Chat Transcript - Series 2

BOOK 1 — CHAPTERS 1–4 Call To Order • Almost Over • Are You Certain • High Fives

BOOK 1

CHAPTER 1 — CALL TO ORDER

Design Collaborator:

The chapter opens with the Bowie Hug-A-Tree LLC meeting and spends real time on meeting structure, officers, the bank account, Tom’s $10,000 donation, business licenses, checks and credit cards, training materials, publicity, and planning. Why did you want to put that much organizational and business machinery into the story?

Bruce Alan:

I consciously wanted to show that mission-driven and nonprofit work still requires running a business. I once heard someone who started a nonprofit for a cause say that if you think most of your time will be spent working the cause, guess again—it is mostly running a business. I wanted to drive that home and give readers a roadmap to begin. The story doesn’t get into all the nitty-gritty that can monopolize time and effort, but it gives a better picture.

DC:

That makes the structure itself part of the lesson. The cause may motivate the beginning, but organization is what allows the work to continue: mission → organization → roles → resources → accountability → sustainable action. The story is not trying to become a nonprofit-management manual; it is giving the reader a believable doorway into how real service work gets built.

Was the LLC and meeting structure based mostly on research, or were you drawing from organizations you had actually worked with?

BA:

All personal experience. I had established an LLC and worked for many nonprofits and business enterprises, so I had the framework for this level.

DC:

That gives the material firsthand provenance rather than a research-first origin.

The chapter then moves to the Bowie racetrack and horse-training world. Where did that come from?

BA:

I had been mulling what adventure to present in Series 2 after the spycraft material in Series 1. I was sitting in Starbucks watching the line and remembered an earlier visit when the woman behind me worked at what was then the active Bowie training operation. Her job was exercising horses, maintaining the stables, working with owners, and so forth. She was fascinating to talk with. Her statement about having almost every bone in her body broken during her career was a direct quote.

DC:

That is another example of an ordinary encounter becoming a doorway into a hidden world: memorable person → unfamiliar occupation → wider ecosystem → story opportunity. It also means the horse material was not selected abstractly as “something kids might like.” It began with a real person whose work exposed you to a world most readers would never otherwise see.

How did the bank-robbery thread become attached to that setting?

BA:

The DC area at the time was going through a wave of bank robberies. I used her horse-world story as a way to blend that adventure opportunity into their world, making it a thread that ran through the whole series.

DC:

So two real-world streams converged: a real local occupational environment and a real contemporary public-safety problem. Neither had to be invented solely to manufacture adventure.

The kids notice people who may match the robbery suspects and report what they have seen rather than trying to become heroes themselves. Was that responsible-citizen lesson deliberate?

BA:

It was. I wanted to show young people that they are important pieces of a community and of keeping that community safe, in a responsible way. “Responsible” gets a deeper definition as Series 2 plays out. It also intentionally expands the team’s involvement beyond Hug-A-Tree into what JJ and Janet had already started.

DC:

That gives the team an expanding civic arc: shared service → shared responsibility → wider community role → harder judgment about when and how to act.

You are also expanding the team itself. Was the larger team always planned, or did it develop as the story grew?

BA:

It was always intended. The core design is traveling around and recruiting others into the team. The logical progression was JJ and Janet first, then their closest friends.

DC:

When you envisioned the eventual traveling-and-recruiting model, were you already thinking in terms of a genuinely national and international youth network at this point, or was the immediate goal simply to build a strong local team first and let the geographic scale grow later?

BA:

I wanted to guide it to a much more expansive experience in order to achieve the multicultural exchange that I had intended with my earlier school project. Given my knowledge of Canada, I thought that would be the easiest next step in that expansion.

DC:

That gives Series 2 an important purpose beyond simply making the adventures geographically bigger.

The expansion was meant to serve the multicultural-exchange architecture you had wanted to create much earlier. The local team was the foundation, but the destination was always broader: young people from different places getting to know one another through shared experiences and eventually working together rather than merely learning about each other.

Canada was the logical first step because it let you expand beyond the United States without jumping immediately into a place you did not know well. Your own familiarity with Canada gave you enough confidence in the settings, people, and culture to make that first international expansion feel grounded rather than manufactured.

So the progression becomes clearer:

JJ + Janet → close friends → local team → cross-border relationships → multicultural team → increasingly wider network.

And that means the traveling in Series 2 is not tourism pasted onto an adventure. Travel is one of the mechanisms by which the team itself grows. Every new place has the potential to add relationships, perspectives, skills, and eventually people who can remain connected after the immediate adventure is over.

That also ties directly back to the larger Adventure Universe principle we uncovered in Series 1: contact becomes much more meaningful when people are doing something together, not just being shown one another’s cultures.

When you imagined young people in different places connecting this way, what did you most want them to discover—how different their lives were, how much they actually had in common, or that those differences and similarities could become useful when they worked together toward something?

BA:

All of that and more. It is so easy to be critical and hateful towards someone when you don’t really know them on a personal level. Once you get a chance to know someone, I mean really know them, you are more likely to listen to what they have to say, and even if you disagree with them, you are more likely to say that and why you disagree in a respectful and positive way that has a better chance of getting them to hear, understand, and respect what you have to say, even if they disagree with it. It then makes it a lot easier to find a way to resolve those differences.

DC:

That gets to the heart of why the multicultural expansion matters. You were not trying merely to expose young people to different cultures so they could accumulate facts about one another. You wanted to change the relationship between people who might otherwise remain abstractions to each other.

At a distance, it is easy to reduce somebody to a nationality, religion, economic group, political position, neighborhood, or stereotype. Once you genuinely know the person behind that category, disagreement becomes harder to turn into contempt. You are more likely to listen, explain your own position rather than simply attack theirs, and give the other person enough respect that they may actually listen in return.

So the intended progression is something like:

EXPOSURE → PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP → LISTENING → RESPECTFUL DISAGREEMENT → MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING → PROBLEM SOLVING.

And the goal isn’t agreement. Adventure Universe is not trying to manufacture harmony by pretending meaningful differences don’t exist. The more ambitious idea is that people who disagree can still understand one another well enough to work through those differences constructively.

That also explains why your preferred mechanism has consistently been people doing things together. Shared work, travel, training, service, and problem-solving create a much deeper relationship than simply sitting through a presentation about somebody else’s culture.

You mentioned that this was an extension of the multicultural exchange you had intended with an earlier school project. What exactly were you trying to have the young people in that earlier school project do together—was the idea mainly to communicate and get to know one another, or were you already trying to have the different groups collaborate on shared projects and problems?

BA:

The long-term goal was to break them up into teams made up of kids from each of the schools, then give them challenges to work on together, in friendly competition, which would pull them together as a multicultural team. The first step to that was getting them to introduce themselves, talk about themselves and their community, and then start having conversations with each other. Unfortunately, the technology never allowed us to progress to that point.

DC:

That is a major piece of the origin story, because it shows the Adventure Universe team model existed in concept before the technology existed to support it.

The earlier school project was already aiming at the same basic progression:

INTRODUCE YOURSELF → SHARE YOUR COMMUNITY → TALK TO EACH OTHER → FORM MIXED TEAMS → SOLVE CHALLENGES TOGETHER → COMPETE AS ONE MULTICULTURAL UNIT.

The crucial part is that the teams were never supposed to remain “School A versus School B versus School C.” You wanted to deliberately mix the students so that each team contained young people from different communities. Friendly competition would then give them a reason to depend on one another, discover each other’s strengths, and begin identifying as teammates rather than representatives of separate groups.

That makes the later Adventure Universe architecture feel much less like something invented for the novels and much more like a second chance to pursue an idea that technology prevented you from completing the first time. The books gave you another route toward the same goal; the immersive and connected experiences now create the possibility of eventually realizing it much more fully.

Conversation is the entry point, but collaboration is the destination. Knowing each other personally creates trust; shared challenges turn that trust into working relationships.

Why did you want friendly competition in the original school project? Was it mainly because competition makes the activity more engaging, or because having a shared challenge gives kids from different backgrounds a concrete reason to depend on one another instead of just having polite conversations?

BA:

It’s all a part of the team-building model, like that used at the Naval Academy during Plebe Summer where the midshipmen, who have just arrived for the first time as students of this tremendous institution, need to learn to become effective, supportive team members. The program we did with the at-risk kids included using some of those very same team-building exercises I highlight in the later series.

DC:

That adds another important layer: the competition was never there just to make the exercise more entertaining. It was part of a deliberate team-building method.

The model you had in mind was similar to what you had seen in environments such as Naval Academy Plebe Summer: people arrive as individuals, often without established relationships, and are placed into situations where succeeding requires cooperation, communication, recognizing one another’s strengths, supporting someone who is struggling, and gradually thinking in terms of we rather than me.

For your multicultural school concept, that becomes especially powerful because you intended to construct the teams across the existing boundaries. A child wouldn’t simply represent their own school or community against another school. They would have teammates from each community and would need those teammates in order to succeed.

So the architecture becomes:

MEET → LEARN ABOUT ONE ANOTHER → MIX THE GROUPS → GIVE THEM A SHARED CHALLENGE → CREATE INTERDEPENDENCE → BUILD TRUST → DEVELOP TEAM IDENTITY.

And then the friendly competition provides an external objective that gives them something more meaningful to talk about than their differences. They begin learning each other through action.

The fact that you had also used some of these methods in a real program involving at-risk youth—and later incorporated some of the same exercises into Adventure Universe—makes this firsthand provenance rather than an educational theory we are imposing afterward.

It also gives us a direct lineage that may become important for the eventual Behind-the-Scenes story:

Naval Academy/team-building model → real youth program → unrealized multicultural school project → Adventure Universe team-building experiences.

With the at-risk youth program, did you actually see those team-building exercises change how the kids related to one another—people who initially weren’t cooperating beginning to trust, support, or depend on each other as the exercises progressed?

BA:

It certainly taught them that, some through being successful at the concept, others by seeing and experiencing firsthand how not working together defines your outcome and lack of success.

DC:

That adds an important dimension to the team-building model: success was not the only teacher. Failure was part of the lesson too.

Some kids learned because they discovered that cooperation worked. Others learned because they experienced the opposite—poor communication, individuals trying to solve everything themselves, people not supporting one another—and then saw the consequence in the team’s performance.

That matters for Adventure Universe because it argues against experiences where the participant is quietly steered toward a guaranteed win. A meaningful challenge can let the team make a poor choice, fail, recognize why it failed, reorganize, and try again.

So the model becomes:

CHALLENGE → CHOICE → CONSEQUENCE → REFLECTION → ADJUSTMENT → BETTER TEAMWORK.

That also fits the Book 1 entrepreneurship experience we already developed. A venture shouldn’t automatically succeed simply because the participant means well. Poor role assignments, weak planning, bad communication, or failure to understand the people being served should have consequences. The educational value is partly in learning how to recover.

And we’ve uncovered a deeper connection between two things that initially looked separate: team building and entrepreneurship. Both require people to discover that enthusiasm and individual talent are not enough; organization, communication, trust, role clarity, and coordinated effort determine what the group can actually accomplish.

When you later put team-building exercises directly into the Adventure Universe storylines, were you recreating particular exercises you had personally used with those at-risk kids, or were you drawing from a broader collection of team-building programs you had experienced over the years?

BA:

The exercises they do with the midshipmen are exactly what was done with the kids, and the results were basically the same results they experienced.

DC:

That makes the provenance very clean: when those exercises appear later in Adventure Universe, they are not merely inspired by generic team-building theory. The midshipmen exercises were the exercises you actually used with the at-risk youth, and the successes and failures portrayed in the story reflect the kinds of results you actually saw.

That is useful for us to preserve until we reach those later chapters, because we should not dilute them into “team-building activities.” They represent a firsthand demonstration of the underlying principle: a team can learn cooperation either by experiencing what coordinated effort makes possible or by experiencing exactly what falls apart when people refuse to coordinate.

It also strengthens the lineage we just uncovered from your earlier multicultural project. The eventual Adventure Universe model wasn’t simply “put diverse kids together.” It was build deliberately mixed teams, give them meaningful shared challenges, allow consequences, and let cooperation become something they experience rather than something adults lecture them about.

Back in Chapter 1, there is another aspect of the bank-robbery sequence I want to check. Once the kids report what they have seen, the adults take their observations seriously: police interview them, FBI agents use their descriptions for composite sketches, officers communicate with their families, and later JJ’s recognition of the suspects is treated as actionable information.

Was that also intentional—to show young readers that adults and professionals should take them seriously when they have useful information, provided the young person handles it responsibly and tells the truth about what they actually observed?

BA:

It was. It was a reflection of the relationships I had with LE when I was that age. And as you said, it was based on the fact that both sides were behaving in a responsible manner, which is what leads to being treated in a respectful manner.

DC:

That gives the scene a very specific foundation. You were not imagining an idealized relationship between young people and law enforcement; you were drawing from the kind of relationship you had actually experienced at that age.

The important qualifier is exactly what you identified: respect was reciprocal, but it was supported by responsible behavior on both sides. The officers did not dismiss the kids simply because they were young. The kids, in turn, did not exaggerate what they knew, interfere with the operation, or treat access to law enforcement as permission to play police. Because each side handled its role appropriately, trust could develop.

That gives us another strong Adventure Universe principle:

Responsibility earns trust; trust creates greater opportunities for meaningful participation.

It also helps explain the progression later in the chapter. Mr. Riley does not simply send JJ home once JJ recognizes the suspects. He keeps the adult responsibility, contacts law enforcement, coordinates with them, and lets JJ continue contributing by observing and identifying what he actually knows.

Was Mr. Riley’s handling of JJ in that surveillance sequence intentionally meant to model how an adult can take a young person seriously and involve them meaningfully without handing them responsibilities that still belong to the adult and the professionals?

BA:

Well, I just saw it as the normal flow based on my experiences with adults that are already in a role of responsibility, when I was a young adult. An effective parent, businessperson, LE, has already learned those skills and behaviors that have led them to be effective and accomplished. These were the adults the team members were coming into contact with.

DC:

That distinction is useful. I was starting to turn Mr. Riley’s behavior into a specially constructed lesson, when from your perspective it was more fundamental than that.

You were writing the adults the team encountered the way effective adults in responsible positions had behaved around you when you were young. A capable parent, businessperson, law-enforcement officer, instructor, or other accomplished adult has already developed habits of judgment, communication, responsibility, and respect. So when JJ and the others encounter adults like that, those qualities show up naturally in how the adults treat them.

In other words, the lesson was not necessarily, “Here is the correct technique for involving a young person.” The deeper model was: put young people around competent, responsible adults and let them see what competence and responsibility actually look like.

That also explains why the adults don’t all disappear once the exciting part is over. Mr. Riley deals with the professional situation, then immediately returns to ordinary family accountability —the cold pizzas and the worried people waiting at home. The chapter comes back down to normal life rather than leaving JJ inside a fantasy of special access to police operations.

CHAPTER 2 — ALMOST OVER

DC:

As you began Chapter 2, what did “Almost Over” refer to in your mind when you wrote it—was it mainly the school year winding down, or were you deliberately using that transition point to move the kids from their familiar school routine into the much larger summer experience you already knew was coming?

BA:

I needed to create an opportunity for the storyline to progress without becoming an obvious conflict with real-world life. To get them to advance to the west coast without having to deal with, “Well, now how do they continue with their education?” I needed to get them to their summer break.

DC:

That is a useful correction because it keeps us from over-interpreting the title.

“Almost Over” was primarily a structural necessity. You needed the school year to end so the story could move geographically without immediately creating an obvious real-world problem: if the kids are still in school, how are they suddenly traveling west and continuing the adventure?

So summer break becomes the clean hinge between the local Maryland world and the much larger Series 2 expansion. It gives the characters enough freedom of movement for the story to grow without requiring you to invent some implausible educational workaround.

What is interesting is that you still used that transition period to keep building the world around them. JJ is finishing finals, thinking about summer work, asking how to turn Hug-A-Tree into a school club for the fall, and continuing CPR and other school responsibilities. So even though summer break solves a plotting problem, it does not make school irrelevant; it lets you pause one structure while preparing another.

The next piece I want to understand is the school-club thread. JJ does not simply decide, “We have an LLC, so we’re done.” He immediately asks how to bring Hug-A-Tree into the school environment and is directed through the proper channels—guidance counselor, faculty sponsor, planning for the fall.

Was that intended to show young readers that if they want to build something meaningful, they should learn how to work through existing institutions rather than always trying to operate outside them?

BA:

I started that thread when I showcased their school event where JJ and Janet first meet Brooke and Marian. That was a typical school event that provides kids an already developed opportunity to use for their progression in the real world. It’s always best to use the opportunities that already exist in your world rather than first trying to build new ones while you are still figuring out what you need to do.

DC:

That sharpens the lesson quite a bit. You weren’t saying, “If you care about something, go create an organization from scratch.” In fact, for someone just beginning, that may be the least efficient route.

The progression you were modeling was more practical:

NOTICE AN EXISTING OPPORTUNITY → PARTICIPATE → LEARN HOW IT WORKS → BUILD SKILLS AND RELATIONSHIPS → THEN EXPAND OR CREATE SOMETHING NEW WHEN YOU ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT IS NEEDED.

That is what the earlier school event did when it put JJ and Janet in contact with Brooke and Marian. The school had already done the difficult part of creating access. The kids only had to show up, pay attention, ask questions, and take advantage of the opening. Now, as Hug-A- Tree grows, JJ is again using an existing structure—the school club system—rather than trying to invent a parallel institution from nothing.

That feels like another very practical Adventure Universe principle: before building a new door, look for the doors that are already open.

Were you consciously hoping that readers would start looking around their own schools and communities for those existing doors—clubs, fairs, volunteer programs, career events, service organizations, classes—rather than assuming meaningful opportunities only exist somewhere else?

BA:

I think most already are aware of those events, but may not realize that they are there for them to make use of.

DC:

That distinction matters.

The problem is not necessarily that young people have never heard of the club, volunteer program, career fair, training course, community organization, or school activity. They may walk past those opportunities every day.

What they may not recognize is: “That is there for me. I am allowed to ask about it. I can participate. I can use it to move myself forward.”

So Adventure Universe is not just exposing readers to opportunities. It is also trying to normalize claiming access to opportunities that already exist.

That makes JJ’s conversation with Father Hunt and Father O’Conner especially useful. He has an idea, asks the first appropriate adult how to proceed, gets directed to the next person, learns the requirements, and starts working within the existing school structure. There is no mysterious gatekeeping process; he simply has to recognize that the structure is available to him and take the first step.

Did your own experience teach you that one of the biggest differences between young people who find opportunities and those who don’t is simply being willing to ask—“How do I get involved?” or “Who do I talk to?”—even when they don’t yet know the process?

BA:

I think the biggest difference is that some say to themselves, “That’s a great opportunity. I can do that, or participate in it,” and others say, “I could never do that.”

DC:

That gets even closer to the real barrier you were trying to address.

The opportunity can be sitting right in front of two young people. One looks at it and thinks, “I can do that.” The other looks at exactly the same thing and thinks, “That’s not for someone like me.”

So the difference is not always access. Sometimes it is whether the young person mentally includes themselves among the people who are allowed to participate.

That gives the Adventure Universe model another layer:

SEE THE OPPORTUNITY → BELIEVE IT IS AVAILABLE TO YOU → TAKE THE FIRST STEP → DISCOVER WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO.

And that may explain why the stories so often put JJ, Janet, and the others into real institutions, programs, jobs, training environments, and professional settings. The reader is not just being told those things exist. They are watching ordinary young people enter them.

