest things was trying to get the timeline to be similar to the "Long Ride Home" book.  Obviously it would take Sue pretty long to ride a bicycle from central Mississippi to northwest Montana.  But it would only take a couple days at most for the kids and grandkids to make it their short distances to our house.  I had to work with passage of time issues, and as a new writer I felt like I had a bumpy journey there.  This was only my second book.  At the time I never thought of it as something I would publish for sale.  It was going to go up alongside the other book on the preparedness forum I belonged to.  So I didn't feel as much pressure to be 'professional' as I wrote it.

I like how I tied the ending of both books together in each one.  Sue arrived at the cabin and was surrounded by family in the yard at the end of both books.  Sue and the traveling companions she had ended up with had happened across a wrecked Pepsi truck and salvaged several cases of pop.  In "Rally Point" Charlie and the girl had happened across a Frito-Lays delivery truck with a mortally wounded driver and salvaged several bags of chips.  I thought that was a nice touch.  Most preppers have stored up foods essential for survival, and some are very serious about nutrition.  But what a lot of us will really miss is the junk food.  Pop, candy bars, and chips.  We can make cookies, cakes, and pies.  But a can of pepsi, a Hershey bar, and a bag of corn chips will be gold after a year into a real SHTF situation.  Though I could be wrong.  We might all just be glad to still be ALIVE at that point.

When I can sink my mind into my stories and BE my characters I do my best writing.  It's not just thinking about what I would do in their case, it becomes me doing that.  I had to find a middle ground of being my characters, and yet letting them be their characters.  How do they think and act?  What would they say?  How do they treat each other?  Those are the things that would bring the individual to life.  I wanted the kids to like how I presented them.  I wanted them to like the dialogue I placed in their mouths.

I feel like I really captured some of their personalities.  Rose would be the worrier making sure her brother, Charlie, really did get out of town, because Charlie, being who he is in real life, would be the one who would not leave town until he made sure the other siblings were all on their way.  And at the cabin when Aemelia's son was standing at the table while they made pancakes and without turning she asked him what he had in his mouth, the boy swallowed the dried huckleberry (like a wild blueberry) and said "nothing", while thinking "Mothers!  How do they know this stuff"!  I thought that was very telling.  My kids might be 'other people' that I would barely recognize when they're away from me and around their friends, but they still have certain things to their personalities that they are defined by in their behaviors.  It was easy to write some of those things into the book. 

As I wrote the accounts of their fictional journeys up to our house in a world whose civilization and order was rapidly deteriorating I tried to put in adventures and challenges for them to deal with.  I tried to use their actual talents, skills, and hobbies to create their book characters.

I toyed with a third book to tie the first two together and complete things, but I couldn't think up enough action for it.  They would all be "bugged in" at the homestead and it would basically be every day life of gardening, preserving food, cutting firewood, making sure we were all safe in our remote neighborhood.  There could be scenes of outsiders trying to come in among us, or accidents or grizzly bears (it IS grizzly bear country up there!), but it still didn't seem exciting to me.  I have found it easier to write books that have people on the move.  I may still write the book, but I have a lot of others in line that I would like to write first.  Some are sequels to my other prepper fiction books.

Another thing that makes it hard to think about the third book is that the life situation has changed for nearly all of the kids.  'John' is married now.  Joyce has moved to another nearby town and has two more children.  Rose is married to Alan now and they have two sons.  It would be hard to leave those people out but they don't have a place in the book either.  I could do it, but I'd have to get in the right mind set to not include these wonderful additions to our family.  I could have 'John' meet his future wife in the third book, but I can't pop those four other grandchildren (belonging to two different daughters) into the book unless it covers a long period of time.  And maybe I think too hard? 

I could not think of a title for this book. A  friend in Canada named it "The Montana Homestead" when we put it on the preparedness forum.  But when we published it we wracked our brains for a more fitting title.  We finally settled on "The Rally Point", which I don't think really tells the reader much about the story they're about to read.  Maybe someone will come up with a really good title someday that just fits right in with the story.  Usually the title for a book I'm writing just settles in my brain and makes itself at home, but not this one.

Here's the original cover for the kindle version.  I'm not sure why it's fuzzy.  I copied and pasted it from Amazon.

 

Here's the cover for the print version of the book:

Here's the link if you would like to look at the book on amazon.com,

or to buy the book:

 

The Rally Point: Bugging Home

The Long Ride Home

I wrote this book in the spring of 2010.  I was on a train traveling from Montana to Hammond, Louisiana to meet a friend who lived in Michigan.  My bicycle was boxed and in the baggage car.  My husband was a bit worried about what would happen if there was some kind of disaster or unrest while I was so far across the country from home and family.  It was a time of economic troubles here in the United States as well as in parts of Europe.  There was concern that Greece would collapse, and that it would lead to a domino effect and cause other countries to follow.

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:

The Long Ride Home

 

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:

Gypsy Sue on a bike

 

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