Hi there and thanks for your interest in my story. Just so you know, this is a sequel to the highly acclaimed (by me and possibly a few others) book Tourist Trap. You can find it here on Wattpad and I would definitely recommend reading it before this one. I suppose you could read this one first, but you definitely wouldn't get some of the jokes and you'd probably be pretty confused by some things that are quite frankly pretty weird, but are explained for the most part in the first one. Also, if you read this first and then decided to read Tourist Trap afterwards you're going to spoil a bunch of stuff in that story. I can't stop you if that's what you decide to do, but I can and I will think you're silly.
It took me a long time to write this, mostly because I didn't work on it at all for the better part of nine years. I started writing it back in 2005 and got somewhere around fifty pages or so into it before deciding for various reasons that I wasn't in the right head space to write it at that time. So I stopped working on it and set it aside and kind of didn't think I'd ever get back to it again. I can honestly say this story wouldn't exist without Wattpad. I stumbled on this site in 2013 and decided to post my first book (the aforementioned Tourist Trap) just for fun. Well, some people started to read it and it seemed like a decent number of them enjoyed it pretty well. I was even asked by the nice people who run this place if I would like it to be a featured story on the site, which was really cool. Then before too long, after a number of people had read the whole thing, the question started coming up, "Well, what happens next?"
What happens next, indeed? I kind of knew, because I did actually have a little bit done on a sequel, but I hadn't worked on the thing in almost a decade. Honestly a lot of stuff changes in that amount of time. I was in a pretty different place in life than I was when I started it, and even more so than when I wrote the first book. Was I even capable of writing a worthy followup to Tourist Trap? I didn't want to disappoint all of the nice people who had said they liked it. Also it had been so long since I had looked at the sequel I had started, that I couldn't remember much about it. I wasn't sure if what I had written so long ago was any good or not, and I didn't recall where I was planning to go with the story, or if I'd even had a plan at all. I kind of had a mental block as far as resuming work on the sequel went. It seemed like a good idea to start writing it again in theory, but in actual practice the thought of working on it sent me into a weird paralysis. Still, I felt guilty every time someone asked me what the heck happened next to Zeke and everyone else. It's my own fault. I could have wrapped everything up in a neat little bow in the first one, but instead I left things a little open-ended. Hell, I more or less implied there would be a sequel. I also actually knew a little bit about what happened next, because I had already written about it.
But was what I'd already written any good? I sure as hell didn't know. I briefly considered scrapping the whole thing and starting fresh with a new sequel. But first I decided I should probably re-read what I had written way back in 2005. And a funny thing happened. I got kind of sucked into the dang thing. I was disappointed when I reached the spot where I had left off. I knew all of a sudden that I had to finish this story. So somewhere around the summer of 2014, I blew the rust off my typing fingers and wrote the first new words on the sequel in about nine years. That was a strange thing to think about, but I didn't worry about it too much and pressed on. Along the way, a bunch of stupid real life stuff made demands on my time and kept me from working as fast as I would have liked, but I finally finished the sucker off in September of 2015. It's almost certainly a very different book than it would have been if I had somehow finished it off in 2005, but I'm convinced it's the book it was meant to be. It just took a little while to come together. Maybe it was a late bloomer. I didn't want to just completely rehash the first book, so you'll probably find it to be a bit of a different beast than Tourist Trap, but I do hope you find it to be a worthy successor. I also hope a lot of you that were asking me about the sequel for the past couple years will find your way back here and check it out. I honestly wouldn't have written it if it weren't for you, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I'd also like to give a special shout-out to a couple of fellow Wattpad users. KenMagee was one of the earliest and most vocal supporters of Tourist Trap and his encouragement went a long way towards motivating me to resuming work on the sequel. So, thanks Ken! He's also a very talented and funny writer and I would highly encourage you to check out his story Dark Tidings if you get a chance. I'd also like to thank Fairytale_Fabler. Her comments were always very thoughtful and fun to read and she also helped to really motivate me to finish Doorways to Everywhere by challenging me to a race to the end of our respective sequels. Check out her story Fairy Tale: Winter's Bite if you're looking for a fun and exciting read. Also, I'll be writing a fan-fiction set in the world of that story, because I lost the bet I made with her. But it's okay, because we're all winners in the end. I would hand out gold stars at this point, but I don't have any, so use your imaginations. We're readers, we actually have them.
All right, without further ado... here's Doorways to Everywhere.