Some of the things we put in the books needs to be generally available. And it turns out that you can only fit so much in a book. In this section, we share some of the most importiant parts of the two books, some of the hidden parts of writing these books, and some stories that didn't quite fit in the books.
Ericka Brown
One of the most important parts of the book in terms of understanding what we went through is The Island Handbook. This gives a snapshot of the rules we had to live by in the program.
One of the things that made the Guardians unique was just how many special traditions we developed. Most of our traditions were adapted from Naval traditions, but they meant a lot to us. While we sanitized them to remove direct references to the Church, these are a sample of them.
In each book, we had others from our program read drafts of
the books and write us response letters.
This page not only has the letters, but it also tells a little of the
back story involved in getting each letter.
In the course of working on these books, we came into possession
of a number of Island artifacts that are just interesting. While we have had to alter them to hide the
Church, we can present a few of them to you here.
As I am sure you can imagine, in the process of writing
these books, we spoke to a lot of different people involved in different
aspects of this program. In so doing, we collected quite a number of stories they told us about the Island. A sample of them is here. When the
stories came from a Guardian, we included their book name. A lot of this was originally collected for a
short stories book we were working on, but decided not to write.
For both authors, food on the Island was a big deal. Here are some of the recipies they used on the Island.
If you worked as a servant of any kind in the Church on the staff side, you learned the codes we used to send secret messages to other girls hidden from the staff. We incorporated a few encoded messages in each book. Decode with the second and fourth religious books we had to study. These messages are intended just for girls from the program, but I thought others might find it interesting to know that we had such codes.
While our co-author Steven has a ton of writing experiance, including literally thousands of articles and 17 books, he is very much a technical writer, more at home writing about structural engineering or other such things than he is telling stories of people. The fact is, none of us had ever worked on, or published a novel before, let alone one with the complexities of these books. And while Vanessa has her Masters in English, those are skills she had not worked in a long time. The only member of our team with any real and recent fiction experiance was Noah, who wrote a lot of fan fiction. On this page we share some of our writing process, stories of things that went wrong, sucessed we had and a few touching moment we had writing these books.