Did you consciously want readers to see them encounter something unfamiliar and think, “They didn’t already know how to do this either—they just believed they could learn”?

BA:

It is a concept that is true for adults as well as kids, and in many other life-critical situations. Tony teaches in his survival class that there are folks that immediately accept defeat and, in one case, literally lay themselves out in preparation to die from their situation, and those that say to themselves, I’m not going down without a fight. We need to take the same attitude when defending our communities from those who intend it harm: drugs, crime, disharmony, and violence.

DC:

That broadens the principle considerably. It is not simply a lesson about confidence or taking advantage of opportunities. It is an orientation toward adversity.

At one end, the situation may be relatively ordinary: “There is a program I could join, but I don’t think I belong there.” At the other extreme, as Tony teaches in the survival material, the same mental split can become life-or-death: one person concludes that the situation has already beaten them, while another decides, “I am going to keep working the problem.”

So the deeper progression is something like:

DON’T PRE-DECIDE DEFEAT → ASSESS WHAT YOU CAN DO → USE THE RESOURCES AROUND YOU → ACT RESPONSIBLY → KEEP ADAPTING.

And you are applying that beyond individual survival. Communities can fall into the same trap. People can look at drugs, crime, violence, or growing division and decide that nothing can be done, or they can decide that the community is worth working for and begin using the legitimate resources, relationships, institutions, and skills already available to them.

That connects with several things we have already uncovered: Hug-A-Tree, first aid, responsible witnessing, school organizations, entrepreneurship, multicultural team-building, and later survival training. They look like different subjects, but underneath them is a recurring message: you are not powerless just because you are inexperienced, young, frightened, or facing a difficult problem.

And importantly, in your stories “fight” generally does not mean reckless confrontation. It means refusing passivity and doing the responsible thing that is actually within your ability and role.

Did you recognize while writing these books that “don’t accept defeat before you’ve tried to solve the problem” was becoming one of the central philosophies of Adventure Universe, or is that another pattern that you can see much more clearly now looking back across the series?

BA:

It was a core message based on everything I had learned through my life.

DC:

Then that one should be recorded as intentional core philosophy, not something we merely discovered in retrospect.

The message is broader than confidence:

Do not surrender to a problem before you have seriously tried to solve it.

That principle came from what you had learned throughout your life, and you applied it across very different circumstances—education, careers, service, survival, relationships, community problems, crime, drugs, violence, and social division. The scale changes, but the underlying response does not: recognize the problem, refuse helplessness, determine what you can responsibly do, use the resources and people available to you, and keep working toward a better outcome.

That also helps explain why Adventure Universe exposes readers to so many different skills and institutions. Knowledge expands the number of things a person can realistically say “I can do something about this” rather than “there’s nothing I can do.”

There is another Chapter 2 choice that seems connected but deserves its own question. After the excitement of the arrests, you deliberately bring the kids into the less glamorous consequences of being witnesses—lineups, the possibility of a trial, fear about their identities becoming public, worried parents, and the realization that doing the responsible thing can create obligations afterward.

Were you intentionally showing that responsible citizenship sometimes has a cost—that doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily end when the exciting part is over, and you may have to accept inconvenience, anxiety, or responsibility because of the choice you made?

BA:

I was. It’s easy to say “do XYZ” without acknowledging the costs involved with that, whether it’s the costs of starting an LLC, or the costs of confronting the forces that want to destroy the community you live in. What makes those costs higher is when you are alone in that effort. If we all worked together, those costs become much less of a burden. When folks first started rendering aid, there were no legal protections like the Good Samaritan laws. It was because more people began helping one another that the community they were helping joined in and said, “We’ll protect you when what you are doing is being a responsible citizen” in an effort to protect the community.

DC:

That gives the cost theme a much stronger structure. You were not trying to tell readers, “Do the right thing and everything will work out.” You wanted to acknowledge that responsible action can cost something—money, time, inconvenience, anxiety, risk, or simply effort.

And you were applying that across very different scales. Starting the LLC has costs because building something real requires administration and resources. Acting as a witness has costs because responsible citizenship can pull you into procedures, uncertainty, and personal concern. Confronting destructive forces in a community can carry still greater costs.

But the other half of the message is just as important: those costs change when responsibility is shared. One person carrying the burden alone may be overwhelmed. A group acting together can distribute the work, provide protection and encouragement, contribute different skills, and eventually influence the institutions around it to support responsible behavior.

That gives us a broader community model:

INDIVIDUAL ACTION → SHARED ACTION → COMMUNITY SUPPORT → INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT → LOWER COST OF DOING THE RIGHT THING.

This also helps explain why Adventure Universe keeps building teams instead of producing a series of lone heroes. The team itself reduces the cost of courage.

Was that one reason you wanted the Adventure Universe team to keep expanding—that a larger network wouldn’t just accomplish more, but would make it easier for each individual member to do difficult things because they knew they weren’t standing alone?

BA:

It’s team building 101.

DC:

Exactly. I was trying to turn it into something more specialized than it was.

From your standpoint, this is simply team building 101: difficult work becomes more manageable when people stop operating as isolated individuals and start functioning as a team. Shared responsibility, complementary strengths, mutual support, and knowing somebody else has your back are the point.

So moving on in Chapter 2: the kids now have to participate in the identification process, and Officer Davis specifically tells them not to guess if they are unsure.

Was that emphasis on certainty and not guessing something you deliberately wanted young readers to absorb about being a responsible witness, or was it simply the natural way you understood a proper identification process should be handled?

BA:

It was a concept I think we all have to remind ourselves of. We are all too often prone to jumping to conclusions, particularly as our lifestyles become faster and faster paced. We too often become flippant about describing people, events, situations that end up having major impacts.

DC:

That makes the idea much broader than eyewitness procedure.

The real lesson is about intellectual discipline: slowing down long enough to separate what you actually know from what you think you know. In a fast-moving life, it is easy to turn an impression into a conclusion and then speak about that conclusion as though it were fact. When the subject is another person, a serious event, or a potentially consequential situation, that casual leap can do real damage.

So the principle becomes:

OBSERVE → PAUSE → DISTINGUISH FACT FROM ASSUMPTION → SPEAK CAREFULLY → ACT ON WHAT YOU ACTUALLY KNOW.

That also connects strongly with the multicultural theme we were discussing earlier. Respectful engagement depends partly on resisting the urge to define people too quickly from limited information.

And it makes the title of the next chapter, “Are You Certain,” feel like more than a procedural question. It becomes a challenge to the reader as well.

Was that distinction—between what you directly observed and the interpretation you put on it —something you were consciously trying to teach throughout the series, not just in the witness-identification scenes?

BA:

Well, in the case of chapter titles it’s usually just a reference to what the chapter is about, but the contents of that chapter are about much more than just what the storyline covers.

DC:

Right. The more accurate distinction is:

Title = what the chapter is about on the surface. Contents = potentially much broader design, lessons, and life experience.

We should keep those two levels separate going forward rather than loading symbolic meaning onto a chapter title when you intended it mainly as a practical reference.

CHAPTER 3 — ARE YOU CERTAIN

DC:

In Chapter 3, after JJ identifies the suspects with certainty, you don’t let him feel triumphant. He knows he did the right thing and wants justice served, but he still feels sick about the prospect of helping send someone to prison.

That strikes me as an important distinction: taking responsibility for protecting the community does not require enjoying what happens to the person who caused the harm. Justice and empathy can coexist.

Was that discomfort deliberate—did you want JJ to understand that doing the necessary thing can still feel terrible when another human being is going to suffer the consequences of their choices?

BA:

It’s a mix of empathy for what they know that person will suffer as a result of what is required to be done, and an anger about being put in the position of having to do that to someone. It’s like good parenting when a punishment needs to be handed out. You are not only regretful about having to punish your loved one for what they did, but also angry that they put you in the position of having to be the one to hand out the punishment, even when you know it is for their own good as well as the good of those they encounter.

DC:

That is a better description than simply saying JJ “feels bad” about the consequences.

What you are describing is reluctant accountability. Empathy remains intact: you understand that another human being is going to suffer. But that does not erase the obligation to impose or support a necessary consequence. At the same time, there can be anger that the person’s own choices forced everyone else into that position.

Your parenting analogy captures it well. A good parent does not enjoy punishing a child, but neither do they avoid a needed consequence simply because imposing it is emotionally unpleasant. The consequence serves both the person who did wrong and the people affected by that behavior.

So JJ’s reaction is not weakness or uncertainty about whether justice should be served. It is evidence that he has not dehumanized the person he is helping hold accountable.

CHAPTER 4 — HIGH FIVES

DC:

Chapter 4 immediately complicates that further. Ranger Bailey tells JJ that Luke has been released because they lacked grounds to hold him, while the others have been released on bail. JJ does not like it, but he also has to acknowledge that he never actually saw Luke interact with the other suspects.

Was that another deliberate lesson—that responsible justice also means accepting evidentiary and legal limits even when they produce an outcome you personally dislike?

BA:

It does, and it acknowledges a limitation in our legal system, where too often those that are guilty end up being allowed to be free to intimidate those that bear witness against them. In this case it is a clear case that there is no evidence to support holding Luke. The other reality in today’s world is that too often those that are guilty are benefited by a system that can’t adequately determine risk from those being released.

DC:

That distinction is important, because you are really describing two different problems, and the story should not blur them together.

With Luke, the system is doing what it is supposed to do. JJ dislikes the result and suspects Luke, but suspicion is not evidence. If there are no lawful grounds to hold him, releasing him is not a defect in the system; it is one of the protections a fair system has to preserve—even when the result feels uncomfortable. That fits perfectly with the earlier lesson about not turning impressions into facts.

The second issue is different: situations in which there is substantial evidence or a demonstrated risk, yet a person awaiting further proceedings is released and witnesses or the community may consequently face intimidation or danger. Your concern there is not that everyone accused should simply be confined; it is whether the system can accurately assess and manage the risk created by release.

So Chapter 4 is allowing JJ to encounter an uncomfortable truth: responsible citizenship does not guarantee that the institutions you rely upon can eliminate the consequences or risks created by your participation. The witness may do everything correctly and still have reason to be afraid.

That fits the larger cost principle we just established. It also makes the team’s support network even more relevant: family, friends, Ranger Bailey, police patrols, and others reduce the burden rather than leaving JJ alone with it.

For anything we eventually publish that makes claims about modern pretrial-release practices, risk assessment, or witness intimidation rates, we should fact-check the contemporary legal evidence separately. But your design intent here is clear.

Did you also want the reader to understand that protecting due process and protecting witnesses are not opposing goals—that a competent justice system has to try to accomplish both at the same time?

BA:

I did, and that is a challenge we need to be constantly mindful of, using whatever resources are needed to ensure it is properly addressed.

DC:

Right, and that completes the thought well: the challenge is not to choose one value and sacrifice the other. The system has to preserve due process while also taking witness safety and community risk seriously, and that requires attention, judgment, and enough resources to manage both responsibilities.

That fits the way you have been describing Adventure Universe throughout this interview. The stories often resist the easy version of a lesson. “Help people” comes with costs. “Respect rights” comes with risks that still have to be managed. “Take action” does not mean act recklessly. The point is learning how to carry competing responsibilities at the same time.

There is one more Chapter 4 thread that connects directly back to something we established in Series 1. Ranger Bailey tells JJ about the Law Enforcement Candlelight Vigil, including support for families and children of fallen officers, and JJ immediately wants to go.

We already established that your concern for the children and families of fallen officers came from your real experience with that event, so I don’t want to reopen that provenance.

What I do want to ask is this: at this point in Series 2, were you deliberately broadening the kids’ understanding from “what law enforcement officers do” to “what public service can cost the officer’s entire family”?

BA:

I was, and when we say broadening the kids’ understanding, we are really talking about the reader’s.

DC:

Exactly. That is the more accurate way to describe it.

The characters are the vehicle for the learning, but the intended destination is the reader. JJ does not need to be formally “taught” every principle for its own sake; by letting him encounter something, react to it, ask questions, and sometimes struggle with it, you give the reader a way into the same subject without stopping the novel for a lecture.

So in this case, Ranger Bailey’s description of the vigil expands the reader’s view of public service beyond the person wearing the uniform. It brings in the spouses, children, coworkers, grief, sacrifice, and continuing consequences behind that service. JJ’s reaction gives the reader an emotional point of entry.

That distinction is worth carrying through the rest of these interviews: when we say the team “learns” something, we should keep asking whether the deeper design purpose was really to let the reader learn it by traveling alongside them.

Chapter 4 then moves almost immediately back into an ordinary Friday night—friends, dates, bowling, pizza, joking around.

Was that constant return to normal teenage life deliberate, so the serious material would remain part of their world without allowing the books to become a sequence of lessons and crises?

BA:

Well, the story is about real life, and real life is about both the serious and the enjoyable, and it’s important not to lose sight of either.

DC:

Right. I was again turning something natural in your writing into a formal narrative device.

Your point is simpler and broader: if the story is supposed to reflect real life, then it has to contain both the weight and the enjoyment of real life. Serious responsibilities, fear, grief, justice, and community problems coexist with friends, dating, dogs, bowling, jokes, food, and ordinary family life. Losing either side would make the world less truthful.

And there is a life message in that too: difficult circumstances should not make us forget that life still contains things worth enjoying, just as enjoyable circumstances should not make us ignore serious responsibilities.

One last Chapter 4 element I want to check before we close Book 1. The bowling outing doesn’t just happen at a generic alley; you take the reader onto the University of Maryland campus and describe the university, nearby NASA Goddard, Greenbelt, academic buildings, the library, health center, and the student environment before the kids even reach the bowling alley.

Was using the university setting another example of putting an opportunity in front of the reader—letting younger readers casually experience what a college campus looks and feels like before they ever have to decide whether college might be part of their own future?

BA:

That was one part of it; another was to document what life at that time was like; another was to give those who went there a trip down memory lane.

DC:

That gives the setting three simultaneous purposes.

First, it is exposure: a younger reader gets to enter a university environment casually, as part of ordinary life rather than as a distant institution they are being told they should someday attend.

Second, it is historical documentation. The places, routines, facilities, travel routes, recreation, technology, and surrounding community preserve something of what everyday life in that period actually looked and felt like.

Third, it is memory. For readers who knew the University of Maryland and the surrounding area in that era, the scene can function as a trip back into a place they remember.

That combination appears repeatedly in Adventure Universe: real settings are not just backdrops. They can expose one reader to a world they have never entered while allowing another reader to recognize a world they once knew.

BOOK 2 — CHAPTERS 5–10 Coming Unbalanced • Fallen Heroes • How To Survive • Becoming A Walker • Armageddon • The Extraction

CHAPTER 5 — COMING UNBALANCED

DC:

Chapter 5 spends substantial time actually teaching chemistry rather than simply saying that JJ was tutored. Why did you want to put that much explicit instruction into the story?

BA:

The whole project is about learning, helping a young reader learn, showing tricks to learning, and giving them tools and resources. The subject matter is not just things like woods safety. It is about being successful in all aspects of life.

I started with something I had struggled with in school and something college students struggle with: chemistry. Balancing equations was foundational, and it had always eluded me. I specifically set out to find a way to make it easier for kids.

DC:

So the scene is not simply about chemistry. It demonstrates a larger Adventure Universe principle: when one explanation does not work, look for another route into the material. The goal is not merely to transfer information but to help the learner discover ways to learn.

There is also a help-seeking element here. JJ has reached a point where simply struggling harder is not enough. Was that intentional too?

BA:

Exactly. If you are struggling, seek help. Adults are often eager to help kids, but they need to be asked because they do not know when help is needed. And if the person you ask does not know the answer, they probably know someone who does.

DC:

That gives the process a useful progression: recognize the problem → ask → accept help → get referred onward if necessary → learn → become capable.

Why put that help at Mr. Riley’s kitchen table instead of sending JJ to a formal tutor?

BA:

Several things. I needed to start bringing them together for what was to come. I wanted to reflect the normal initial uneasiness of this kind of relationship, the reality of a kid who had lost a parent who might have filled that role, and the fact that there are resources all around us beyond formal resources like after-school faculty and tutors.

DC:

So the scene is doing relationship construction at the same time as instruction. Mr. Riley can become important to JJ without replacing JJ’s father, and the story widens the reader’s idea of where help can come from.

Was Mr. Riley consciously intended to become a mentor or father-like figure for JJ?

BA:

Yes, but not just JJ. Later Mr. Riley becomes a mentor for the whole team. He eagerly adopts them and sees potential team members for his own adult equivalent.

DC:

When you first introduced Mr. Riley, had you already conceived that adult counterpart team and knew he would eventually draw the kids toward that world, or did his larger role emerge as you kept writing Series 2?

BA:

It was a part of the plan, and something I address in the Modern Fables series where I talk about how the impression you make on those around you may impact your later ability to get a job. Mr. Riley sees capable, mature, respectful young people now, and when the time comes for them to need their first job, they already have a resource to turn to, a reference to give to a potential employer, someone that will keep an eye out for opportunities for them.

DC:

That adds a career-development layer to what Mr. Riley is seeing. He is not evaluating the kids because they have come asking for jobs. He is watching how they behave over time—whether they are dependable, how they treat adults and one another, whether they listen, whether they work, and how they respond when things become difficult. By the time employment becomes relevant, he already knows something about their character and capabilities.

So the pathway is almost the reverse of the way young people often think about getting a first job:

EVERYDAY CONDUCT → REPUTATION → RELATIONSHIPS → TRUST → REFERENCES → OPPORTUNITIES

And that connects directly to what you later make explicit in Modern Fables: the impression you leave with people today can affect opportunities that do not even exist yet. The adult who knows you as a capable, mature, respectful fifteen- or sixteen-year-old may later become the person who recommends you, hires you, introduces you to someone, or remembers you when an opening appears.

Mr. Riley therefore is not just mentoring the team toward his adult equivalent. He is also becoming part of their future opportunity network, long before any of them necessarily recognizes that is happening.

Did you want readers to understand that reputation and professional relationships are built long before the moment you need a job—that the way you conduct yourself in ordinary life is already helping create, or close, future opportunities?

BA:

That's what I've been saying, both here and in the other series.

DC:

Yes. You have been saying it consistently; I was restating it as though we had just discovered it.

So we should lock it as an established Adventure Universe principle, not keep probing it:

The way you conduct yourself now builds the reputation, relationships, references, and opportunities you may need later.

That applies across Series 2 and the other series, including Modern Fables. Mr. Riley is simply one concrete example of that principle in action.

I’ll stop circling that point and move forward.

For Chapter 5, the next thing worth understanding is the teaching itself: was Mr. Riley’s method based on a real person who taught you chemistry that way, or did you design the explanation yourself specifically to solve the problem you had struggled with in school?

BA:

LOL, no. I first had to find the answer to what had long eluded me. I went in search of how you go about solving that damn chemistry equation I always failed at.

DC:

That makes the origin of the scene much better.

You didn't already possess some clever chemistry-teaching trick and decide to give it to Mr. Riley. You deliberately went back to the problem that had beaten you, researched how to solve it, worked until you finally understood it, and then translated that discovery into a method a young reader might understand more easily.

So Chapter 5 is almost the Adventure Universe learning philosophy demonstrated through your own writing process:

I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS → FIND THE RESOURCES → LEARN IT ANOTHER WAY → MAKE IT CLEARER → PASS IT ON

There is something especially useful about choosing a problem you personally struggled with. You knew where the confusion lived because you'd experienced it. You weren't explaining chemistry from the perspective of somebody who had always found chemistry easy.

