Yesterday's Gone: Season Three (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER)

means that capturing our thoughts and turning them into stories through the alchemy of the keyboard can keep that well from drying.
    The more you write, the more ideas you have; the more ideas you have, the more you can write; the more you write, the easier it gets to articulate those ideas.
    And so the circles spin.
    I never minded the pace, but I did mind that I was writing seven figures worth of words each year, with too few raining on work that I loved.
    Once Dave and I decided to revisit the serial idea that we started (and fell short) with writing Available Darkness online, we needed to develop a concept. We both love post-apocalyptic fiction, and felt that the open world rules of the genre would allow us to make things up as we went along, thus allowing us to get started almost immediately.
    Ready, fire, aim.
    Beyond our setting, we also needed a model. Kindle was a new medium, and we didn’t want to write the same sort of books we would have written before it existed. We thought it would be a good idea to shake things up, so we ignored convention and modeled our first series after scripted television, with LOST being one of our biggest inspirations.
    We used words like “episodes” and “seasons” as a shorthand broadcast to our readers that would help them immediately understand where we were coming from and where we were going - let them know what sorts of stories we were planning to tell so we could sell tickets to the right sort of adventurer.
    We had the name, premise, and a giddy green light, with each of us at our keyboard and a week to deliver our side of the story.
    The first episode of Yesterday’s Gone was written in the dark, neither of us having a clue what the other had written until pages were traded. Dave started with his three characters: Ed, Brent, and Charlie, and I started with mine: The Warson Woods Crew, Luca, and Boricio.
    Boricio wasn’t premeditated as the force of nature he’s become.
    I knew only that I wanted a wild card. Boricio was born when his feet hit the cold wooden floor with the words, “Well, this is some beer battered bullshit.” The line came to me while I was in the Think Tank (the bathtub) a day or so before I sat to write, and the name Boricio was born from my son, Ethan. He made it up based on a kid in his grade named Mauricio. I’d loved the name Boricio for about a year, and figured it would find a home eventually.
    Even our most loyal readers probably notice that the first episode of Yesterday’s Gone is the roughest of everything we’ve written. But I love it for its raw edges. After that episode, we couldn’t get away with ready, fire, aim anymore - we owed it to our readers to plot, and plot we did.
    One thing was nonnegotiable: Each season of our work must improve upon the season before. We want each of our series to be exceptional, and each series to substantially improve from season to season, building on what came before while losing none of what made it what it was. More Breaking Bad than LOST, which had a few hiccups . That improvement from year to year is one of, if not the most important things, to us as creators.
    Season one started as an adventure, and it was a helluva fun ride. As was Season Two. But it wasn’t long before some of our story threads began to require our immediate attention, threatening to tear the tapestry we were trying so hard to sew.
    LOST wasn’t just one of our favorite shows, it also happened to be one of our best teachers. We both love that show, but also appreciate it for the many lessons it taught us - not just with what to do, but what not to do.
    Perhaps only diehard fans of the show are aware of the “Hurley Bird,” but the Hurley Bird for Dave and me was almost like a North Star in our creative sky.
    In the second season finale of LOST , just when the show was going from the coolest show on TV to possibly my favorite show ever, one of the characters, Hurley, is crossing the mysterious island with a small handful of the show’s main characters. Just shy of their destination, a bird swoops in front of his path, crying, “HURLEY!”
    For the next four years, many fans waited for an explanation to this singular event.
    Alas, an explanation never came.
    Yesterdays’ Gone was not allowed to have any Hurley Birds.
    As we entered our third season, it was essential that we wrapped our loose threads, closed our open loops, and made sure that those readers who stuck with us for two seasons had all their