What Remains Here

Author's Note

Welcome back to the world of What Comes After, and I'm excited to continue to expand on Neal and his family's journey.

For those who are new here, I'd recommend checking out the first book in my series, What Comes After , since it'll be difficult to read this book as a stand-alone, and many of the plot points established in the previous book will play key roles in this novel.

And for those who are sticking with Neal's journey as he navigates this changing world, I hope that you enjoy this book, and any comments or feedback would be appreciated!

***

Blurb:

As Neal navigates his anger and grief stemming from the loss of his only friend, his family must pull together to gather enough supplies to survive the deathly cold winter as the volcanic ash storms intensify. However, when a family appears on their doorsteps and offers engineering and medical expertise in exchange for food and shelter, Neal and his family's isolationist stance is challenged as they face a reckoning on how they will adapt to life in this changed world.

In this follow-up to "What Comes After," Neal's daily journal entries reveal his struggle to maintain hope and trust in others, as the world becomes bleeker and more desolate. With the government toppled, looters and bandits armed with weapons roam the landscape unchallenged, but rumors of sanctuaries keep hopes of rebuilding society high. Neal and his family must navigate the balance between the security of isolation and the possibility of trust.

With no one left to save them, they must choose how they'll live with what remains here.

***

Note to Judges and Readers:

I've gotten a lot of feedback about my use of mixed tenses in my stories, and I'd like to clarify something. The use of both present and past tense is intentional because of the hybrid-journalistic style of this story. The use of past tense is for the documentation of events that happened on that day, which are events of the past. The use of present tense is for the documentation of events occurring at the moment that the diary is being written. There is a mixture of past and present tenses to differentiate between events that had occurred and events that are occurring as Neal writes in his diary.

Also, what I mean by hybrid-diary is that I incorporate conversations and lots of dialogue into the diary entries, not making it a true diary, which lacks these features, but a hybrid style between the common 1st person POV narrative storytelling and the diary entry storytelling. Hopefully, this clears things up!