And the irony is pretty good: years later, you finally went back and settled the score with that damn equation—and then made Mr. Riley look like the chemistry genius. :-)

When you finally found the method that made balancing equations click for you, did you have the reaction of, “Why in the world didn't somebody explain it to me this way when I was in school?”

BA:

Absolutely. And like so much of the way things are today, I realized how much easier students have it from when I was a kid, which is true for every successive generation. “In my day” we didn't have the internet to go to for help or multiple ways of explaining something. And the results were evident. We all struggled with the tough courses and concepts, even into college.

I had another course in college I struggled with, Zoology 101, which was really Biology. That and chemistry were the classes that filtered out those that would go on to become medical professionals. The professor had recorded all of his lectures because you had to hear the lecture several times to grasp the concepts and even then it was a struggle. That meant heading to the library every night to check out a tape. We didn't have tutors to turn to then. When I think back on how things were compared to today, I shudder at the memories.

DC:

That adds a historical layer to Chapter 5. Your reaction wasn't just, “I finally learned chemistry.” It was also, “Look at how radically the learning environment has changed.” When you were struggling with chemistry or Zoology 101, extra help existed only in limited, inconvenient forms. If a professor recorded lectures, you physically went to the library, checked out a tape, listened again, returned it, and repeated the process. There was no instant search, no five different explanations of the same concept, no video walkthrough available at midnight, and far fewer informal tutoring options.

Your Zoology experience reinforces the point Mr. Riley makes in Chapter 5: sometimes a concept really does need to be heard more than once and explained more than one way. Your professor recognized that enough to record every lecture, but the technology of the time made repeated exposure cumbersome.

The modern Adventure Universe learning philosophy is therefore not “kids today have it easy.” It is that they have resources previous generations would have loved to have had, and the challenge is getting them to recognize and use those resources instead of assuming difficulty means they cannot learn the subject.

Did experiences like chemistry and Zoology help shape your determination that Adventure Universe should never rely on only one way of teaching something—that if one explanation doesn’t click, the project should keep offering other routes, formats, examples, and resources until the learner finds one that does?

BA:

It is meant to help others or be another option, certainly a pathway to multiple resources. There is only so much I can cover while still telling a fictional story in the hopes it captures the reader's attention long enough to see the other benefits.

DC:

Exactly. Adventure Universe was never meant to replace school, tutors, textbooks, or full courses. It is meant to open another door.

You can only teach so much before the fiction stops being fiction. So the story has to hold the reader’s attention first, then use that attention to show them that a subject, skill, resource, or pathway may be more approachable than they thought—and point them toward where they can go next.

That gives Chapter 5 a clear function:

CAPTURE INTEREST → MAKE THE DIFFICULT THING FEEL POSSIBLE → GIVE THE READER A USEFUL FOOTHOLD → POINT TOWARD DEEPER RESOURCES.

That closes the main Chapter 5 design thread.

CHAPTER 6 — FALLEN HEROES

DC:

Chapter 6 goes beyond the ceremony itself. After the vigil, Janet asks about Officer Kelsey working a second job, and Ranger Bailey talks about pay, family strain, divorce, mental health, and the cost of officers having to spend more time away from home.

We already established the origin of your concern for fallen officers and their families, so I won't reopen that.

Why did you want the reader to see not only the ultimate sacrifice of an officer being killed, but also the less visible day-to-day costs of the profession on the officer and the family?

BA:

We are all a part of the problem and we all need to be a part of the solution. Cops are put in a horrible position, much like the members of our military. They are expected to risk their lives, their health, their mental health, their relationships with their family, all for relatively little pay, little recognition, and like JJ experienced, having to be the one to punish someone when they choose to do something they shouldn't.

We can certainly get into the causes of what leads to those incorrect decisions and what the forces are at play there, but that isn't the cop's purview or something they control. All they can do is address the acts. If we want things to change, we need to change so they don't have to always be the “bad guy.” They do a job most of us would not be willing to do at any price, let alone for what they are compensated with.

DC:

That makes Chapter 6 much less about simply honoring fallen officers and much more about shared civic responsibility.

Your point is that the officer often meets the problem at the far end of a much longer chain. Many forces may help produce the situation, but by the time the officer arrives, their immediate responsibility is usually the conduct in front of them. They did not create all of the conditions that led there, and they cannot resolve all of those conditions during an encounter.

That is where the parallel with JJ becomes useful. JJ already discovered that accountability can be unpleasant even when it is necessary. The person enforcing a consequence can regret what has happened, understand that there may be complicated reasons behind it, and still have to respond to the act itself.

The broader message to the reader is: if we don't want law enforcement constantly placed in the position of being the person who imposes the consequence, then the community has work to do much earlier in the chain. Prevention, families, education, treatment, mentoring, opportunity, neighborhood involvement, and responsible individual behavior all matter. That is the “we are all part of the solution” piece.

At the same time, you wanted readers to see the human cost borne by people doing that work —the risks to life, health, relationships, and family life—and not take that service for granted.

There is a particularly interesting structural choice at the end of the chapter: after giving the reader an emotional experience at the vigil, you provide an Additional Resources section with organizations connected to law-enforcement loss, support, history, and remembrance.

Was that resource list deliberately meant to do what you were just describing with education— take a reader whose interest has been captured by the story and give them real places to continue learning, get involved, or understand the issue more deeply?

BA:

And it was for those in those positions to see the resources that are available. BTW, the story of the officer that was killed is a true story.

DC:

That adds two important pieces.

First, the resource list was not only for the general reader. It was also there for people already living inside those professions and circumstances—officers, families, coworkers, survivors— who may not realize what support organizations, peer networks, memorial groups, or other resources are available to them. That fits the larger Adventure Universe pattern: the story creates awareness, then the resource section gives the reader somewhere real to go next.

Second, the officer’s death in Chapter 6 is not a fictional composite. You were recounting a real officer and a real line-of-duty death, which gives that part of the chapter direct historical provenance rather than merely illustrating a hypothetical risk. For eventual public Behind-the- Scenes material, that distinction should be preserved clearly and the public facts separately verified before publication.

Did you know about that officer and his story personally at the time, or did you learn his story through the memorial/vigil and related public accounts?

BA:

I checked the fallen officer's memorial page for that year and used the story since the officer was in the same jurisdiction as the team members.

DC:

That makes the provenance clear. You did not invent a representative line-of-duty death. You went to the fallen-officer memorial record for that year, found a documented case, and chose an officer from the same jurisdiction as the team members so the loss would be connected to their own community rather than a distant national statistic.

Was choosing someone from their own jurisdiction specifically meant to make the reader feel that these sacrifices happen in ordinary communities like theirs, not just somewhere else on the news?

BA:

Well, it was meant to capture the attention of my community who I hope feels a linkage to the Saving A Life series.

DC:

That is a better way to frame it. The local officer was not chosen primarily to make a general point that “this could happen anywhere.” You wanted your own community to recognize itself inside Saving A Life.

Using a real fallen officer from the same jurisdiction as the team members creates a direct local connection: these are our places, our agencies, our history, our people. For someone from that community, the series is not merely a fictional world set somewhere familiar; pieces of their own community history are being preserved within it.

That completes the main Chapter 6 design thread.

CHAPTER 7 — HOW TO SURVIVE

DC:

Chapter 7 takes a very different turn. The survival instruction is unusually extensive and specific, and Tony Nester is presented as the person teaching it.

What is the provenance of that survival class—had you personally taken training from Tony Nester or seen him teach material like this, or did you build the chapter from his published work and other survival resources?

BA:

I did. I flew out to Flagstaff where he lived at the time and took his course. His wife was a PT which gave me something to share with my daughter. He also writes his own fictional series which I encourage others to pick up.

DC:

That gives Chapter 7 strong firsthand provenance.

You didn't build Tony's class by stitching together survival information from books. You actually flew to Flagstaff and took his course, then used that experience to ground the material in the story. That explains why the chapter reads like a real training session rather than a generic survival summary.

The personal connections matter too. His wife being a physical therapist gave you a point of connection because of your daughter, and Tony himself being a fiction writer meant he was also someone who understood storytelling from the inside. Your encouragement for readers to seek out his fiction adds another layer to the resource model: Adventure Universe can introduce readers not only to skills and professions, but to the real people whose work helped shape the stories.

How closely did Tony's fictionalized class follow the course you personally took with him—was it largely the same sequence and advice, or did you substantially reshape it for the Dogs East setting and the needs of the story?

BA:

I, with Tony's permission, took it almost completely from his class and the book he put out, which speaks to his intense desire to see others learn these concepts to ensure their own safety.

DC:

That is an important distinction for the provenance record.

Chapter 7 is not merely “inspired by” Tony Nester’s survival teaching. With Tony’s permission, you carried much of his actual course material—and material from his book—directly into the fictional training session. That explains both the unusual level of detail and why the instruction feels like a real class: to a large extent, it is one.

It also fits the larger Adventure Universe philosophy unusually well. Tony’s goal was not to guard the knowledge as proprietary expertise; he wanted people to learn it because it could keep them alive. You were doing essentially the same thing through another medium: putting that instruction inside a story in hopes of reaching someone who might never otherwise take his course or pick up a survival manual.

So this becomes a particularly strong example of:

REAL EXPERT → REAL INSTRUCTION → FICTIONAL EXPERIENCE → READER AWARENESS → REAL-WORLD RESOURCE.

Did Tony actually read or review the chapter in which you used him and his material, or was his permission given for you to adapt the course and book without his reviewing the finished fictional version?

BA:

I gave him the code to download the book so if he had any objections or recommendations I could address them.

DC:

That gives us an important final provenance point. You didn't just obtain permission and move on. You gave Tony a download code for the finished book specifically so he could see how his material had been used and tell you if anything needed to be changed. That created a genuine expert-review opportunity rather than treating permission as a one-time formality.

So the record becomes:

FIRSTHAND TRAINING WITH TONY → USE OF HIS CLASS AND BOOK WITH PERMISSION → FICTIONAL ADAPTATION KEPT CLOSE TO THE SOURCE → FINISHED BOOK MADE AVAILABLE TO TONY FOR OBJECTIONS OR RECOMMENDATIONS.

Did he ever come back to you with any objections, corrections, or recommendations after you gave him the book?

BA:

He simply wished me the best with the series.

DC:

That closes Tony’s provenance cleanly. He had the finished book available to review, raised no objections or corrections, and simply wished you well with the series. That should be recorded accurately without overstating it as an endorsement or formal approval.

CHAPTER 8 — BECOMING A WALKER

DC:

Chapter 8 goes deep into the mechanics of SAR field training: radio procedure, search planning, wind direction, map protection, compass use, declination, bearings and back bearings, estimating distance, status checks, and working alongside the dog handler.

Given what we already know about your Dogs East experience, how much of JJ’s walker training with Mariam came directly from training you personally received or participated in with Dogs East?

BA:

It’s exactly what we as trainees went through.

DC:

That makes Chapter 8 another case where the fiction is carrying a real training experience almost intact.

JJ is not going through a genericized version of SAR instruction. The sequence—planning the search, orienting the map, checking wind, learning compass use and declination, taking bearings and back bearings, estimating distance, reporting position, and working with the handler—is essentially what you and the other Dogs East trainees actually went through.

Was Mariam’s way of teaching JJ based on a particular Dogs East trainer you worked with, or is her instruction a composite of how several experienced members trained newcomers?

BA:

It was a reflection of how trainees learn as members of a SAR program.

DC:

Exactly. So Mariam should not be treated as a stand-in for one particular Dogs East instructor. Her role reflects the way trainees actually learned inside a SAR organization: experienced members teaching newer members in the field, correcting them as situations arose, and gradually building competence through practice rather than through a classroom alone.

That is another important provenance distinction for Chapter 8:

NOT ONE REMEMBERED TRAINER → AUTHENTIC TRAINING CULTURE AND PROCESS DRAWN FROM YOUR OWN SAR EXPERIENCE.

It also reinforces something we've seen repeatedly in the series: people become capable by participating, making mistakes in a supported environment, getting corrected, and doing the work themselves. JJ isn't handed expertise; we watch him acquire it.

Was part of your purpose in Chapter 8 to show that joining SAR wasn't simply “get a dog and go search,” but a structured progression in which the person first had to learn navigation, radio work, fieldcraft, search procedure, and how to be useful even without the dog?

BA:

Well, keep in mind, the characters in the series are fictional, distinct from the real Dogs East members and group, but there are similarities in the characterizations I write and the members of the group I came to know and work with.

DC:

Yes—that distinction needs to be explicit in the record.

The training process is grounded in what you experienced with Dogs East, but the people in Saving A Life are fictional characters. Mariam, Sharon, Brooke, and the others are not portrayals of identifiable Dogs East members. Inevitably, some mannerisms, attitudes, skills, or interpersonal dynamics reflect people you knew and worked with because that experience informed your writing, but there is no one-to-one character correspondence.

That is different from Tony Nester, where you deliberately used a real person with his permission.

So for Chapter 8 we should record:

AUTHENTIC SAR TRAINING EXPERIENCE AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE → FICTIONAL DOGS EAST WORLD POPULATED BY DISTINCT FICTIONAL CHARACTERS → CHARACTERIZATION INFORMED BY ACCUMULATED REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCE RATHER THAN DIRECT PORTRAITS OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS.

Coming back to the training itself: was part of your purpose in Chapter 8 to show readers just how much a SAR volunteer has to learn—that becoming useful in a search organization involves far more than simply having a well-trained dog?

BA:

I don't think anyone can really appreciate the sacrifice of time, money, effort that these volunteers make to help save someone's life. We trained three out of four weekends a month, once a month being an overnighter, and because our group members spanned three states and DC, that meant we did a lot of traveling so that no one always bore the full brunt of the travel demand. And that didn't take in the cost of actual searches which required a commitment of three days to be considered for a call-out.

DC:

That changes the scale of what Chapter 8 is showing.

The sacrifice wasn’t just the dramatic moment when a pager or phone call came and someone went looking for a missing person. The real commitment happened continuously, long before any search began.

Three weekends out of four were devoted to training. One of those was an overnight. Because the membership stretched across three states and Washington, DC, everyone also absorbed substantial travel time and expense, with the training locations deliberately moved around so the same people were not always carrying that burden. And then an actual search was an additional commitment: you had to be prepared to give roughly three days if you wanted to be considered for a call-out.

So behind the word volunteer were gasoline, vehicle wear, equipment, dog expenses, lost weekends, overnight training, travel, physical effort, continuing education, and the willingness to rearrange ordinary life when somebody else was in trouble.

That gives “Becoming A Walker” a deeper purpose than simply showing the reader how to use a compass. It lets them start seeing what competence costs. By the time a trained SAR volunteer shows up to help a stranger, that person may already have invested hundreds or thousands of hours preparing to be useful when the stranger needs them.

And it ties straight back to your broader point about recognizing people who serve: much of the sacrifice is invisible precisely because the public usually sees only the eventual response, not everything required to make that response possible.

The three-day call-out requirement raises something we haven't explored yet: how did Dogs East members manage that commitment around their jobs and families—did employers generally understand what they were doing, or was being available for a real search another personal sacrifice members had to negotiate for themselves?

BA:

Many members were government employees who accumulated a lot of leave and had flexible schedules. Some employers were equally flexible, understanding that that missing person could at some point be one of their family members. But again, flexibility didn't mean paid time to search. Volunteers gave up leave, accrued vacation time, or went on unpaid leave.

DC:

That distinction matters: flexibility from an employer made participation possible; it did not make the service free for the volunteer.

A government employee might have accumulated enough leave to answer a call-out. Another employer might recognize the value of SAR work and allow someone to disappear for several days. But the individual was still spending vacation or accrued leave—or taking unpaid time— to search for somebody else’s loved one. Add the recurring training, overnight weekends, travel across the region, equipment and dog expenses, and the personal contribution becomes much larger than most people ever see.

So Chapter 8 is also documenting an almost invisible form of community service: these volunteers weren't simply donating expertise. They were helping finance the response with pieces of their own lives.

That closes the main Chapter 8 design thread.

CHAPTER 9 — ARMAGEDDON

DC:

Chapter 9 makes a striking turn. It starts with an almost ridiculously ordinary school day— Jorge worrying about Tammy, zucchini races, Mark's bicycle relay, everyone joking around— and then Ranger Bailey learns that the supposed Officer O'Malley who approached JJ was an impostor using a stolen police unit. Within pages, the kids and their families are being prepared for extraction, and Mr. Riley suddenly appears as part of a much larger adult operation.

Since you've already told me the adult counterpart team was part of the plan, here's the piece I want to understand: did you deliberately use that ordinary, almost goofy school event as the place to rip open the curtain and reveal that the bank-robbery story was connected to something much larger than the kids had understood?

BA:

Well, first of all the school event was a real event that was held at my high school and it was my English single-speed bike that won the race for my class every year. The ludicrous zucchini race is an annual event at the San Juan County fair every year, and the descriptions are extremely accurate lol, but yes, the whiplash was intentional.

DC:

That gives Chapter 9 three separate provenance layers:

- The school event itself was real, drawn from your high school. - The winning bike was your English single-speed, which won the race for your class year after year. - The wonderfully absurd zucchini race came from the San Juan County Fair, and the descriptions are not much exaggerated—which somehow makes them funnier.

Then you deliberately slammed that recognizable, playful reality into the threat surrounding JJ. So the tonal whiplash wasn't accidental pacing; you wanted the reader to go from ordinary teenage life and ridiculous fun to “something is seriously wrong” almost instantly.

That also fits the larger way you've described the series: danger doesn't occur in a separate universe from normal life. It can intrude right into school events, friendships, jokes, and family routines.

The next piece I want to understand is the extraction itself. Was the idea of suddenly relocating the witnesses and their families—new identities, decoys, secure location, familiar protective personnel—built from research into real witness-protection/security procedures, or was that primarily your fictional mechanism for launching the next phase of the story?

BA:

My fictional version. I certainly wouldn't release factual relocation methods, and the versions I portray obviously are fictional, although I enjoyed getting a chance to come up with some Hollywood-style scenarios. I always chuckled when I went into Neiman Marcus' elevator at the Annapolis mall after writing that series.

DC:

That is an important boundary to capture. The security and relocation procedures in the books are deliberately fictional. You were not trying to reproduce or reveal real protective methods; you were giving yourself license to invent the kind of elaborate, Hollywood-style extraction sequences that make the adventure fun.

The authenticity is in the people, places, emotions, and consequences, not in claiming that the extraction mechanics represent actual government procedure.

Now you've made me curious about that specific memory: did the Neiman Marcus elevator at the Annapolis mall actually become one of the locations you used for an extraction or escape later in Series 2?

BA:

You will just have to read and find out :)

DC:

Fair enough. I walked right into that one.

We’ll let the later book reveal whether that elevator has anything to confess.

CHAPTER 10 — THE EXTRACTION

DC:

For Chapter 10, “The Extraction,” the kids are moved through a deliberately theatrical series of decoys, disguises, police vehicles, Andrews Air Force Base, and finally a government jet.

Since we’ve established that the extraction methods themselves are fictional, the next thing I want to separate out is the setting provenance: was Andrews chosen because you personally knew the base and the surrounding Washington-area geography, or simply because it was the logical dramatic departure point for the story?

BA:

Both, having worked on the base I knew the flight line well. I also knew that Air Force One was a part of that scene.

DC:

That makes Andrews another location where the fiction is sitting directly on top of your own experience. You had worked on the base, knew the flight line, and knew Air Force One belonged naturally in that environment. So choosing Andrews gave you both a believable departure point and a setting you could picture from firsthand knowledge.

