The Final Pack

Official tumblr for The Final Pack, by Kedreeva Whitemane.

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Welcome to The Final Pack

The Final Pack is a series of 4(6?) original books I am beginning work on. I will be separating information regarding it here, just to generally keep it in one place and easy to find and sort. We'll see how it goes.

The Final Pack

Six years after the 2012 apocalypse, Osker Owens' best friend gets bitten by a werewolf. The deal Osker strikes to save him leads Osker out into the apocalpyse in the company of wolves, to discover all the wonders that await him outside the protected walls of a human encampment.

A post-apocalypse hopepunk road trip, with lots of supernatural and fantasy creatures roaming the ruined world around a found family, and a hefty dose of magic and mythology on the side.

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I finished the "first" draft of book 1 literally at a new year's eve event with my family! I ended up adding around 8k words, just in updating sentences to reflect ten extra years of practice (since I originally wrote chapter 1 in 2012/early2013) and adding some current lore.

I gave it some time to rest, and I am back at the start writing the second draft, just about finished with chapter 1. I'm starting to really appreciate these characters and their fresh quirks. They are surprisingly cooperative, and it feels good to be working on the early story. Like going back and seeing my favorites when they were just babies, just little colts testing their shaky limbs.

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I finished chapter 4 and I'm starting chapter 5. Everything is very slow, but I think it's going well.

I'm on the fence about posting bits and pieces. I kind of want to show you folks the first scene, at least! But it feels weird to post anything since no one knows any of the characters. I suppose that's the point of sharing, though.

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well, I just started chapter 4 of Part 1 (I'm blowing through it but it's a shorter chapter), and I'm already starting to think about how I want to handle the "part 2" stuff. The events of part 2 span like 300k words, but there are definitely distinct arcs to it, generally location/adventure based. I'm trying to decide if I want to split it at the natural splice points into two long books, or split it into a smaller series. Part 1 is probably going to end up being around 80k, give or take, and the middle will probably lengthen some as well.

As a reader do you think you'd prefer a couple of big works released far apart, or shorter ones released more often? If you could get an anthology of the shorter works anyway once the "book" amount of them are released, does that make a difference?

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I'm writing the first book of this series for nanowrimo, and I've just finished chapter 2!

I'm actually re-writing, completely; no copy/paste from the first draft, and editing/adding/altering as I go. I'm finding it very interesting to touch the start of this story, since I put the first chapter down about 10 years ago. It's nice to see the growth I've made!

I will definitely have to edit all this again heavily, since this is just the translation phase, but I may post a little bit of the raw writing along the way.

But for now... time to start chapter 3!

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Before the end, Marcus Emerson was well-known by supernatural creatures, particularly werewolves, as a lawyer that worked to keep werewolves out of jail, where their habit of turning into giant direwolves on the full moon would get the whole lot of them exposed. He originally worked out of LA, and when the end hit, he and his mate and youngest daughter, Ivy, headed north to try to find Steve, near Sacramento, but he had already been chased out by human hunting parties that had arisen in the wake of the end. Marcus and his mate manage to track Steve down, but Marcus' wife is killed in the process, and Ivy is lost when they scatter. Marcus and Steve travel east through the rockies to get away from the hunters hounding them, and keep going all the way to Nashville to look for Abigail, his eldest daughter, and her small pack. While they didn't find her there, they did manage to track her down. She had already lost her mate and two young children, and has no interest in being a lone wolf, so she rejoins her family as they travel looking for others in the aftermath, avoiding hunters.

[kedreeva]

I’m getting ready to publish the last chapter of The Final Pack, so here are some of the maps I had saved for it.

1: New Hope, and New Hope’s library 2-3: Skytown 4: The Farm 5: Chimera Crossings 6: The red line of death; everything east of the red line is underwater or partially underwater. 7: The Gouge. The red dot in Nebraska is Chimera Crossings, and the red dot at the southeast of Missouri is, I THINK where they crossed the Mississippi

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Scarlet was 12 when the end hit, living in southern Nebraska. Her parents kept her and her brother alive for two years before a grim began to track them down. The family split up to try to avoid all of them dying to it, but the grim had all their scents. It hunted them down, one by one. Scarlet was the last, and Marcus got to her first. He asked her if she wanted to be a werewolf with him and his family, and told her that if it worked, if she turned, the grim would never bother her again. It only went after humans. Scarlet agreed, and shortly thereafter joined the Emerson pack. She was not always called Scarlet, but that is the name she chose, and that is the only one her family remembers. She took the pack's last name when she joined, even though she is unrelated by blood. She has the slightest of the human forms, but the most massive of the wolf forms, her fur a bold auburn and her eyes red.

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takes a deep breath and lets it out... I have picked names for the main two characters and some of the side ones!

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Osker Owens and Steve Emerson.

Osker was 15 when the end hit, still living with his dad in the Midwest. They'd been on vacation in San Francisco, to see the aquarium and the bridge and the redwoods. They didn't know anyone. They didn't have anything. His dad is a mechanic, John Owens.

Steve was 18 when it hit, and he was on the run with his pack outside Sacramento. With all of the humans hunting down supernatural creatures, they had to flee- they crossed the Rockies to get away, but they lost his mother to hunters. His aunt and uncle were picked off first, and two of his cousins. His sister's mate and child. They finally got far enough away, hid well enough, lost the hunters trailing them (or the hunters lost interest), and started trying to reform the pack. His father, Marcus Emerson, grief struck still after 6 years, returned to seek revenge, and brought the rest of the pack with him.