Introduction to The Forgotten Colony
I was an arrogant twelve-year-old.
I don’t know why, but with every book I read, I thought to myself—Pfft. I can do better than this.
Again. Arrogant.
Nevertheless, I was determined to make good on my word. So, in June 2019, at the ripe age of twelve, I started writing the first draft of The Forgotten Colony.
I did not, in fact, do better than those other authors.
Shocker.
But I didn’t give up. I still thought I could do better in the end. When November rolled around, I took advantage of National Novel Writing Month and pumped out 30,000 words of absolute garbage. By the end of the year, I had a 50,000-word first draft and very little desire to go on.
But once again, I had to be a man of my word.
For my thirteenth birthday, my father made me a cake resembling an irogen crystal (you’ll know what that is later on) and applauded me for writing a novel instead of playing video games. I wouldn’t call it a novel, exactly—it was more like the incoherent ramblings of a sci-fi-obsessed child. But I had something to work with. I just had to make it good.
Around this time, COVID-19 hit, and I was deeply, deeply devastated to find that I was no longer allowed to attend school. I just loved sitting in a room for seven hours, listening to lectures about the layers of the Earth.
In the absence of school, I spent six months outlining the novel, killing plenty of my favorite scenes and characters along the way. That part sucked. But I got it done! For the next six months, I rewrote the whole book to follow the new outline.
After doing so, I looked at the book as a whole and realized one simple fact:
It was still shit.
The story worked, sure, but much of the actual writing was immature and unrealistic. What do you think I did next? At fourteen, I rewrote it again!
After another six months, I had a 143,000-word monstrosity of adventure, death, and destruction. At this point, I began my freshman year of high school and started to do other things besides writing. I knew there was still a lot of work to be done on the book, such as copyediting it cover to cover, but I grew distracted.
I made new friends, got a girlfriend, and developed other hobbies. I was fourteen, after all. I was supposed to be having fun, right?
Wrong. I was supposed to be sitting in a dark corner of my room with a bag of Doritos, editing my book. So I did that too! With the help of my father, I got a nearly finished manuscript together in roughly… A YEAR AND A HALF. Yes, it took me just as long to edit the book as it took me to write it.
Still, I didn’t give up.
After copyediting it—and rewriting way more scenes than I should have—I went through for the final proofread. Although I’m not proud of it, I rewrote even more scenes during that time. (It’s a problem, okay?)
But there I was, nearly sixteen years old, with a polished manuscript of the novel I started when I was twelve. I’m not sure if it’s truly better than all the books I claimed it would knock out of the water, but who cares?
I wrote a book!
At twelve years old, I said I would write a book, and I did.
That’s all that matters.
It’s up to the readers to decide if it’s good, amazing, or worth using as toilet paper.
So, thank you for taking a chance on this book.
— J.B. Ryder
Introduction to Us Before Them
Back again so soon?
Since I didn’t scare you off with the first book, I’d like to thank you for sticking with me this long. Indeed, the last two years have been an interesting time in my life.
Allow me to recap.
Before the release of The Forgotten Colony, I was a high school sophomore with no knowledge of marketing or the publishing industry. Therefore, I decided to leverage the one tool all teenagers have in their hands: social media.
Over the next two months, I slowly realized I was not alone. Thousands of other teen authors were trying to do the same thing as I was. Even stranger, I found that people were genuinely interested in my book.
Some people fancasted actors for the characters. Others created artwork of the characters, settings, and situations I had teased. Then, May 9th rolled around, and the most unbelievable thing happened:
People started to read the book.
I may have acted confident in the months leading up to launch, but I was secretly terrified of how it would be received. After all, I’d spent 25% of my life on it. Was it too long? Were there typos? Would people use it as toilet paper?
Thankfully, there have been no cases of the latter.
Reported cases.
During the summer, I began plotting out the second book (aka I listened to Discord by the Living Tombstone on repeat while imagining edits of a single, partially irrelevant character).
The work really began in August.
Kinda.
I wrote the present-day scenes for seventeen chapters, amounting to about 30,000 words, in about three months. To be honest, it wasn’t as many as I was hoping.
But then, a Christmas miracle happened.
I got a keyboard that looked like a typewriter.
With it, I outlined the entire present-day timeline in half a week and committed to writing around 2,500 words a day. I kept to my word and finished all the present-day scenes in a month, adding 70,000 words to the draft.
I’m telling you, man: this keyboard was magical.
The clacking of the keys made me feel like I was writing.
Then, I had to write the flashbacks. I outlined that storyline in about a day, starting with a strawberry smoothie at Denny’s and ending with three crushed Coke cans in a dark room. Then, I wrote roughly 30,000 words of flashbacks in three weeks.
And there it was!
My first draft.
Before you’re impressed with the word count, keep in mind that it was not what I’d call good writing. This was the “get it out on paper without bursting a blood vessel in my brain” draft. The subplots were all hazy, the history of Alpha Cen was endlessly confusing, and the characters acted melodramatically.
But having a detailed outline was incredibly helpful. It meant I didn’t need to feel motivated every day. I just had to stick to the script and get my words done. By contrast, I didn’t outline The Forgotten Colony until after the first draft… which was why it required so much time and effort to fix.
Us Before Them at least resembled what I needed it to be.
But it wasn’t right yet.
I spent the next four months reworking much of the book, adding another 70,000 words during the subsequent two drafts. Yes, Us Before Them is much longer than The Forgotten Colony.
But The Forgotten Colony was quite literally the setup for all the crazy stuff you’re about to read.
In the summer of 2024, I had the incredible opportunity to study science, technology, and society at Harvard. If you remember, Zach Croft’s alma mater is Harvard, so it was a very interesting experience living as Zach may have for a few months. Much of what I learned there influenced my later edits of Us Before Them (specifically, the underlying theme).
For the six months after the program, I continued to refine the story of Us Before Them, doing a lot of restructuring during the winter of 2024 to 2025. There’s just something about the pressure of the deadline that makes the best ideas come out. It’s when you really have to look at your story and say, “this part isn’t working” or “I need to reorder these scenes for clarity.”
Admittedly, I’ve been known to edit my writing until the last minute, so this shouldn’t be too surprising.
I’m now a senior in high school, one year away from being torn from the warm embrace of childhood and thrown out into the cold clutches of adulthood. Knowing that, I am forever grateful for the opportunity to share my stories with the world and create a time capsule of my twelve-year-old mind.
I’ll admit: this second installment is a little bit less down to Earth (literally), but I am genuinely so excited for you all to experience the next chapter in Zach Croft’s story.
Thank you to everyone who took a chance on The Forgotten Colony. You made my dreams come true, and that’s something I’ll never be able to repay.
Unfortunately, I don’t think killing three major characters in this book is the way to repay you.
But that’s just storytelling!
— J.B. Ryder
jbryderauthor.com 