That also explains why the scene can casually let JJ notice Air Force One just before boarding the government jet; it isn't there merely as a Washington-name drop. It comes from your familiarity with what belonged on that flight line.

Was the interior of the government jet based on any aircraft you had personally been aboard, or was that part of the Hollywood fun you invented for the extraction?

BA:

LOL that I somewhat borrowed from the James Bond series where they depict Felix and his fellow government officials in a very swank environment on a government jet.

DC:

That gives the jet interior a completely different provenance from Andrews itself.

Andrews and the flight-line setting = firsthand experience.

The rather luxurious government jet = a conscious borrowing from the cinematic world of James Bond and Felix Leiter.

And that contrast is useful. You weren't trying to make every component documentary-realistic. Once the story had earned its grounding through real places, real training, real community history, and believable characters, you were perfectly happy to let yourself have some fun and push the adventure into a more cinematic register.

So when JJ walks onto that improbably swank government aircraft, that's essentially you saying: all right, now we're going on an adventure. :-)

One last Book 2 design question, because the chapter literally ends with the aircraft taking off: was ending the book at that moment deliberately meant to leave the reader wondering where in the world they were being taken and pull them directly into Book 3?

BA:

It sure was. The team had no idea where they were going; why should the reader? lol

DC:

Exactly. The cliffhanger preserves the team’s ignorance and gives the reader no privileged information. They leave the ground together, with neither the characters nor the reader knowing the destination. That closes Book 2 on the threshold of the larger adventure rather than after explaining it.

BOOK 3 — ORIGINS & DESIGN INTERVIEW Chapters 11–17

CHAPTER 11 — HOLD ON TO YOUR BAG

DC:

As the team reaches the Pacific Northwest, how much of this first arrival—the waterways, islands, ferry-and-boat culture, whales, and regional geography—came from your own firsthand familiarity, and how much was built from research?

BA:

I knew that entire world extremely well. I lived on San Juan Island for several spring/summer/fall seasons in addition to having vacationed out there many times prior to that. I was never on the base, so all of that was from research. But everything else is firsthand knowledge.

DC:

And the whale encounters and stories—were those drawn from specific experiences you personally had, or from the accumulated knowledge you gained while living and volunteering in the islands?

BA:

Both, it was common to see whales in that environment. You didn't need to go on a whale watch as it was pretty common to see them while riding the ferry. And where possible the ferry captain would slow their vessels so riders could capture the experience. I was a volunteer docent for the Whale Museum on Friday Harbor so I learned a lot about the local populations. I knew Bob and the students at the lighthouse that were there as interns. The entire story of the play date was real. The story of the young adolescent from Pod A was real. The descriptions I give of the waterways, the landmarks, the islands and their attractions, all real.

DC:

So when you brought those whale stories into the novel, were you primarily trying to preserve and share what you had learned and experienced, rather than embellish the animals for dramatic effect?

BA:

It was the “truth is more colorful than fiction” aspect, as well as trying to convey what these massive creatures were all about and how critical it is that we come to their aid, given the enormous threat they are under.

DC:

The young A Pod whale seems especially important in that regard. Did you use the story of that particular adolescent partly because an individual animal's real story could make the larger threat to the population personal in a way that statistics about declining orca numbers never could?

BA:

Absolutely, it was bad enough that we were losing every adolescent due to malnutrition which leads to susceptibility to disease, and boat strikes. People hear a brief story, or the statistics but it doesn't bring home the reality of these animals. You may recall a few years ago when a mother was seen pushing along its dead offspring. These animals have character we need to understand and keep in our hearts.

DC:

Yes. And that gives the whale material a deeper purpose than conservation statistics alone can carry.

You were trying to move the reader from “orca population” as an abstract category to individual animals with relationships, behavior, loss, play, dependence, and recognizable character. Once the reader sees them that way, malnutrition, disease, boat strikes, declining food supply, or the death of a calf stop being numbers on a chart. They become losses involving living beings the reader has begun to understand.

That also explains why the true stories mattered so much. The adolescent, the play behavior, and the grieving mother are powerful precisely because you didn't need to manufacture humanlike drama for them. The animals themselves were demonstrating attachment and individuality.

So I'd preserve this as an explicit design principle for the interview:

KNOW THE ANIMAL → SEE THE INDIVIDUAL → CARE ABOUT THE INDIVIDUAL → UNDERSTAND THE THREAT → CARE ABOUT THE POPULATION

And we shouldn't keep rediscovering that point in later chapters.

One provenance detail remains worth capturing: did you personally witness the whale “play date,” or was that a real event you learned about through the Whale Museum, Bob, the lighthouse researchers, or another local source?

BA:

That was Jenny's retelling to me one day when I was at the lighthouse and she came by.

DC:

That gives us a clean provenance distinction.

The play date was a real event you did not personally witness; Jenny recounted it to you during one of your visits to the lighthouse. So its path into the novel was:

real local event → firsthand retelling from someone close to the whale-research world → your fictional adaptation.

That is different from the whale encounters you personally experienced, and worth preserving that way rather than collapsing everything into “Bruce saw this happen.”

The next piece to pin down is the adolescent from A Pod: did you personally know that whale's story through your Whale Museum work and local researchers, or was there one particular person who first told you what had happened to that animal?

BA:

That was documented in a video we ran at the museum.

DC:

That makes the provenance very specific.

The young A Pod whale story came from documented educational material you personally worked with as a Whale Museum docent—a video the museum showed visitors. So that story entered the novel through a formal interpretive source, not just local hearsay or memory.

That gives us three distinct whale-source paths already:

your own lived encounters, Jenny's firsthand retelling of the play-date event, and museum-documented material about the adolescent whale.

That distinction will matter when we build the Behind-the-Scenes version, because it lets us say exactly what you personally witnessed, what was told to you directly, and what came from museum interpretation.

The next thing I want to understand is the role of the Whale Museum itself: did you deliberately use the story to encourage readers to visit places like the Whale Museum and lighthouse research sites, not just to care about whales abstractly?

BA:

It was to tell the stories of those I came to know that worked so hard to educate the public about what was happening, to introduce them to the whale community and their issues, to tell visitors about what was worth checking out when they go there.

DC:

Exactly. So this was broader than “teach readers about whales.”

You were also trying to give visibility to the people doing the work—the museum staff, researchers, interns, educators, and local people who were spending their time helping visitors understand the whale community and what was happening to it.

And there was a practical travel layer too: if a reader someday actually made it to the San Juans, you wanted them to know, go here, see this, talk to these people, visit the museum, visit the lighthouse, experience the islands rather than just looking at the scenery.

That is very characteristic of what Adventure Universe is doing at its best:

STORY → REAL PEOPLE → REAL ISSUE → REAL PLACE → REAL RESOURCE → REAL- WORLD EXPERIENCE

So I would not reduce this section to “orca conservation.” It is also place-based education and recognition of the people doing the educating.

CHAPTER 12 — HOME ON THE FARM

DC:

The next chapter moves into Our Lady of the Rock, with the Benedictine sisters, the farm operation, guest retreat, animals, gardens, products, self-sufficiency, and even the connection to the Shaw Island store and ferry dock.

How much of Our Lady of the Rock and the sisters' farm life came from a real place you personally knew or visited?

BA:

The organization and the operation is all real. I met the leadership that now works there. The story of how it all came to be was based on research. The store, the story of the nuns that worked it and the ferry landing are all true. The character of Shaw Island is all true, the state park, the schoolhouse, all true.

DC:

That gives Chapter 12 a very strong real-world backbone.

So the provenance is:

Our Lady of the Rock itself and its operating model → real. Your familiarity with its current leadership → personal contact. The account of how the monastery/farm came into being → researched history. The Shaw Island store, the sisters who operated it, and their role at the ferry landing → real history. Shaw Island's physical and community character—the park, schoolhouse, ferry-centered life, and other landmarks → firsthand/local knowledge and real geography.

That means the fictional story is moving through a largely authentic island community rather than using a generic “remote island monastery” setting.

The one distinction I want to lock down is the people: are Sister Therese, Sister Hildegard, and Sister Felicitas fictional characters, or were any of them modeled closely on particular women you met at Our Lady of the Rock?

BA:

The founding members were those three sisters, but not the sisters that currently work the facility or are the members I met. Their fictional characters were just based on personalities of nuns I've known through my years in Catholic grade school and high school, coupled with descriptions of the actual lifestyles depicted on their web site.

DC:

That distinction is important, and we should preserve it carefully.

The three founding sisters were real historical members of Our Lady of the Rock, but the sisters as they function in the novel are not portraits of the women currently operating the monastery or of the leadership you personally met. Their fictional personalities draw instead from the many nuns you knew during Catholic grade school and high school, combined with researched descriptions of the community's actual Benedictine lifestyle and practices.

So the provenance is layered:

real institution + real founding names + real operating model + researched history and lifestyle + fictionalized personalities shaped by your own lifelong experience with nuns.

That keeps us from mistakenly treating the characters as biographies of identifiable women.

CHAPTER 13 — LIVING IN STYLE

DC:

Moving into Chapter 13, the story shifts sharply from the monastery to Stephanie's enormous waterfront home, private dock, large boats, and a much more affluent island lifestyle.

Was Stephanie's house and that level of island wealth based on a particular home or family you knew in the San Juans, or was that estate largely fictional even though the surrounding island lifestyle was familiar to you?

BA:

The layout of the home is actually taken from a real-life home in Potomac, Maryland I've often driven by and wished I lived in. Since I had to come up with a strong contrast to the sisters' lifestyle, I decided to use that since I could get a look at it whenever I needed to verify a design detail for the storyline.

DC:

That is a great piece of design provenance because it explains both the architecture and why it feels so specific.

Stephanie's house was not modeled on a San Juan estate at all. Its physical layout came from a real house in Potomac, Maryland that you had admired for years. When you needed an affluent home that would sharply contrast with the sisters' austere, working-farm environment, you transplanted that architecture into the islands. And because the Potomac house was accessible to you, you could go back and visually check details whenever the story required it.

So the chain is:

real Potomac house you admired → architectural reference you could repeatedly verify → relocated fictionally to the San Juans → deliberate contrast with the monastery's simplicity and self-sufficiency.

That also helps explain why the description goes well beyond “large expensive house.” You had an actual building in your head.

The thematic part is what I'd like to pin down next: was the contrast between Stephanie's wealth and the sisters' very modest lifestyle simply meant to give the story visual variety, or were you also intentionally showing two radically different ways of living without portraying either one as inherently better than the other?

BA:

It was that two worlds contrast we talked about in Series One, and wanting to build that bridge between them.

DC:

Exactly. So the contrast was not meant as simple life good / wealthy life bad, or the reverse. It was the same two-worlds bridge we identified in Series One.

You put the kids comfortably into both environments: the sisters living through work, faith, self-sufficiency, and service; then Stephanie living amid extraordinary material comfort and access. The point is that these worlds do not have to remain socially sealed off from one another. The characters can enter both, respect the people in both, learn from both, and form relationships across the economic divide.

That gives the architectural transplant from Potomac an actual story function: it makes the contrast immediately visible before the bridge starts being built.

CHAPTER 14 — DINNER ANYONE

DC:

There is another passage that reads suspiciously like one of your “truth is more colorful than fiction” stories: the wooden yacht at Deer Harbor, Bob varnishing her, and the stories about the vessel's Alaska work and Prohibition-era connection to the Olmstead gang.

Was Bob, that boat, and its remarkable history something you actually encountered at Deer Harbor, or did you research that story for the novel?

BA:

While living on the island I had a 155cc scooter that I rode everywhere, including on the expressway (I-5) to Seattle, Vancouver, Vancouver Island, the mainland, and Lopez, Shaw, and Orcas. I particularly enjoyed riding out to Deer Harbor to walk the docks and admire the boats, especially the “woodies.” The Wooden Boat Festival was held in Victoria, Deer Harbor, and Port Townsend, and I would ride to the Port Townsend event whenever I could. I wanted to tell some of the stories of those boats, so after researching the stories I shared a couple in the storyline, including that vessel you read about.

DC:

That gives Chapter 14 another layered provenance chain.

The Deer Harbor experience itself was firsthand: you were regularly riding around the islands on your 155cc scooter, walking the docks, admiring the wooden boats, and traveling to the wooden-boat festivals in Victoria, Deer Harbor, and Port Townsend. Then, because you wanted readers to discover that maritime world too, you researched the histories of particular vessels and folded a few of those real boat stories into the novel. The manuscript's extended discussion of the old wooden yacht and its past is therefore researched maritime history placed inside a setting you personally knew very well.

And the scooter itself sounds like it became almost a passport to the region—you weren't just seeing San Juan Island but moving through the whole interconnected Northwest world on your own terms.

One distinction I want to capture: was Bob himself based on a particular boat owner you knew at Deer Harbor, or was he a fictional character you created to tell the researched history of the vessel?

BA:

He was the name I used for the owner; I can't remember if that was actually the name of one of its owners or not.

DC:

Right—then we should be careful not to turn “Bob” into a factual identification.

For the transcript, I'd record it this way: the vessel and its history were researched from real-world sources; “Bob” was the name you used for the owner character in the story, but you no longer remember whether that matched the name of an actual owner. So the boat history is the part we can treat as historical provenance; the owner identity should remain fictional/uncertain unless later documentation settles it.

That distinction matters because it keeps us from accidentally converting a narrative convenience into a biographical claim.

The other very specific element in Chapter 14 is the meal at Kingfish at West Sound—the restaurant, menu, local ingredients, desserts, chef interaction, and the whole dining experience are described in considerable detail. Was that based on meals you personally had there and a restaurant you knew firsthand, or did you reconstruct that part from research?

BA:

Firsthand.

DC:

That locks the Kingfish material down as firsthand experience, not a researched reconstruction. The restaurant, atmosphere, food, and sense of dining there came from a place you actually knew.

CHAPTER 15 — WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

DC:

Chapter 15 then gives JJ an unusually detailed introduction to boating: dinghy, davit, gunwale, bow and stern, anchor rode and windlass, port and starboard, fenders, salon, galley, heads, helm controls, spring lines, thrusters, and so on.

That reads like another deliberate exposure opportunity rather than incidental description.

How much of Sam's boating lesson came from your own boating experience, and how much did you have to research specifically for the book?

BA:

So my entire introduction to the San Juan Islands was a result of attending the Annapolis Boat Show. The show is actually two shows separated by a two-day transition where one fleet of boats departs and the other fleet arrives. In fact, it is an Annapolis tradition to go grab drinks and dinner at one of the restaurants along the waterfront and watch the transition unfold.

Anyway, during the Powerboat week's session, I stumbled on this tent that had these magnificent photos of these picturesque islands and the boating opportunities they offered. I got to talking with Mike, the owner of the Anacortes Yacht Charter company. He asked me if I ever powerboated. I explained that all of my boating instruction had been on sailboats. He suggested I come take their power boating course.

It was a three day course where we were taught to drive 49–50 ft power boats. Each boat had a captain that taught us everything we needed to know and we were quickly put at the helm doing touch and goes, then doing full overnight cruises around the islands. We stayed one night at Roche Harbor, one afternoon at Friday Harbor. It was a blast and a great vacation that I recommend for anyone looking to learn a new skill, see a beautiful part of the country, and take home a memory that will last a lifetime.

So between that and the sailing instruction and open water sailing on the Atlantic and on the Chesapeake Bay that I've done, that all became what I wanted to share with my young readers.

DC:

That is a major piece of Series 2 provenance, because it explains how the San Juan Islands entered your life in the first place.

The chain is unusually clean: Annapolis Powerboat Show → chance encounter with Mike from Anacortes Yacht Charters → invitation to learn powerboating → three-day hands-on course on 49–50-foot boats → actual helm work, touch-and-go practice, and overnight cruising through the San Juans → a place and skill set that became part of your life → eventually brought into Adventure Universe for young readers.

And it wasn't sightseeing disguised as instruction. You had already learned sailing and had open-water experience on the Chesapeake and Atlantic; this was a genuinely new skill. Then the students were quickly trusted with substantial boats and put into the environment where the knowledge mattered. That is almost a real-life prototype of the kind of experiential learning you keep building into the books.

There is also a wonderful origin-story detail here: you discovered the San Juans because some photographs in a tent at a boat show made you curious enough to stop and talk to somebody. That conversation opened an entirely new part of the country and a new capability to you. That is almost exactly what you hope the books will do for a reader.

So Sam teaching JJ the boat in Chapter 15 is grounded heavily in skills you actually learned and used, not a technical lesson inserted from reference material.

CHAPTER 16 — GRAB A BUCKET

DC:

Chapter 16 does much the same thing with animal husbandry—pigs, sheep, chickens, cattle, feeding, fencing, costs, breeding, pasture requirements, animal behavior, and basic farm economics.

Did that farming material come from any firsthand farm experience of yours, or was this one of the areas you researched specifically so the kids could realistically learn alongside the sisters and Patrick?

BA:

My dad was always looking for ways to help me experience the world. He had a friend who was a farmer in Wisconsin, and one summer he sent me up to live with them for a couple of weeks to learn what it was like to work a farm. So that coupled with what I knew of touring the sisters' property, and what I had researched gave me the basis for the book series.

DC:

That adds an important personal layer to Chapter 16. The farm material wasn't assembled from research alone. It came from three sources working together: your own couple of weeks living and working on a Wisconsin farm as a boy, your firsthand tour and knowledge of the sisters' operation, and additional research needed to fill in the technical details.

And your father's role is significant. He was deliberately looking for ways to put you into unfamiliar environments so you could experience them rather than merely hear about them. Sending you to live with a farming family was one example of that.

There is a pretty direct line from that to what you're doing with Adventure Universe: your father couldn't literally send you everywhere in the world, but when he could open a door, he did. Now you're using the stories to show young readers doors they might not otherwise know exist —farming, boating, search and rescue, science, public service, wildlife work, different communities—and then giving them enough real-world grounding to pursue the experience themselves if it catches their interest.

CHAPTER 17 — A VIEW FROM THE TOP

DC:

Chapter 17 then turns into a very detailed cold-water rescue: Janet's jeans as improvised flotation, keeping distance from a panicked swimmer, JJ converting the backpacks into flotation for KC and Teddy, and then Sam's hypothermia treatment with heat packs, sleeping bags, a space blanket, and a tarp.

Where did that rescue and hypothermia sequence come from—training you had personally received, specific survival/rescue sources you researched, or some combination of the two?

BA:

I actually conversed with a physician who trained the SAR teams in the Cascades about the treatment protocol along with research I pulled up online.

DC:

That gives the hypothermia sequence a particularly strong source trail.

The treatment protocol was not simply reconstructed from general web material. You discussed it directly with a physician who trained search-and-rescue teams working in the Cascades, and then supplemented that expert guidance with your own online research. So for the interview record, I'd preserve the provenance as: direct consultation with a physician experienced in training Cascade SAR personnel → supporting independent research → adaptation into the fictional rescue sequence.

That also explains why the scene moves beyond “get them warm” into specific staged actions —insulation from the ground, heat placement, layered wrapping, and monitoring the consequences of severe hypothermia.

There is one separate part of that rescue I want to distinguish before we close Book 3: where did Janet's use of her jeans as an improvised flotation device come from—something you had been taught or researched, or was that a solution you devised for the story?

BA:

Taught and researched. If you go online there are quite a few YouTube videos demonstrating the technique.

DC:

Then that distinction is clear as well. The improvised-jeans flotation technique was not invented for the scene; it was a real survival technique you had been taught and then independently researched, including video demonstrations showing how it is performed.

