Once Upon a Caveman (30 page)

Once
Upon a Caveman
took me about ten years to write.  Seriously. 
I have hundreds of pages of starts and stops, different settings, different
characters, different plots…  In fact,
Wicked, Ugly, Bad
and
Love in
the Time of Zombies
both began their lives as drafts for this book.  Crazy
right?

If
you’ve read
Wicked, Ugly, Bad
you might remember that it begins in a
psychiatric facility.  Well, there was a draft of this book where Lucy was in a
mental hospital, due to her caveman dreams and hallucinations.  If you read
Love
in the Time of Zombies
you might recall that there is a volcano-themed hole
on Zeke’s miniature golf course.  Well, there was a draft of this book where
Zeke was the Warren-ish character and that Fiberglas volcano was a gateway to
Rhawn’s island.  I knew within one chapter that both of those ideas were wrong
for this story and they went in totally new directions.  The trouble was I
still couldn’t figure out what was right for
Once Upon a Caveman
.

It
can be frustrating to know chunks of a story, but not be able to see the whole
picture.  That was me and this book for a long time.  The first pieces for
Once
Upon a Caveman
came so easily.  I was stuck in an intro to anthropology
class, not paying attention to the professor’s boring Power Point.  In the glass
case on the wall, there was a sabretooth tiger skull sitting on a shelf.  The
teeth were longer than my pencil.  I started thinking about what it must have
been like to live in a world where these creatures hunted in the shadows. 
Instead of taking notes on the brain-size of gibbons, (For real, that was a
test question.  You see why I was daydreaming?) I started writing down ideas
for a time travel story, where a modern girl is catapulted back to the Ice Age. 
I filled up a whole notebook with my story ideas and then kinda set it aside,
unfinished.

I
leave a lot of books unfinished.  Far,
far
more than get actual
endings.  I have to actually
write
something to know if it’s going to
work.  Sometimes it takes me eighty thousand words to realize its crap and I
toss it away.  Other times, I wait for a while and come back to it with fresh
eyes.  (I had parts of
Cowboy From the Future
untouched for two years
before finally completing it.)  For some reason, I always knew I’d finish
Once
Upon a Caveman
.  I even knew most of the characters names, which are
primarily based on fossil sites or other archeological finds.  It was the rest that
I was still sketchy on, so I decided I needed to do some “research.”

It
was pretty informal.  If I was in LA, I’d take a side-trip to the La Brea tar
pits.  (Amazing place, by the way.)  If I was in New York, I’d visit the American
History museum to look at the mammoth displays.  If there was a PBS special on
the Ice Age, it got DVRed and scrutinized.  Heck, my sister and I even
practiced Ice Age spear throwing at a mammoth site in Hot Springs, South
Dakota.  (It’s way harder than you’d think.)  I knew I was going to write this
damn book sooner or later, so I was casually gathering up information.

I
set the story in another world so I could play a bit fast-and-loose with the
geological landscape of the island.  I have always been more interested in
history than science and I make no claims about the accuracy of the volcanic
activity on the island, aside from the very basics.  Any references to
historical eruptions like Krakatoa and Vesuvius are true.  But could an island sink
into the sea?  Probably not on Earth.  It could get blown apart, though.  I
leave it up to the reader to decide what happened to Rhawn’s island.

I’m
by no means an expert on the Ice Age either, but the facts that Lucy relates in
the book are true, to the best of my knowledge.  There were no dinosaurs in the
Ice Age.  I just tossed a plesiosaurs because I thought it would be fun.  (I also
made up
bogas
, but that’s about it.)  Wooly rhinos existed.  So did dire
wolves and armadillos the size of cars.  Animals were larger then and glaciers
covered the northern part of the globe.

With
so much water trapped in ice, a land bridge was exposed between Asia and
Alaska.  This is the most accepted theory as to how people first found their
way to the North America, although there is also evidence to suggest that some
cultures were capable of building boats.  These were not stupid people.  They
had art, music, language, and technology to make their daily lives easier.  The
more you learn about “cavemen” the more you see, they’re not so different from
us.

All
over the globe, humans lived side-by-side with creatures so bizarre it’s hard
to even imagine them.  Rhawn’s plan to hunt the mammoths is one theory of how
human groups actually killed them.  Humans used their tusks to make huts, their
skins to make blankets, their bones to make art and tools… Mammoths were a
vital part of their culture.  But I can still sympathize with Lucy’s horror at
the idea of killing something so amazing.  There are few things weirder or more
awesome than Pleistocene mammals.  If you look at some of the cave paintings
people left behind in Europe, you can catch a small glimpse into their world
and its beautiful and terrifying wildlife.

Anyway,
about a decade into my half-hearted, start-and-stop research, my family took a
cruise.  It was a “boutique” ship, filled with an ever-present staff trained to
subdue all resistance with all-you-can-eat sorbet and afternoon shuffleboard. 
My sister Elizabeth is probably the worst person in the world to stick on a
cruise ship full of people who like sorbet and shuffleboard.  A battle of wills
began.  The more the staff urged her to participate in show tune charades (true
story), the higher she cranked Johnny Cash on her iPod and ignored them.

Our
cruise director was a man named Tony, who might just have been genetically
engineered for his job.  His perpetual grin and orangey tan were meant for a
life on the lido deck.  There was no way he’d survive in any other
environment.  He was also overly, aggressively, patronizingly cheerful and my
sister… isn’t.  Conflict was inevitable.  And funny.

“Tony
the cruise director hates you.”  I informed my sister after one of their more
entertaining encounters.

“Whatever.” 
She said, not caring about her onboard popularity.  And then she added, with
the randomness that I love about her, “Hey, that actually sounds like the
beginning of a cool book, though.”

And
that’s how
Once Upon a Caveman
was finally born.  My sister’s snarking,
plus a probably-replica skull of a sabretooth cat, plus a decade of do-overs
and wrong turns.  …And maybe too many rewatches of
The Breakfast Club
.  Honestly,
I’m not sure where the idea of the class reunion came from.  The book is about
becoming the person you always
wanted
to be, so reevaluating your life
through a lens of your high school self just seems to fit.

In
any case, I hope you enjoyed Lucy and Rhawn’s adventure.  It took a long time
for me to get it right, but I think they’re finally both happy with their
happily ever after.  If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about
this book or any other please let me know at
[email protected]
. 
We
love to hear from you!