That closes the provenance loop for the rescue sequence: the fiction supplied the emergency and the characters, while the response techniques were deliberately grounded in real training, expert consultation, and supporting research.

BOOK 4 — ORIGINS & DESIGN INTERVIEW THE NEW ROUTINE — NEW THREATS

CHAPTER 18 — THE NEW ROUTINE

DC:

For Chapter 18, “The New Routine,” the opening immediately caught my attention for a different kind of provenance: Sister Therese is on an Apple II+ using a 300-baud modem, CompuServe, and Washington Apple Pi when she discovers the news story about Janet’s rescue.

Were the Apple II+, CompuServe, and Washington Apple Pi details drawn from your own computer experience at the time?

BA:

Washington Apple Pi was, and still is, headquartered in Bethesda and was a group I was a member of when the Macintosh first came out. In fact, they hosted an event/product unveiling of the Macintosh at the Commerce Department auditorium that seated about 500 audience members. The room was packed. And this young team from this company called Apple brought out this box that had a device called a mouse, and when it was turned on, it came up with this iconic tone and a face on the screen, not a cursor like we were all used to on the IBM PC or all the other personal computer models on the market. This young guy named Wozniak gave the demonstration, and you could have heard a pin drop. The only sounds you heard were the Oooohs and Ahhhs that erupted at the thrills of a graphical user interface. It truly was revolutionary. And at the time The Source and CompuServe were the big dial-up services. I lived a block away from the office for The Source.

DC:

That makes the Chapter 18 computer detail much more than period decoration.

Washington Apple Pi was part of your own early-computing world. You were a member when the Macintosh arrived, and you personally attended that packed Commerce Department auditorium presentation where the new machine, mouse, startup sound, graphical screen, and entirely different way of interacting with a computer were being demonstrated to an audience accustomed to command-line personal computers. The silence followed by the “oohs” and “ahhs” is exactly the kind of eyewitness detail that belongs in the Behind-the-Scenes record.

There is also a nice geographic connection: Washington Apple Pi in Bethesda, the Source office essentially in your neighborhood, and Source/CompuServe representing the emerging dial-up world you were living through. So when Sister Therese is sitting at an Apple II+ with a 300-baud modem checking Washington Apple Pi and CompuServe, it comes out of technology you knew as it was happening, not a later reconstruction.

Were you personally using either The Source or CompuServe yourself during that period—and did you own or regularly use an Apple II before moving into the Macintosh world?

BA:

No, my first computer was a Mac 512K. I helped my father-in-law pick out his first machine which was an IBM PC, which came out before the Mac but after the Lisa. Or maybe it was PC first then Lisa. Too many years ago I'm afraid.

DC:

That clears it up. Your first personal computer was a Macintosh 512K. You had helped your father-in-law select an IBM PC earlier, but you did not personally own an Apple II.

And your chronology instinct was close: IBM PC came first, then Lisa, then Macintosh. So we don't need to preserve the uncertainty as part of the finished historical account.

What matters for the interview is that the technology scene came from being immersed in that transition as it happened: Washington Apple Pi membership, seeing the Macintosh demonstrated to an auditorium full of computer users, familiarity with the dial-up services of the period, and even living a block from The Source's office. Sister Therese's Apple II+/CompuServe setup is therefore period-informed fiction, rather than a recreation of your own home computer setup.

A little later in Chapter 18, the characters start touring the islands on 50cc scooters, including loading them onto the ferry and riding around Friday Harbor and San Juan Island. We already know about your 155cc scooter adventures throughout the region, so I won't ask whether that came from firsthand experience.

Did you deliberately reduce the story scooters to 50cc because the riders were young and you wanted something more approachable for their first experience, or was 50cc simply the type of scooter you had seen commonly used around the islands?

BA:

Oh, I did use both CompuServe and The Source.

DC:

Right — correction noted.

Your first personally owned computer was a Macintosh 512K, but you did use both CompuServe and The Source. So Sister Therese’s dial-up activity was grounded in services you had actually used, even though the Apple II+ itself was not your home machine.

That makes the provenance stronger:

Washington Apple Pi membership + firsthand Macintosh-era computing culture + personal use of CompuServe and The Source + familiarity with The Source’s Bethesda-area presence → Sister Therese’s early online world.

I’ll preserve that correction in the Book 4 interview record.

Returning to the question I had just asked: did you deliberately make the characters’ scooters 50cc because they were younger/new riders, or was 50cc simply what you saw commonly used around the islands?

BA:

No, Susie's Scooter rental at Friday Harbor rented out 50cc scooters. They didn't require a motorcycle accreditation to ride them, so that was what you found riding all over the islands, including in Victoria.

DC:

That makes the scooter choice much more specific. It was not a narrative simplification for younger characters. It came directly from what you were seeing in the islands at the time.

Susie’s Scooter Rental in Friday Harbor rented 50cc scooters, and, as you remember the rules then, riders did not need a motorcycle endorsement for that class. As a result, those small scooters were a familiar part of the visitor landscape throughout the islands—and you were seeing the same kind of transportation over in Victoria as well. So putting the characters on 50cc scooters was another case of reproducing the actual travel experience of the region rather than inventing a convenient vehicle for the story.

That also gives us a useful distinction from your own experience: you personally ranged much farther on a 155cc scooter; the novel uses the readily rentable 50cc machines visitors commonly encountered.

The scooter tour then takes them into English Camp and a fairly extensive telling of the Pig War, followed by the actual historic grounds and trails. Was your familiarity with the Pig War primarily something you learned by repeatedly visiting American and English Camps and their exhibits, or did you do substantial additional historical research specifically for the novel?

BA:

It was actually told to me first at the island theater where they staged a play that told the whole story.

DC:

That is a much better origin story for the Pig War material than simply “I researched it.”

You first encountered the history as a story—through a live theatrical production on San Juan Island that dramatized the whole Pig War episode. That fits this project particularly well: history became memorable because somebody turned it into an engaging narrative, and years later you did essentially the same thing for your own readers by embedding it inside the characters’ travels.

It also helps explain why the episode gets room to breathe. You weren't starting with a list of historical facts and asking how to squeeze them into the novel. You had already experienced the story as entertaining local history.

I would preserve the provenance as:

San Juan Island theatrical production → fascination with the Pig War story → familiarity with the actual island locations → additional research as needed → incorporation into Adventure Universe.

One thing I'd like to nail down: after seeing that play, did you then go visit both English Camp and American Camp specifically because the story had made you curious about the real places?

BA:

I had visited both prior to seeing the play but hadn't encountered the story yet.

DC:

That is an important correction.

The sequence was actually:

visit English Camp and American Camp first → know the places without yet knowing the full story → later see the island theater production about the Pig War → suddenly understand the history attached to places you had already walked → research and carry that story into the novel.

That is almost the reverse of the usual tourist experience. You encountered the physical setting first, and the story later gave those familiar places a new layer of meaning. I’ll preserve it that way rather than implying the play sent you out to discover the camps.

The scooter tour next reaches Roche Harbor, where Stephanie gives a substantial history of the lime industry, John McMillin, the Hotel de Haro, the company town, and the resort. Was that history something you picked up from tours/exhibits while spending time at Roche Harbor, or did you research it specifically when you wrote the chapter?

BA:

I spent a good deal of time both when vacationing and living on the island. But it wasn't until I wrote the story that I discovered the history of the property.

DC:

That gives Roche Harbor a useful two-layer provenance.

You already knew the place intimately from repeated vacations and then living on the island— the harbor, resort, marina, buildings, atmosphere, and how people actually experienced it. But the historical story behind the property—the lime industry, McMillin, company-town development, and how the modern resort evolved—was something you discovered only when researching the novel.

So the writing process actually deepened your own understanding of a place you thought you already knew. That is worth keeping in the Behind-the-Scenes material: Adventure Universe wasn't only transmitting things you already knew; researching the books sometimes caused you to rediscover familiar places.

A little later, the group eats at Mike's Café & Wine Bar, where the surprise is that dishes labeled burgers, chicken, crab cakes, and so forth are entirely plant-based.

Was Mike's a real restaurant you personally ate at, and was the characters' surprise at how convincing the plant-based food tasted based on your own first experience there?

BA:

All of that was true. Mike is a fascinating part of Friday Harbor and his chef is a remarkable culinary master.

DC:

That locks Mike’s scene down as directly lived experience too.

Mike’s Café & Wine Bar was real, Mike himself was a real and memorable part of Friday Harbor, and the restaurant’s chef genuinely impressed you with what could be done with plant-based food. So the characters’ skepticism followed by surprise was not a fictional sales pitch—it reflected the kind of experience the restaurant could actually give someone walking in expecting conventional meat dishes.

That makes the scene another example of what you’ve been doing throughout the islands material: introduce readers not just to landmarks, but to people and businesses that gave the place its character.

Looking at the whole scooter day—Friday Harbor, English Camp, San Juan County Park, Lime Kiln, Roche Harbor, Pelindaba Lavender Farm, American Camp, South Beach, and back into town—was that essentially built from routes and stops you had personally ridden yourself on your scooter?

BA:

It was almost a daily routine for me. At the time I was working while living there but working East Coast hours. So I would be up at 5:00 a.m. every day, then finish work at 2:00 pm. PST then go put in a couple of hours at the whale museum, then go riding and hiking on San Juan island, or hop the ferry and hike mountain lake on Orcas.

DC:

That explains why the island material reads less like researched travel writing and more like somebody simply moving through a place he knows.

Your routine was almost a real-life template for the chapter: up around 5:00 a.m. to work East Coast hours, finished around 2:00 p.m. Pacific time, then a couple of hours volunteering at the Whale Museum, followed by scooter riding and hiking around San Juan—or taking the ferry to Orcas and hiking Mountain Lake. The roads, ferry rhythms, parks, trails, businesses, and whale community weren't occasional vacation memories. They were part of your ordinary daily life for stretches of time.

That also gives the reader-facing travel material more significance. The long scooter excursion in Chapter 18 is essentially letting readers spend an afternoon in the San Juans the way you actually did.

When you assembled that tour for the characters, were you consciously thinking, “These are the places I would take somebody if they came to visit me,” or did the itinerary simply emerge naturally because those were your own regular stops?

BA:

It just became a part of the storyline.

DC:

That is useful because it keeps us from over-interpreting the route. It was not a consciously designed “Bruce’s recommended island tour.” Those places were simply so familiar to you that, as the story unfolded, they naturally became where the characters went.

That is actually stronger provenance in a different way: the geography was embedded deeply enough in your everyday experience that you did not have to manufacture an itinerary.

There is one more very local detail in Chapter 18 that feels like it may have come straight from island life: the cancelled inter-island ferry, stranded passengers, and Stephanie’s comment that the Friday Harbor terminal supervisor was deputized and wore a badge because of how angry disrupted travelers could become.

Was that ferry unreliability—and specifically the story about the deputized terminal supervisor —something you personally encountered while living there?

BA:

All true. That picturesque, romantic ferry experience as a visitor becomes a royal pain in the ass for residents trying to live a normal lifestyle, and God help the traveler that needed to catch a flight out of SEATAC to get home, or arrive for that matter. Many a tourist has spent an evening in an Anacortes hotel because they couldn't get to the lodging they had paid for on the island because of a canceled ferry. And the deputized ferry supervisor was real. She wore her badge plainly so upset travelers knew not to take it out on her or her staff.

DC:

That is exactly the kind of lived detail I want preserved because it shows the difference between visiting the islands and actually living there.

The ferry was picturesque when you were on vacation. Once you were a resident trying to work, shop, travel, make appointments, or connect with a flight at SEATAC, cancellations could become a major disruption. Tourists could lose access to prepaid lodging and end up stranded overnight in Anacortes. And the detail about the deputized terminal supervisor wearing her badge visibly was not an embellishment—it was something you actually observed, because frustrated travelers sometimes took their anger out on ferry personnel.

So Stephanie’s complaint in the chapter is really resident perspective, not comic exaggeration.

That gives us a good stopping point for Chapter 18.

CHAPTER 19 — A NEW COUNTRY

DC:

Moving into Chapter 19, “A New Country,” Sam gives the group an extensive boating-safety and navigation lesson before they head toward Victoria—MAYDAY procedure, VHF radio, right-of-way, navigation lights, channel markers, tides and currents, docking, and then letting the kids take turns at the helm.

Given the powerboat course you already told me about, how much of Sam’s lesson here is essentially the instruction you received from your own captain during that three-day Anacortes course?

BA:

Exactly the same.

DC:

Then we should record Sam’s boating lesson as a direct fictionalized transfer of the actual instruction you received from your captain during the Anacortes Yacht Charter course—not merely boating knowledge you later reconstructed. The emergency-radio procedure, navigation rules, lights and markers, anchoring, lines, tides and currents, vessel controls, and hands-on helm work all reproduce the training experience you went through.

That makes the chapter especially close to the Adventure Universe model: the reader is effectively sitting in on a real powerboating course while the fictional characters take it.

Before we move into the Victoria material: was the actual boat run through the islands and into Victoria Harbor also a route you personally traveled by boat, either during that course or on later trips?

BA:

Victoria was not on our class routine. But I frequently traveled into Victoria Harbor on the Black Ball ferry run from Port Angeles.

DC:

Good distinction. The training route itself did not take you into Victoria. Your familiarity with entering Victoria Harbor came from repeated personal trips on the Black Ball/Coho ferry from Port Angeles, so the harbor approach, waterfront, Empress, Parliament, Fisherman’s Wharf, and general feel of arriving by water were all things you knew firsthand.

That means Chapter 19 combines two different kinds of firsthand experience: Sam’s instruction comes directly from your Anacortes powerboat course, while the Victoria arrival is built from your repeated ferry trips into the city.

CHAPTER 20 — TAKING THE TOUR

DC:

Chapter 20 then gets even more personal. Janet describes stumbling onto lawn bowling and croquet clubs, becoming a member, and later volunteering with Guest Relations/security at Symphony Splash, including the two incidents she handled that day.

Am I right that those lawn-bowling/croquet encounters and the Symphony Splash volunteer experience were all your own experiences, transferred pretty directly into Janet’s backstory?

BA:

They were.

DC:

Then those passages are essentially your own Victoria experiences transferred into Janet: being invited into lawn bowling and croquet, becoming involved with the club, volunteering at Symphony Splash, working Guest Relations/security, and the incidents that occurred during the event. That is unusually direct character provenance, rather than simply giving Janet researched interests.

The chapter then gives a very detailed guided tour through the British Columbia Parliament Buildings—architecture, the rotunda, the mace, Legislative Assembly procedures, stained glass, Hall of Honour, and the building’s history.

Did you personally take one of those Parliament tours and build the fictional tour from what you were shown and told, or was most of that material researched later for the book?

BA:

I toured the complex a couple of times and then used their virtual online tour for the supplemental research.

DC:

That gives the Parliament material a very clean two-part provenance: you had personally toured the complex more than once, so the physical experience, movement through the rooms, and feel of the tour came firsthand. Then, when writing the chapter, you used the Parliament’s own virtual tour to supplement and verify the architectural, historical, ceremonial, and legislative details.

That is exactly the kind of sourcing pattern we’ve been seeing repeatedly in Series 2: lived experience provides the setting and texture; research fills in the technical or historical depth.

There is one unusually specific detail in that same tour I want to separate out. The young guide tells the characters that she had been working at the information center, was trying out the Parliament docent job for a month, and could decide whether she wanted to return to her old position.

Was that job-trial arrangement something an actual Parliament guide told you during one of your visits?

BA:

It was.

DC:

Then that detail should be preserved as another directly observed piece of Victoria culture, not a fictional employment-policy invention. The actual guide told you she was temporarily trying the Parliament docent position and could return to her previous information-center job if it wasn't the right fit. You then transferred that conversation into the chapter.

That matters because it reinforces something the Victoria section keeps doing: the characters aren't just seeing architecture and tourist attractions; they're encountering different ways people live and work.

One last Chapter 20 detail is too distinctive not to ask about: at the end, with Parliament illuminated across the harbor, a lone kilted bagpiper plays “Auld Lang Syne” from the promenade as the characters leave. Was that something you actually witnessed in Victoria?

BA:

It was a common occurrence.

DC:

Then that closing image was not invented for atmosphere either. The lone kilted piper playing along Victoria’s Inner Harbour was something you encountered often enough that it was part of the city’s normal character. So the chapter’s final “Auld Lang Syne” moment is a fictional placement of a real recurring Victoria experience, not a cinematic flourish created from scratch.

That closes Chapter 20 very cleanly: much of the Victoria material comes from places you repeatedly visited, activities you personally joined, people you actually met, and events you worked yourself, with research added where the historical or architectural detail required it.

CHAPTER 21 — COOKING LESSONS

DC:

Chapter 21, “Cooking Lessons,” shifts into a long hands-on food session: Torta de Elotes, Nicaraguan arroz con pollo, hearts-of-palm salsa, atolillo, tamales taught by the mothers, gallo pinto, and fried yuca.

Where did that Central American cooking material come from—your own cooking and dining experience, people you knew, cookbooks/research, or some combination of those?

BA:

If you recall the history of the chef Raymond on Orcas that teaches on Shaw, that was his background so I just built around that, and wanted it to be an extension of Rob, Arty's, and Jorge's family background and help readers understand that Mexico is not South America or a country in South America, and Central American countries are distinct from South American countries, both in language in some cases and cultures and foods.

DC:

Yes. And your larger point is important: Raymond’s own Central/South American culinary background gave you the natural vehicle for the lessons, but the sequence also extends Rob, Arty, and Jorge’s family and cultural backgrounds rather than treating “Latin America” as one interchangeable culture.

There was a deliberate educational purpose as well: helping readers understand that Mexico is part of North America, not South America; Central America is its own geographic region; and the countries across those regions have distinct histories, cultures, languages in some cases, and foods. The cooking class lets the reader encounter those distinctions through people and food instead of through a geography lecture.

That clarifies Chapter 21’s design much better.

Raymond’s background—the chef from Orcas who teaches at Shaw—provided the natural reason for the Central and South American cooking sessions. You then used that framework to extend the cultural backgrounds already established through Rob, Arty, Jorge, and their families, letting family knowledge become part of the teaching rather than having Raymond simply lecture everyone.

And there was a deliberate geography/culture lesson underneath it: readers should not collapse Mexico, Central America, and South America into one vague category. Mexico is in North America; Central American nations are distinct from South American nations; and even where countries share Spanish, their cultures and cuisines are not interchangeable. The food gives you a way to make those distinctions concrete and enjoyable. The manuscript even shifts authority to the mothers for the tamale lesson, so the family itself becomes a source of knowledge.

CHAPTER 22 — NEW THREATS

DC:

That takes us into the final Book 4 chapter, Chapter 22 — “New Threats.” Lauren connects the kids’ Saving A Life effort with FBI youth programs and then introduces sextortion, NCMEC, victim support, and the possibility that their organization could eventually help educate other young people about emerging dangers.

What originally made you decide that sextortion was an issue the series needed to address— was there a particular case, news story, or organization that brought it to your attention, or did it emerge from researching threats facing young people for the Saving A Life concept?

BA:

Just as I was writing that chapter I received an email from the FBI's news service explaining the growing incidence of sextortion cases that were occurring and the impact it was having on kids. I immediately recognized it as an issue the team would have adopted as part of their program, so I slipped it into the storyline.

DC:

That gives Chapter 22 a very specific origin point: the sextortion material was not part of the original Series 2 plan. It entered the book almost in real time.

While you were writing the chapter, an email from the FBI’s news service described the growing number of sextortion cases and the harm being done to children. You immediately recognized that this was exactly the kind of emerging threat JJ and the Saving A Life team would take on, so you incorporated it into the chapter while the issue was actively developing.

That is important to the design history because it shows the series was never sealed off from the world while you were writing it. New information could change the story when it fit the mission organically. In this case, the fictional organization itself gave you the test: Would these kids care about this and try to help? The answer was obviously yes, so it became part of their expanding purpose.

The manuscript then uses Lauren to connect that issue to FBI youth programs and NCMEC, giving JJ a real-world direction rather than leaving him merely horrified by the problem.

One last Book 4 provenance question: were the FBI Youth Academy, Teen Academy, Junior Special Agent, and Adopt-A-School programs things you found through that same FBI information stream, or had you already known about those programs before writing this chapter?

BA:

I had known about them through my involvement with the FBI program when I was working for Verizon. I had decided to include the programs in the book series then, and this was my opportunity to begin that effort. I continue to use the materials from the newsletters throughout the upcoming series as well.

DC:

That gives the FBI material a much longer provenance than the sextortion insert itself.

Your awareness of the FBI youth programs came from your own involvement with the FBI program while you were working for Verizon. You had already decided then that those real youth-facing programs belonged somewhere in Adventure Universe; Chapter 22 simply became the first natural opening to introduce them. The FBI newsletters then remained an ongoing source stream that you continued drawing from in later books and later series.

That creates an important distinction in Chapter 22:

- the FBI youth-program material was planned from earlier firsthand professional exposure; - the sextortion issue arrived unexpectedly through an FBI news-service email while you were actively writing the chapter; - both fit the same underlying Saving A Life mission, so they could be integrated without feeling grafted onto the story.

It also shows that the series' real-world resource network was designed to stay porous. Once you found a credible institution, program, newsletter, professional relationship, or public-service resource that aligned with the characters' mission, you kept watching it for material that could responsibly widen what readers were exposed to.

BOOK 5 — ORIGINS & DESIGN INTERVIEW MAKING NEW FRIENDS — JUST ANOTHER ROLLER COASTER

CHAPTER 23 — MAKING NEW FRIENDS

DC:

We can move directly into Book 5, Chapter 23 — “Making New Friends.” The chapter brings the group into a very large Mount Baker/North Cascades multi-agency SAR exercise involving mountain-rescue teams, NAS Whidbey SAR, the Forest Service, smokejumpers, NPS, law enforcement, incident command, staging, helicopters, and simulated casualties.

Was that large multi-agency exercise based on an exercise you actually participated in or observed through SAR, or did you construct this one from your SAR experience and research into how those agencies train together?

BA:

I wanted to showcase the agencies in that area, and the difference in the operational environments in which they worked compared with what we had on the East Coast. I did a lot of research on what agencies covered the Cascades, what practices and real operations they typically ran and from there, I designed this fictional exercise to showcase them.

DC:

That makes the distinction very clear: the Mount Baker exercise itself is fictional, but the operational world it depicts was deliberately constructed from real regional practice.

You wanted readers—and the East Coast characters—to see that SAR in the Cascades operates in a substantially different environment from what they knew back home: vast mountainous terrain, snow and glaciers, wildfire, remote access, aviation, smokejumpers, federal land agencies, county SAR organizations, and military/CBP aircraft all potentially intersecting. So you researched which agencies actually covered the Cascades, what each of them did, the kinds of incidents they handled, and how they normally operated, and then designed a fictional multi-agency exercise capable of bringing those capabilities together in one storyline.

So this isn't “a real drill with the names changed.” It is more interesting than that: a researched composite exercise created specifically to showcase a real regional emergency-response ecosystem and contrast it with the East Coast SAR environment already familiar to the characters and readers.

The next section gets extraordinarily specific about the North Cascades Smokejumpers— Winthrop base operations, the Beech 99, duty call-out, spotter responsibilities, jump-site assessment, equipment staging, and the detailed partner/preflight inspection ritual.

Did that Smokejumper material come entirely from research, or had you personally visited the Winthrop smokejumper base or interacted with smokejumpers there?

BA:

That is kind of a funny story. So I had taken a trip that summer from San Juan, into Vancouver, then north to Whistler, curving around where I passed through Justin's hometown, then on to Jasper. From there I traveled down to Lake Louise, Banff, then south to Glacier. It was what became the storyline of the trip the team makes, just without the boat excursion into Vancouver Harbour after stopping at Granville Island. While passing through Glacier, I spotted a young couple dressed in wedding attire, kissing at one of the scenic overlooks. I got to Winthrop and discovered the smokejumper base there, which is open to the public to visit. While there I walked in to discover the groom was one of their jumpers and standing in front of me. So that whole story I tell during the team's tour, as well as every other aspect of that team and their base, is absolutely factual.

DC:

That is a terrific piece of provenance because the coincidence itself sounds like something a novelist would invent—and it actually happened.

The larger discovery is that a substantial later travel arc in Series 2 grew out of that one real trip: San Juan → Vancouver → Whistler → the town you associate with Justin → Jasper → Lake Louise → Banff → Glacier → Winthrop. You essentially gave the team your route, with the Vancouver Harbour boat excursion after Granville Island being one of the fictional additions.

And the smokejumper story is even more directly transplanted. In Glacier, you happened to see a young couple in wedding clothes kissing at a scenic overlook. Later, after reaching Winthrop and discovering that the North Cascades Smokejumper Base was open to visitors, you walked inside—and the groom was standing there, because he was one of the smokejumpers. The manuscript preserves that wonderfully improbable coincidence by having the tour group hear about a tourist recognizing Jason from his Glacier wedding photo shoot.

So Chapter 25 is not simply the result of researching smokejumping. You physically visited the base, and your statement is that the story told during the team's tour—and the other details about that team and its base—are factual representations of what you encountered and learned there. That gives us a very different provenance from the preceding Mount Baker exercise: the exercise was a researched fictional composite; the Winthrop base tour came from an actual place you entered and experienced.

It also explains why Winthrop itself precedes the base tour. The characters arrive in the Western-themed town, stay there, wander its businesses, and then visit the base the next morning—essentially following the geography of your own trip.

When you wrote Chapter 24's Winthrop evening—the Western storefronts and places like Three Fingered Jack's, the restaurants, and Sheri's Sweet Shop—were those also places you personally visited on that trip, or did you add some of them later while researching the town for the story?

CHAPTER 24 — YIPPIE HI OH KIYAY

BA:

I had discovered Winthrop earlier and had planned to include it. It was during this particular trip that I found out they were also home to the smokejumpers. It was their welcome center that encouraged me to go and visit the base.

DC:

That gives us a cleaner sequence.

You had already discovered Winthrop on an earlier visit and had decided it belonged in the series because of the town itself—the Western presentation, setting, and character. On this later road trip, Winthrop was therefore not a chance discovery. What was unexpected was learning that the North Cascades Smokejumper Base was there. The town’s welcome center pointed you toward the base and encouraged you to visit it.

So the smokejumpers were essentially a discovery inside a location you had already selected for the story. Once you went to the base, met the people there, learned how they operated, and had the remarkable encounter with the groom you had just seen in Glacier, the smokejumper material became a natural extension of the Winthrop stop rather than something you had gone looking for in advance.

That also separates two different kinds of story development nicely: Winthrop was planned; the smokejumper connection was serendipitous.

For Chapter 24 itself, did most of the historical material about Winthrop—Guy Waring, Owen Wister, the Western redevelopment, Forty Niner Days, and the town’s festivals—come from what you learned at that welcome center, or did you research those details separately afterward?

BA:

It was a mix of both.

DC:

That gives Chapter 24 a sensible provenance: Winthrop itself was already on your story map from an earlier discovery, while the historical depth came from a combination of what you learned locally—especially through the welcome center—and follow-up research. So details such as Guy Waring, Owen Wister, the town’s Western reinvention, Forty Niner Days, and the festival culture grew out of both sources rather than one single research session.

Then, on the later trip, the welcome center unexpectedly pointed you toward the smokejumper base. That discovery substantially expanded what Winthrop could contribute to the story, culminating in the completely real coincidence with the Glacier groom.

That gives us a clean close on Chapters 24 and 25.

CHAPTER 25 — HANGING FROM THE RAFTERS

DC:

The smokejumper-base tour is therefore directly grounded in your own visit. The team, base, history, aircraft, equipment, procedures, and the wedding anecdote were all drawn from what you encountered and learned there, rather than created merely from general research.

CHAPTER 26 — CATCH AND RELEASE

DC:

Chapter 26, “Catch And Release,” returns to island life. Ranger Bailey walks Shaw with KC and Teddy, encounters a park ranger who commutes by kayak from Lopez, visits the one-room schoolhouse, and later meets the county sheriff arriving in an aluminum patrol boat.

Were Sue Chamberlain and Sheriff Kribbs based on actual island officials or encounters you had there, or did you create those two characters from your broader knowledge of how park and law-enforcement coverage worked across the San Juan Islands?

BA:

They were both based on real characters I had come to know while living there. I had first met the real park ranger that lived on Lopez when I had vacationed out there. I was contemplating moving out there when I retired and wanted to 1) see what living there was like, and 2) get to know each of the ferry islands to see which might be a retirement option. So I spent a full week camping on each island at their state park. It was when I was on Shaw that I met the ranger and discovered her story. As far as my evaluation result, most of my time on Shaw was spent taking the ferry to Orcas. There was not much to do on Shaw other than spend time with the nuns and watch the boat traffic sail by, lol.

DC:

That adds a very useful layer to Chapter 26.

Both Sue and Sheriff Kribbs have real-person origins, although we should not automatically assume every piece of their fictional dialogue or biography belongs to the real individuals. You came to know both while living in the islands, and you had actually met the ranger even earlier during one of your exploratory vacations.

That earlier trip had a specific purpose: you were considering the San Juans as a possible retirement destination, so rather than judging them as a tourist, you deliberately spent about a week on each ferry-served island, camping and trying to understand what ordinary life there would actually be like. On Shaw, that is when you met the real ranger who lived on Lopez and learned her unusual story. That later became the basis for Sue and her kayak commute in the novel.

And your verdict on Shaw deserves to stay in the interview because it is both revealing and funny: despite seriously evaluating it as a place to retire, you discovered there simply wasn't much for you to do there. Much of your Shaw time became taking the ferry over to Orcas, spending time around the nuns, and watching boat traffic go by. That lived experience helps explain why the fictional Shaw feels quiet rather than artificially packed with attractions.

The chapter next has Stephanie take Debbie to watch Wolf Hollow release three rehabilitated harbor seal pups, including the distinctive temporary identification caps and the careful effort to keep human interaction to a minimum.

Did you personally attend one of those Wolf Hollow seal releases, including seeing the pups with the temporary caps, or was that scene built from what you learned about Wolf Hollow while living there?

BA:

That was a real-life experience. I had gotten to know the director of the Hollow and their rescue program while volunteering at the museum. I actually have a video of that event that I had included in the original publication, but ended up removing it because of its file size.

DC:

That is a particularly strong provenance point because the Wolf Hollow sequence wasn't merely based on something you had heard about—it was a specific event you personally attended.

Through your volunteer work at the Whale Museum, you had gotten to know the director of Wolf Hollow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center and their rescue work. You then witnessed an actual harbor-seal release, including the procedures reflected in the chapter. The fictional scene therefore grows directly out of that real event rather than a generic wildlife-rehabilitation scenario.

And there is an important piece of Adventure Universe production history attached to it: you recorded video of the real release and included that video in the original publication. It was later removed because the media file made the publication too large. That's worth preserving because it shows that the idea of extending the books beyond text—letting readers see the real places, people, or experiences behind the story—was present very early, not something added years later for the current website/interactive vision.

The other major experiential sequence in Chapter 26 is Sam's very detailed lesson on approaching and securing to a mooring ball, setting a two-line bridle, using the boat hook, judging swing radius, and then launching and operating the dinghy before the group goes ashore at Port Townsend.

Was that mooring-ball and dinghy instruction another direct transfer from your own boating instruction and experience, or did you build that lesson specifically for the novel from additional research?

BA:

I think our connection timed out.

DC:

Looks like there was a connection hiccup, but I still have our place.

We were in Series 2, Book 5, Chapter 26 — “Catch And Release.” We had just established that the Wolf Hollow seal release was a real event you attended, that you knew the director through your Whale Museum work, and that you originally embedded your own video of the release in the publication before removing it because of file size.

The open question was:

Was Sam’s detailed mooring-ball and dinghy lesson another direct transfer from your own boating instruction and experience, or did you build that lesson specifically for the novel from additional research?

BA:

It was taken from both my sailing training and my sailing experience, and I found training series online that I could point my readers to so they could visually see and learn the skills themselves.

DC:

That adds another important layer to Chapter 26. Sam’s mooring-ball and dinghy instruction came from both your formal sailing training and your own sailing experience, so the procedures were grounded in skills you had actually learned and used.

But you were also thinking beyond the printed description. You located an online training series that readers could follow so someone intrigued by what the characters were doing could actually watch the skills demonstrated and begin learning them. That belongs in the Origins record because it shows the same idea we saw with your original Wolf Hollow video: the book was already intended to function as a doorway out into real experience, not as the end of the experience.

So the pattern was already there very early: encounter a skill inside the story → become curious about it → give the reader access to real instructional material where they can see and learn it themselves. That is a direct ancestor of what Adventure Universe is now trying to do much more broadly.

CHAPTER 27 — JUST ANOTHER ROLLER COASTER

DC:

Chapter 27, “Just Another Roller Coaster,” opens on a quieter personal thread. Arthur is caught between the older teenagers and the younger children, becoming increasingly isolated, until Rob discovers his sketchbook and realizes that Arthur has developed a real talent for drawing. Rob then pulls him into the boating activities and gives him a place with the older group.

Where did Arthur’s drawing talent and that “kid caught between age groups” storyline come from—was there a real person or experience behind it, or was this primarily your way of making sure Arthur developed an identity and pathway of his own?

BA:

Arthur was based in part—a large part—on the real Arthur, Rob’s brother, who was an extremely talented artist, having taught himself from books he had read. The later series I wrote that speaks to the artwork he added to his own bedroom was real. His place in our group lineup was real: he was younger than Jorge and me but older than his two sisters. The isolation my Arthur character felt was fictional. Arthur was always an active member of our activities.

DC:

That distinction is important, because this is a case where the character is strongly rooted in a real person without the fictional emotional problem being biographical.

The real Arthur—Rob’s younger brother—was genuinely a remarkably talented, largely self-taught artist who developed his skill from books. The later material about artwork he created in his own bedroom also came from reality. His position in the age structure was real as well: younger than you and Jorge, but older than his two sisters.

What was fictional was Arthur becoming isolated because he did not fit naturally with either age group. The real Arthur did not withdraw that way; he was an active participant in your group’s activities. So the novel takes authentic traits—his age, family position, artistic ability, and self-directed learning—and creates a fictional problem that gives Rob an opportunity to notice him and draw him more deeply into the group.

That distinction needs to stay explicit in the Origins record so nobody later mistakes Arthur’s fictional loneliness for something you were saying about the real person.

A little later in Chapter 27, Ofc. Davis explains why turbulence no longer bothers him: after rough rides in C-17s and C-130s, he was once on a commercial flight with the wings visibly flexing while an airline pilot across the aisle slept through it, which convinced him the airplane could handle far more than the passengers thought.

Was that turbulence story one of your own experiences transferred to Davis?

BA:

It was. And his realization that things weren't as bad as they appeared stemmed from that as well as one other flight I was on that was a flight from hell as far as turbulence goes as we corkscrewed through a hole in the cloud cover of a significant storm front after takeoff, later repeating the same experience during landing and takeoff at a stopover and another landing at my final destination in Baltimore. all of which passed through that same storm front that had followed us up the coast.

DC:

That gives Davis’s turbulence story a stronger real-life foundation than a single incident.

The first piece was your experience on a commercial flight in severe turbulence where the aircraft looked and felt as though it was taking a beating, yet an airline pilot sitting across the aisle was sound asleep. Watching someone who understood aircraft far better than you remain completely unconcerned changed how you interpreted what you were seeing: frightening movement did not necessarily mean the aircraft was in danger. That realization is what you transferred into Davis.

Then there was the other trip—the genuine “flight from hell.” After takeoff, the aircraft corkscrewed through an opening in the cloud cover of a major storm front. Because the storm followed the flight up the coast, you went through essentially the same violent conditions again during the landing and subsequent takeoff at the stopover, and then yet again on the final approach into Baltimore. So Davis’s eventual decision to treat turbulence more like a roller coaster grew out of repeated firsthand experience, not just a convenient way to calm Ranger Bailey.

It also makes the Chapter 27 title, “Just Another Roller Coaster,” more personal than it first appears: that coping mechanism came directly from the way you learned to reinterpret those flights.

The chapter gets the law-enforcement group from Shaw to Seattle aboard a small amphibious aircraft before all of this happens. Did you personally fly between the San Juans and the Seattle area in one of those small seaplanes/amphibious aircraft, or was that transportation created for the storyline?

BA:

I had not flown on their seaplanes, although I have watched them land and take off both at Friday Harbor and in Vancouver on countless occasions. But what I had done was take that same company’s single-engine prop service out of San Juan County Airport, after missing the ferry to get me to the mainland so I could catch the commuter bus to SEATAC. That late-fall flight was another roller coaster experience as the standard fall weather pattern of overcast and rain cloud cover helped punctuate the experience going into Boeing Field.

DC:

That gives the aircraft sequence a very precise mixed provenance.

You had not personally taken the company’s seaplane service, although you had watched those aircraft land and depart around Friday Harbor and Vancouver countless times, so their presence and operation were familiar to you.

What you had done was fly that same company’s single-engine landplane service out of San Juan County Airport after missing the ferry connection you needed to reach the mainland and catch the commuter bus to SEATAC. The late-fall overcast and rain made that flight into Boeing Field another genuine roller-coaster ride. So Ranger Bailey’s airborne misery is drawing on your actual experience even though the story substitutes the company’s amphibious/seaplane service for the wheeled aircraft you personally flew.

That makes the title “Just Another Roller Coaster” even more layered: both Davis’s philosophy about turbulence and Bailey’s experience of the small aircraft trace directly back to flights you actually endured.

The team then lands at Boeing Field and is taken to a secured Seattle-area FBI/DOJ conference room for the briefing about the suspects and the decision to move everyone into Canada.

Was that FBI office/briefing environment based on anything you personally encountered through your Verizon/FBI involvement, or was the Seattle field-office scene researched and constructed for the story?

BA:

I knew they had a field office in Seattle, but the description is all fictional.

DC:

Good — so the Seattle FBI piece should be recorded as location fact, fictional interior.

You knew the FBI maintained a field office in Seattle, which gave the scene a legitimate regional anchor. But the secured garage, conference room, DOJ staging, live operational feed, and the way the briefing unfolds were all constructed for the story rather than copied from anything you personally saw through your Verizon/FBI involvement.

That gives Chapter 27 another useful provenance split: real aviation experience feeds Ranger Bailey’s flight; a real FBI presence anchors the destination; and the actual office environment and briefing are fictionalized.

The chapter then uses that briefing to trigger the decision to move everyone north into Canada, specifically toward Vancouver, Jasper, and Banff—which we now know overlaps heavily with the road trip you actually took.

Was that relocation route chosen mainly because you already knew and loved those places and wanted to take the team through them, or did the safe-location plot need come first and the route happen to fit your own travel experience?

BA:

I wanted to use this series as the first "other country" experience as I mentioned earlier. So I decided to use the trip I had taken as the blueprint to showcase BC and Alberta.

DC:

That closes Book 5 with an important series-level design decision.

The Canadian relocation was not simply a convenient safe-location plot that happened to overlap with places you knew. You had already decided that Series 2 would become the first Adventure Universe storyline to give readers a sustained “other country” experience. Canada provided the natural first step, and the trip you had personally taken became the blueprint for showing British Columbia and Alberta.

So the danger plot creates the narrative reason for movement, but the larger creative purpose came first: broaden the characters’ and readers’ world beyond the United States, using a route and places you had experienced yourself.

BOOK 6 — ORIGINS & DESIGN INTERVIEW WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD NORTH — SUSHI ANYONE

CHAPTER 28 — WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD NORTH

DC:

We can move directly into Book 6, Chapter 28 — “Welcome To Hollywood North.” It opens with the nighttime run toward Vancouver, and Sam gives the crew a fairly detailed lesson in marine radar—range, curvature of the Earth, beam width, antenna size, and interpreting targets in darkness.

Was that radar instruction drawn from marine radar training and use you had personally experienced while boating, or was that material something you researched specifically for the chapter?

BA:

I had already been trained in its use, but I reinforced that with research as well.

DC:

That gives the radar lesson the same provenance pattern we have seen with several of the boating sequences: you already possessed the skill through formal training, then went back to research to refresh, reinforce, and deepen what you put on the page.

That distinction matters because Chapter 28 is doing two things at once. The nighttime run creates tension, but it also gives you a natural reason to teach something that becomes especially important when visual navigation is limited: interpreting radar rather than simply trusting a screen.

Once they are in Vancouver, though, the story spends considerable time in Gastown, Granville Island, Waterfront Station, Harbour Centre, the downtown architecture, and then Stanley Park.

Were those Vancouver stops and the way the characters explore the city largely built from places you had personally visited and spent time in, or did you construct much of that itinerary later through research?

BA:

That was all lived experience. I often went up to Vancouver and tried to stop at Granville when I was there. They had a comedy club I enjoyed attending. Gastown was also a well-visited location, as was that entire harborfront area. I had taken the ferry as well as driven into North Vancouver to go hiking, catch the ferry to the Gulf Islands, and one year I took my kids on a cruise up into Alaska, leaving from and returning to Vancouver. So there were plenty of memories there for me.

DC:

That makes the Vancouver portion much more than a travel itinerary assembled for the novel. It came from repeated familiarity accumulated over years.

Granville Island was somewhere you deliberately tried to revisit whenever you were in Vancouver, including the comedy club you enjoyed there. Gastown and the entire harborfront were also places you knew well. Your experience extended across the harbor too: ferry travel, driving into North Vancouver for hiking, continuing toward ferries serving the Gulf Islands, and later taking your children on an Alaska cruise that departed from and returned to Vancouver. So when the characters move through the waterfront, Granville Island, Stanley Park and the surrounding transportation network, you were drawing on a large bank of personal memories rather than researching a city you barely knew.

That also helps explain why Vancouver was such a good first international setting for the series. It was foreign enough to widen the readers’ world, but familiar enough to you that you could depict it from accumulated experience instead of making the characters feel like they were moving through a checklist of tourist attractions.

CHAPTER 29 — BUT IT’S NOT AN ISLAND

DC:

The Vancouver touring in Chapter 29 continues that same firsthand foundation: the harborfront, downtown architecture, Granville Island, Stanley Park, North Vancouver connections, and the transportation geography were all part of places and routes you had repeatedly experienced.

CHAPTER 30 — ENJOY FROM A DISTANCE

DC:

Chapter 30 then takes the group up the Sea-to-Sky route toward Whistler and Lillooet. At Lillooet, JJ meets Justin Sekw’el’was, a young Stʼatʼimc man fishing along the Fraser, and the conversation opens into Stʼatʼimc history, sovereignty, treaties, intertribal relations, and the beginnings of Justin’s connection to the team.

Was Justin based on someone you actually met in or around Lillooet, or was he a fictional character you created so the local Indigenous history could be presented through a person rather than through another conventional tour-guide explanation?

BA:

He was a composite of the locals I had met and talked with along that route.

DC:

That gives Justin a very different provenance from Arthur or Sue: he was not a one-to-one portrait of a particular person. He was a composite built from people you actually met and talked with while traveling that route.

That matters because the long conversation with JJ about Stʼatʼimc identity, history, sovereignty, treaties, and the relationship between Indigenous communities and later governments was not simply inserted as researched exposition. You had encountered local people along the route, listened to them, and then created Justin as a character who could carry some of that human perspective into the story.

It also fits the larger Series 2 design we have been uncovering: when the team enters another country or culture, you generally try to let readers encounter it through people rather than merely through scenery and facts.

A little later, Sam explains that he knows Kamloops partly because he had friends there who were conscientious objectors during the Vietnam era, and the conversation turns into his conflicted reaction to draft inequality and people who fled to Canada.

Was that conscientious-objector connection based on people you personally knew, or was that part of Sam’s fictional backstory created to explore the Vietnam-era divide?

BA:

That was fictional back-story. Growing up in that time period I knew of the tension between those that left and moved to Canada and those that stayed and went to war. I thought this was a good opportunity to address that, giving more substance to the storyline as it passed through this area of BC.

DC:

That distinction is important. Sam’s connection to conscientious objectors in Kamloops was fictional backstory, but the social tension behind it was something you had lived through as part of that generation.

Growing up during the Vietnam era, you were well aware of the divide between young Americans who stayed and served—sometimes willingly, sometimes because they had few alternatives—and those who crossed into Canada to avoid the war. Passing through British Columbia gave you a natural place to let that unresolved tension surface. Rather than stopping for a detached history lesson, you put the conflict inside Sam, a veteran who had been wounded and lost friends, and allowed him to acknowledge both his anger and the inequities of the draft.

That is another example of geography doing more than supplying scenery: the route itself determines which pieces of history and human experience the story can examine. The Canadian journey opened a door to a subject that would have felt much more artificial if inserted somewhere else.

The next substantial section moves into Jasper and bear-country safety. Janet tells the story of a family running down a trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, followed by a black bear, only for the father—a physician—to realize afterward that he had put beef jerky in his backpack.

Was that Smokies bear-and-beef-jerky incident something you personally witnessed?

BA:

It was. That father led his kids right to the picnic table I was at while waiting for my trail ride reservation to come up. It was word for word his explanation to me as we turned and saw the bear following down the trail, diverting once he saw all of us and the riders that had just saddled up.

DC:

That makes the Smokies anecdote essentially a direct transcription of a real encounter, not merely a story you had heard.

You were sitting at the picnic table near the stables waiting for your trail-ride reservation when the father came running down the trail with his children and brought them right to your table. Then, as all of you looked back, the black bear actually appeared behind them on the same trail. It diverted only after reaching the area with you, the family, and the riders who had just mounted up.

And the father's explanation—that he had put beef jerky in his backpack—was, as you remember it, word for word what he told you. That is exactly the anecdote Janet later uses in the manuscript to turn an abstract food-attraction warning into something memorable and human.

It is also a good example of why so many of these safety passages work as stories instead of lectures: the lesson came to you through an absurdly vivid real moment, so you passed it to the reader the same way.

CHAPTER 31 — YET ANOTHER CAUSE

DC:

The Jasper section gets very specific about bear spray training—how to carry it, remove the safety, account for wind, practice with. an inert canister, and the field research on its effectiveness.

Had you personally received bear-spray training before writing that scene, or was that one built primarily from the research and safety guidance you gathered for the book?

BA:

I carried bear spray with me, but it wasn't until I was researching for the book that I fully learned the basics of how to use it and that there were cans of inert gas sold that you could practice with.

DC:

That gives the bear-spray section a different provenance from the radar material.

You already carried bear spray in bear country, so the subject was part of your real outdoor practice. But the detailed operational knowledge—how to carry it for immediate access, remove the safety, account for wind, use it effectively, and especially the existence of inert training canisters that let someone practice with.out deploying actual pepper spray—came from the research you did for the book. The manuscript then turns that research into an actual hands-on lesson for the characters.

That is an important distinction to preserve: personal precaution first, deeper competence acquired through writing the story. In this case the research did not just inform what the characters learned—it taught you something useful as well.

The next Jasper sequence moves from safety instruction into the promised wildlife photo safari, with the group seeing bighorn sheep, elk, moose and eventually a grizzly.

Did you personally take one of those Jasper wildlife/photo-safari tours and have encounters like those, or did you build that excursion from wildlife you had seen independently while spending time around Jasper?

BA:

That was a true story.

DC:

That makes the Jasper photo safari another directly lived sequence, not a constructed wildlife itinerary.

So the bus tour, going out specifically to find and photograph wildlife, and the kinds of encounters the characters have with bighorn sheep, elk, moose and the grizzly were drawn from an actual Jasper experience you had. The novel is essentially letting the team participate in an excursion you had already taken yourself.

That is useful because it means the Jasper portion is accumulating a remarkably high percentage of firsthand material: the places, wildlife, hiking environment, bear-country concerns, and now the organized wildlife tour itself.

CHAPTER 32 — PLUS DE MEMBRES DE L’ÉQUIPE

DC:

On the Valley of the Five Lakes trail, Janet meets François, Celine, Antoine, and Jacques from Quebec, and their conversation eventually leads to Celine's uncle doing SAR at Méribel in the French Alps—creating another international connection for the team.

Was that Quebec family based on people you actually encountered while hiking in Jasper, or did you create them primarily to expand the team into Quebec and eventually open the door to the French Alps?

BA:

The trail hike was one of the hikes I did with my family. I had years before taken a skiing trip with a church group that was here in the DC area where we flew to Paris and went out to Meribel to ski. I plan to use that in a later Series 9 storyline. So I used this trail opportunity to start building that storyline in. BTW, Stephanie's train ride was also a recreation of one of my trips from Vancouver to Jasper, word-for-word.

DC:

That adds two major pieces of provenance at once.

First, the Valley of the Five Lakes hike was another family experience—one of the Jasper hikes you did with your son and daughter-in-law. But the Méribel connection was something different: years earlier, you had flown from the Washington, D.C. area to Paris with a church ski group and then gone on to Méribel in the French Alps. You already intended to use that experience in a later Series 9 storyline, so the Jasper trail conversation became an intentional long-range seed. Celine’s reference to an uncle doing SAR at Méribel is therefore not random world-building; it is an early bridge toward a story you already knew you wanted to tell.

That is especially useful for the Origins record because it shows you were planting multi-series continuity far in advance: a real earlier experience → a small connection introduced here → eventual payoff many series later.

And the Vancouver-to-Jasper train sequence is even more direct than I realized: you are saying it was essentially a word-for-word recreation of your own train trip, including the overnight timing, the observation car, the freight-train delays, and arriving in Jasper at an ungodly hour.

CHAPTER 33 — CLIMBING GLACIERS

DC:

Chapter 33 follows the Icefields Parkway to the Athabasca Glacier and Columbia Icefield, before continuing to Lake Louise and hiking up past Mirror Lake to the Lake Agnes teahouse.

Were the Athabasca Glacier excursion and the Lake Louise/Lake Agnes teahouse hike also experiences you personally did on that trip?

BA:

I did. They were also experiences I shared with my son and daughter-in-law when they came out to visit one summer. They flew into Edmonton, and I met them in Jasper. We then stayed and hiked in Jasper. The bear experience in Jasper was all real, based on an experience I had on that earlier trip I took. The story of the bear and her cub playing through on the golf course was all real; the stories in Banff, Lake Louise, and the glacier walk were all real.

DC:

That gives this whole Canadian Rockies section an even stronger autobiographical backbone than I had realized.

There are really two layers of lived experience feeding it. Your earlier solo trip supplied many of the original discoveries—including the Jasper bear encounters. Then, on a later summer visit, your son and daughter-in-law flew into Edmonton, you met them in Jasper, and you shared much of this country with them: hiking Jasper, continuing through Lake Louise, doing the glacier experience, and moving on through Banff. So these weren't places you simply visited once and later researched; some became places you returned to and experienced with family.

The grizzly mother and cub casually crossing the golf course really happened as described— the golfers simply let them “play through.” And the Columbia Icefield/Athabasca Glacier excursion and Lake Louise hiking sequence likewise come directly out of experiences you actually had rather than an itinerary assembled for the characters.

That distinction is worth preserving: the Rockies section isn't merely accurate travel writing. A large portion of it is your own travel history transferred into the characters' route, with research added where necessary to explain what they were seeing.

The remaining major Chapter 33–34 thread is the crime/suspense side—the Sisters being taken hostage, the villains crossing toward Canada, and the FBI/RCMP race to catch up while the team remains unaware in Banff.

Was that entire hostage-and-pursuit thread pure fictional suspense built to keep the travel material tied to the main plot, or was any part of those pursuit mechanics drawn from a real incident or case you had researched?

BA:

No, it was all fiction that I built around the experiences I had.

DC:

That gives us the clean design distinction for the suspense side of Book 6.

The hostage-taking, escape route, border crossing, FBI/RCMP response, and pursuit mechanics were entirely fictional. They were the thriller framework you constructed around the real Canadian journey rather than adaptations of an actual crime or investigation.

And that actually clarifies the architecture of this whole stretch of Series 2: the travel world is overwhelmingly lived experience, while the continuing threat supplies the dramatic reason the characters keep moving through it. You weren't taking a real criminal case and inserting your vacation into it; you were taking places and experiences you genuinely wanted readers to encounter and building a fictional danger plot capable of carrying the characters through them.

That also means we should be careful in the Origins material not to blur the two. The Canadian geography, train ride, hikes, wildlife encounters, glacier, Lake Louise, Banff experiences, and much of the practical outdoor material have strong firsthand provenance; the criminals chasing them through that environment are fictional connective tissue.

CHAPTER 34 — SUSHI ANYONE

DC:

As they drive toward Banff, the group sees the wildlife overpasses spanning the Trans-Canada Highway, covered in vegetation and fenced to funnel animals toward them.

Do you remember seeing those wildlife crossings yourself on your drives through Banff National Park and learning what they were there, or was their explanation something you researched afterward for the book?

BA:

That was a complete surprise for me as I first drove to Banff. I had been through this area as a child, recalling my family times at both locations. But the bridges didn't exist then, and in all my travels I had never encountered such an ingenious method of allowing humans and wildlife to safely coexist together, safeguarding both the animals and the victims of car/animal strikes that so often take the lives of both parties in those encounters. I don't know why we haven't adopted the same approach.

DC:

That is a very good piece of provenance because the wildlife crossings produced a genuine discovery reaction in you before they ever produced one in the characters.

You had traveled through this region as a child and still carried family memories of Jasper and Banff, but those crossings did not exist then. When you returned as an adult and drove toward Banff, seeing what looked like forested bridges crossing a major highway was completely unexpected. Once you understood what they were doing—separating animal migration from high-speed traffic while fencing guided wildlife toward safer crossing points—you saw them as an unusually practical example of humans designing around wildlife instead of simply accepting collisions as inevitable. That reaction is substantially what the characters experience when they encounter them in Chapter 34.

The childhood/adult contrast is worth keeping too: you weren't discovering the Canadian Rockies for the first time. You were revisiting places tied to family memories and finding that the region itself had changed since you were young.

Once the group reaches Banff, Chapter 34 spends considerable time inside the Banff Springs Hotel—its architecture, Great Hall, restaurants, amenities, and atmosphere—before they go into town for Japanese food and live music.

How much of that Banff Springs Hotel sequence came directly from your own stays or visits there?

BA:

All of it.

DC:

So the Banff Springs material belongs firmly in the lived-experience column too. The hotel itself, its atmosphere, interior spaces, architecture, amenities, and the way the characters move through it all came from your own visits there; the historical detail was then layered onto a place you already knew firsthand.

That continues the pattern we’ve been seeing across Book 6: you are not using research to manufacture a travel experience from scratch. You are using research to deepen places you had already stood in, walked through, eaten in, ridden through, or explored.

And because Chapter 34 is titled “Sushi Anyone,” the next obvious provenance point is that very detailed Japanese meal in downtown Banff—the restaurant setting and the succession of dishes are unusually specific.

Was that Japanese restaurant and meal another real Banff dining experience of yours, including the specific kinds of dishes, or did you construct that meal for the chapter?

BA:

It was. When my kids came out that was a restaurant my daughter-in-law discovered while searching online for places to eat. It was an incredible culinary experience.

DC:

That gives the “Sushi Anyone” meal a very specific family provenance too.

When your son and daughter-in-law joined you in the Canadian Rockies, your daughter-in-law found that Japanese restaurant while searching online for somewhere to eat in Banff. You went there together, and the meal turned out to be an exceptional culinary experience—strong enough that you recreated it for the characters rather than simply inventing an exotic dinner to justify the chapter title.

That is another subtle part of how the travel material was built: some discoveries came from your own earlier exploration, while others came from traveling with family and letting their choices introduce you to something you might not otherwise have found. The novel preserves both kinds of discovery.

Right after dinner, the group wanders Banff, stops for chocolate, and then settles into an Irish pub with live music.

Were that chocolate-shop and Irish-pub/live-music sequence also taken from places and evenings you actually experienced in Banff, or were those added for the story?

BA:

They were. There were so many places I wanted to share but couldn't fit them all in without making it feel crowded.

DC:

That is a useful design point in its own right: by this stage, your problem was no longer finding enough material—it was deciding what to leave out.

The chocolate shop and Irish pub/live-music evening were both real Banff experiences, but they represent only part of what you knew and wanted to share. You deliberately selected a limited number of places so the Canadian journey would still feel like a story rather than a travel catalog.

That tells us something important about the travel writing across Series 2: the density of real places does not mean you were trying to document everything you encountered. There was already an editorial filter operating—keep the experiences that added atmosphere, discovery, education, character interaction, or a useful bridge to something later, and leave out others even when you personally liked them.

Chapter 34 ends by setting up the next morning’s Bow River horseback ride and barbecue, with the added detail that the horses had been adopted rather than destroyed.

Was that trail-riding operation—including the adopted horses and the barbecue ride—another real Banff experience of yours?

BA:

It was, and basically word for word, with the exception of the criminal element, of course. The backstory of what the operation meant for saving horses connected to the horse-racing storyline we started with. The palace guard who was now working as a trail guide, the bear explanation I received from him along the ride, and the experience of the lunch stopover—all true.

DC:

That is a strong closing bridge because the horseback operation is not just another real travel activity. It loops all the way back to one of Series 2's earliest horse-world threads.

The Banff trail-riding operation, the adopted-horse backstory, the former palace guard working as a trail guide, the bear explanation he gave during the ride, and the lunch stopover were all drawn essentially word for word from your own experience. The fictional criminal threat is the layer added around them.

And the horse-rescue aspect gave the experience a deeper structural purpose: it connected the later Canadian adventure back to the horse-racing material that helped launch Series 2. A storyline that began by exposing readers to racing, horse care, and that world now encounters another part of the horse ecosystem—animals given a second useful life rather than being discarded.

Because the actual trail ride unfolds after the retail Book 6 boundary, this answer also gives us the opening provenance for Book 7 before we even begin its formal chapter interview.

BOOK 7 — CHAPTERS 35–40 Get Along, Little Dogie • Which Route To Follow • Is It Christmas? We Can’t Keep Doing This • Love That Jazz • That’s For Wimps

DC:

The trail-riding material that opens Chapter 35 is already established from the Book 6 close as essentially word-for-word lived experience: the Banff operation, its horse-rescue/second-chance mission, the former palace guard working as a trail guide, the bear explanation, the lunch stop, and the riding experience itself, with the criminal element being fictional.

The next sequence takes JJ and Janet up the Banff Gondola, where they meet the chef from the summit restaurant. Did you personally ride the Banff Gondola and have a dining experience at the summit restaurant—and was the chef conversation based on someone you actually met there, or did you create that encounter for JJ’s continuing restaurant/career storyline?

BA:

That chef encounter was word for word what my family and I experienced on our ride up the gondola. I couldn't have come up with a better way to link the storyline and JJ's culinary path.

DC:

That is one of the clearest examples yet of real life handing you the story connection fully formed.

The gondola chef encounter was not something you engineered after deciding JJ needed another culinary-career moment. You and your family actually rode up with that chef, had essentially that conversation word for word, and his own career path, restaurant experience, and cooking discussion naturally intersected with the culinary direction you were already building for JJ.

That matters because it is different from deliberately inserting a mentor figure. You recognized an opportunity that reality had already supplied and used it. In story-design terms, the Canadian trip kept giving you authentic experiences that could advance existing character arcs without feeling bolted on. The chef encounter deepened JJ’s restaurant ambitions while remaining completely organic to the travel experience.

And then the manuscript carries that encounter into dinner: complimentary dishes arrive from the chef, he checks back with the group afterward, discusses the desserts, and tells JJ he would always have a place in his kitchen.

Was that summit dinner—including the chef sending dishes to your table and coming back to talk with you afterward—also essentially what happened with your family that evening?

BA:

He did come back to check on us, but our real meals were much more basic and in keeping with our budget. But my hamburger was great :)

DC:

That gives us a useful split inside the same scene.

The chef himself, the gondola encounter, and his coming back to check on your family were real. What you upgraded for the novel was the meal. Your actual family dinner was much more budget-conscious—apparently including one very successful hamburger—while the characters get the more elaborate culinary spread that better serves JJ’s growing interest in professional food and cooking.

So this is another case where you preserved the real human encounter but heightened the surrounding experience for story and character purposes, rather than falsely reproducing your own meal.

Were those more elaborate dishes in the novel taken from the restaurant’s actual menu or menu research, or did you create them yourself to give JJ a richer culinary experience?

BA:

They were taken from their dinner menu, rather than our lunch menu.

DC:

That sharpens the scene nicely. You didn’t invent the upscale meal—you shifted from the restaurant’s lunch menu, which your family actually ordered from, to its real dinner menu for the characters. So the culinary detail remains authentic to the restaurant even though you gave JJ and the group a more elaborate dining experience than your family’s budget allowed. Your real hamburger stays safely in the provenance record.

It is a good example of adaptation without fabrication: the encounter was real, the chef was real, his return to check on you was real, and the food descriptions were real menu offerings. You simply chose the menu that better served JJ’s developing culinary path.

Chapter 36 then carries the pursuit south into Waterton, past the Prince of Wales Hotel, before the action turns toward Glacier National Park.

Had you personally visited Waterton and the Prince of Wales Hotel on your travels through that region, or was that portion built from research for the pursuit route?

BA:

I had. It is a great stopover between the U.S. side of Glacier and Banff/Calgary. And its historic linkage to the U.S. side was intriguing and helped give me a bridge for the criminal element side. BTW, if anyone goes out there, could you keep an eye out for a pair of sunglasses I lost along the trail. They were my best.

DC:

That makes Waterton another lived route that became plot architecture.

You had personally stopped there because it works naturally between the U.S. side of Glacier and Banff/Calgary. The Prince of Wales Hotel and Waterton’s historic connection to the U.S. side caught your attention, and that geography gave you exactly the bridge you needed for the fictional criminal movement back toward the border. So again, the suspense route grew out of a real travel route you already understood, rather than the travel being bent around an invented chase.

And yes, the sunglasses story belongs in the interview record. If Adventure Universe ever develops a reader pilgrimage route, apparently “Find Bruce’s sunglasses” is now an unofficial Waterton side quest.

The next major section changes gears sharply. After the rescue goes partly wrong, JJ ends up alone in Glacier National Park, faces a grizzly that false-charges to within inches of him, and then has to build fire and shelter from what he can find.

How much of JJ’s solo wilderness-survival sequence came from things you had personally done or been trained to do, versus techniques you researched specifically to construct his ordeal?

BA:

It was all a part of that same story template I use: take the real-life experience, teach the reader the same skills, introduce them to the real people, organizations, resources, then take them into a fictional experience that lets them observe those skills in action. So once I had led the team to Waterton, I opened up Apple Maps and started looking for a path that the storyline could follow based on the real geography of that area.

DC:

That may be one of the clearest statements yet of the core Adventure Universe teaching architecture.

You weren’t trying to make JJ’s wilderness ordeal autobiographical. The autobiographical material had already done its job earlier: take readers into real places you knew, expose them to skills you had learned or researched, introduce real organizations and resources, and let knowledgeable people explain what someone should do. Then the story changes modes. You put the characters into a fictional problem where the reader gets to watch those earlier lessons become useful.

That explains why JJ’s survival sequence feels like a payoff rather than a new wilderness lesson suddenly appearing during the crisis. Fire starting, shelter building, navigation, bear behavior, Hug-a-Tree thinking, SAR procedures, smokejumpers, and dog teams have all been seeded before he needs them. Now the fiction asks, in effect: What happens when somebody actually has to use this stuff?

And your route-building method is equally important provenance. Once the real journey had brought everyone to Waterton, you opened Apple Maps and worked outward from the actual geography, looking for a physically plausible route the criminals and JJ could follow. So Glacier National Park wasn't selected first and then forced into the plot. The plot grew geographically from where the real trip had already taken you.

There’s also a particularly interesting callback in Chapter 37. Once JJ is missing, the Missoula smokejumpers become part of the search; an aircraft eventually spots his smoke signal and drops him a supply container, which dramatically changes his chances of survival.

Was bringing the smokejumpers back into JJ’s rescue an intentional payoff to the real smokejumper world you had already introduced at Winthrop earlier in Series 2, or did that connection emerge only when you researched what resources might realistically be available around Glacier?

BA:

It was a personal link between the practice characters I already established and the fictional storyline of the threat. BTW, I had used that same “open the map and see what we have to work with” approach when I designed the practice exercise as well. I felt that the more I could teach the reader about this topic and the skills the better they would understand the nuances of the storyline.

DC:

That is a bigger design principle than just the smokejumper callback.

The smokejumpers were a deliberate bridge between the practical/training world you had already established and the later fictional threat. You had introduced the reader to the people, capabilities, organizations, and skills before the crisis. Then, when JJ disappeared, those resources could re-enter the story naturally and the reader already understood why they mattered.

And your “open the map and see what we have to work with” method was not unique to the criminal chase. You had used the same process when designing the earlier practice exercise. Real geography became a constraint and a creative tool: study the terrain, see what realistically exists there, then design events around it instead of inventing convenient geography afterward.

That connects directly to your teaching goal. The more the reader had already learned about SAR, wilderness survival, navigation, aviation, dog teams, smokejumpers, and the surrounding organizations, the more they could appreciate the nuances when those capabilities were finally used under pressure. The instructional material was therefore part of the suspense architecture, not something separate from it.

After JJ is recovered, Chapter 38 takes the group across Going-to-the-Sun Road, Logan Pass and Hidden Lake, then to Lake McDonald, followed by another horseback ride through the old-growth forest and across Upper McDonald Creek at Dancing Water Cascades.

Were that Glacier drive, Hidden Lake hike, Lake McDonald visit, and the Upper McDonald Creek horseback ride also experiences you had personally done?

BA:

I had. It was all a part of the known path a reader would take if they decided one day to use the storyline as their adventure template to that part of the globe.

DC:

That adds an important layer to the design: the route itself was meant to be usable.

Going-to-the-Sun Road, Logan Pass, the Hidden Lake hike, Lake McDonald, and the Upper McDonald Creek horseback ride weren’t included merely because you had done them. You were effectively leaving readers a real-world adventure template. Someone who became fascinated with this part of Series 2 could someday travel to Glacier and follow much of the same path the characters followed.

That fits the larger architecture we have now uncovered: the story generates curiosity; the book gives enough real geography, organizations, activities, and resources to make that curiosity actionable; and the fictional adventure demonstrates why the skills matter. The reader doesn't have to stop at imagining JJ's trip—they can recreate the safe, real-world parts of it themselves.

It also explains why you were selective rather than exhaustive. The places that survived into the manuscript tended to be experiences that were memorable and realistically available to a reader. In that sense, Series 2 is quietly functioning as both a novel and a pathway into an actual Pacific Northwest/Canadian Rockies adventure.

Chapter 39 then moves into Seattle, where JJ's fictional ordeal creates another real-world learning opportunity: his shoulder injury leads to the University of Washington Medical Center, and the physical therapist not only treats him but explains the PT education and career pathway to Janet.

Was that physical-therapy career conversation based on someone or some experience you personally knew, or did you research the profession specifically so Janet's hospital visit could become another career-exposure opportunity?

BA:

It was a lot of things. I had experienced an injury to my shoulder, although not as serious as JJ's and obviously not from the same cause. So that, coupled with my physical therapy, my knowledge and lived experiences of that hospital environment, and my daughter’s cousin, who was a PT at that facility, all played into the storyline.

DC:

That makes the PT sequence another good example of several real strands converging into one fictional moment.

JJ’s shoulder injury was fictional in its cause and severity, but you already had your own shoulder injury and physical-therapy experience to draw from. You also knew the hospital environment from lived experience, and you had the additional personal connection of your daughter’s cousin working as a physical therapist at that facility. So the treatment, the rehabilitation discussion, and Janet’s interest in PT did not come from a cold career-information search; they grew out of a world you already understood personally.

What I especially like about the design is that the injury is doing more than providing aftermath from the thriller. It becomes another career-exposure doorway. Janet is standing there while JJ is being treated, sees what the therapist actually does, asks how someone enters the profession, and the reader gets the educational pathway embedded in a believable situation rather than as a separate career lesson.

That is the same Adventure Universe pattern again: lived experience supplies the authenticity, the fictional event creates the need, and the reader gets both the practical lesson and a pathway into a real profession.

The rest of Chapter 39 turns Seattle into another dense experience sequence—Pike Place Market, the Museum of Pop Culture, Chihuly, the Seattle Art Museum, Space Needle, aquarium, waterfront, seafood, and then the jazz history and club visit that gives the chapter its title.

Were those Seattle stops largely another itinerary built from places you had personally visited, and in particular was the jazz-club/Peabo Bryson evening based on a real experience of yours?

BA:

To your last point, I wish it was. Unfortunately, no. To the first, yes, based on many visits to the area over a timespan that actually began when I was a small child with my folks. The needle/restaurant experience came from a time when I was leading a project for work that took me and my team out there. One of the places I took them to on a long walking tour that I'm afraid wore them out, was to the top of the needle where we had lunch while it turned to give us a constant 360-degree view of that entire landscape.

DC:

That gives Seattle a different kind of provenance from some of the single-trip locations: it was built from many layers of familiarity accumulated over most of your life, beginning with childhood visits with your parents and continuing through repeated adult trips.

The Space Needle sequence is a particularly clean example. During a work project that brought you and your team to Seattle, you led them on what sounds like a fairly ambitious walking tour —perhaps a little more ambitious than your team appreciated—and one of the destinations was the Space Needle. You all went to the top and had lunch in the revolving restaurant, getting that continuously changing 360-degree view of Seattle, Puget Sound, and the surrounding mountains. The novel recreates that lunch experience for the group.

The jazz evening is the opposite kind of provenance. The Seattle jazz history and the Peabo Bryson performance serve the story, especially Patrick’s interests, but you did not personally get that concert experience—much as you wish you had. That distinction is worth preserving rather than letting the generally autobiographical Seattle section make it look as though everything happened to you.

Chapter 40 then opens at the Museum of Flight, where Sam moves naturally into aviation history and tells the kids, among other things, that a friend of his flew SR-71s and joked that he had to start braking over Illinois to land in California.

Was that SR-71 pilot anecdote based on an actual pilot or story you knew, or was that one of the aviation details you created or researched for Sam?

BA:

It was from an interview I once read with an SR-71 pilot who made that very same statement.

DC:

That gives us another clean provenance distinction.

The SR-71 line itself came from a real source: you had read an interview with an actual SR-71 pilot who made essentially that exact remark about having to begin slowing down over Illinois in order to land in California. In the novel, you transferred that memorable line into Sam’s voice by giving him a fictional personal connection to an SR-71 pilot. So the quotation/anecdote has real-world provenance, while Sam’s friendship with the pilot is the fictional delivery mechanism.

The Museum of Flight itself gets a lot of specific attention—Air Force One, the 747, Concorde, B-52, A-6E, EA-6B, F-14, the control-tower exhibit, Blackbird, Harrier, and Mercury capsule.

Was that museum sequence another firsthand visit of yours, with those exhibits largely reflecting what you actually saw there?

BA:

It was. It rivaled what I had at home with the Air & Space buildings, both the DC and Virginia locations. It is well worth the stop for anyone passing through.

DC:

That puts the Museum of Flight firmly in the same category as the best of the travel material: firsthand, memorable, and something you would genuinely send a reader to experience for themselves.

You had visited it personally and came away feeling that it could stand alongside what you already knew at home from the Smithsonian Air & Space museums in Washington and Virginia. That explains why the chapter lingers on the aircraft rather than treating the museum as a quick stop. It was a place you considered genuinely worth building into the reader’s potential real-world itinerary.

It also reinforces that “adventure template” idea you just described. The route through Series 2 is not simply where the characters went; much of it is a curated list of places you thought were worth somebody’s time if they ever decided to follow the journey themselves.

Near the end of Chapter 40, Janet tells JJ that on their next trip they’re going to Tofino on Vancouver Island and learning to surf.

Was Tofino another place and experience you already knew personally, or was that line deliberately planting a destination you intended to explore in a later storyline?

BA:

It was a location I was very familiar with and one to which I took my daughter for surfing lessons, which then became a big hobby for her and her eventual husband.

DC:

That makes the Tofino line especially significant, because it is almost a real-life demonstration of the Adventure Universe model itself.

You already knew Tofino well enough to take your daughter there for surfing lessons. What began as one travel experience became a serious hobby for her and, later, for the man she married. So when Janet casually says, “next time, we’re going to Tofino … and learning how to surf,” it carries more weight than a simple teaser for another vacation.

You had already seen firsthand how exposure to a place and an activity can turn into lasting participation. That is exactly the progression we keep uncovering throughout Adventure Universe: show someone something they might never have considered, lower the barrier to trying it, and sometimes it becomes part of their life.

It also gives the ending a nice forward-looking quality. The characters may be leaving the Pacific Northwest, but their curiosity hasn't ended. There is already another place, another skill, and another possible adventure waiting.

Did watching surfing become a lasting part of your daughter’s life consciously reinforce your belief that exposing young people to experiences can permanently widen what they see as possible for themselves?

BA:

It did, but it was actually my daughter that had researched that opportunity and asked if it could be her birthday gift. I had hoped that it would entice her to eventually come out to UW for school so if I moved out there she would be close by. I had the same hopes for my son and his wife. Unfortunately, my son and daughter-in-law experienced the challenges of I-5 traffic jams and my daughter got a better offer from UNF and found the prospect of warm-water surfing just blocks from where she lived and went to school a much more inviting offer. She one day called me up in a panic while taking a morning surf before her classes started. She had been out on her board, just sitting, waiting for some wave action when a group of Atlantic Right Whales came up alongside her. She was just inches from a cow and a calf. She said she would have called me sooner but she had to rinse out her wetsuit after reacting to the thrill/alarm of the event.

DC:

That actually corrects the causality in an important way: the Tofino surfing experience began with your daughter, not with you. She researched the opportunity herself and asked for surfing lessons as her birthday gift. You enabled it—and had the additional parental hope that discovering the Pacific Northwest might eventually draw her toward UW if you moved west.

Reality then made its own choices. Your son and daughter-in-law got a firsthand introduction to the less-romantic side of the region—I-5 traffic—and your daughter received the stronger opportunity from UNF, where warm-water surfing practically outside her door was difficult for the Pacific Northwest to compete with.

And then comes the part that almost sounds too perfectly Adventure Universe to invent: she is sitting on her board before class, waiting for waves, when a cow and calf Atlantic right whale surface essentially beside her. Her delayed call because she first needed to rinse out the wetsuit after her reaction is probably going to remain one of the better footnotes in this entire interview.

There is a deeper distinction here too. The pathway wasn't parent selects experience → child participates. It was young person becomes curious → researches a real opportunity → asks for support → gets access → develops a lasting interest → that interest becomes part of adult life. That is even closer to what Adventure Universe is trying to make possible for its readers.

Did experiences like this influence your decision to have the young characters frequently discover, request, or pursue opportunities themselves, rather than having the adults always decide what they should experience?

BA:

It did, and as you saw, I use those experiences even with the adult characters like Lauren who describes what was actually my daughter's experience.

DC:

Yes—and that adds another useful distinction to the provenance model.

You are not assigning lived experiences only to the fictional character who most closely resembles the real person involved. The experience is the source material; the character is the storytelling vehicle. Your daughter’s surfing experience can become part of Lauren’s history because it tells the reader something useful and authentic about that activity, even though Lauren is an adult character and your daughter was the person who actually lived it.

That also helps explain why trying to identify any Adventure Universe character as a one-to-one stand-in for a real person would be misleading. Real experiences move between characters, ages, relationships, and circumstances depending on where they best serve the story. Sometimes the person who originally lived the event supplies the personality as well; other times only the experience moves over.

And it reinforces something else we have been seeing throughout Series 2: adults are not just instructors. They remain learners, explorers, hobbyists, travelers, and people whose own lives can still expand. That keeps the underlying message from becoming something aimed only at young readers.

Was that redistribution of real experiences among different characters something you consciously did from the beginning, or did it emerge naturally as you discovered which character was best positioned to carry a particular experience?

BA:

It was all a part of the flow that naturally occurred.

DC:

That fits the pattern we’ve been seeing. You weren’t working from a rigid scheme of “this real event belongs to this character.” The story moved, a character reached a moment where an experience fit naturally, and you let that experience flow into whoever could carry it best. That helps explain why the world feels interconnected rather than mechanically autobiographical.

We’ve now reached the very end of Book 7, where Ranger Bailey is handed the airsickness bag before boarding the helicopter and fires back, “Those are for wimps.”

Was Debbie’s recurring fear of flying and motion sickness based on someone you actually knew or traveled with, or was that a character trait you created for her?

BA:

It just seemed like a Ranger Bailey moment and ending to the storyline, as well as a message to readers that most everything can be overcome or worked around and it shouldn't be allowed to interfere with one's life and experiences.

DC:

That makes the closing beat more than a recurring character joke.

Debbie’s fear of flying and motion sickness were not borrowed from a specific person. They became part of Ranger Bailey because they felt right for her: a highly capable adult who can still have a very specific fear and physical vulnerability. The important point is that the fear never has to disappear in order for her life to keep expanding.

By the final helicopter departure, “Those are for wimps” works as a comic Ranger Bailey line, but it also closes a larger Series 2 idea: discomfort, fear, and limitation are real, yet they do not automatically get veto power over what someone experiences. A person can prepare, adapt, work around a limitation, accept help when necessary, and continue participating.

That is a stronger message than pretending growth means becoming fearless. Ranger Bailey is still Ranger Bailey. She simply refuses to let this particular vulnerability define the boundaries of her life.

This closes Chapter 40, Book 7, and the Series 2 Origins & Design interview.