Pulse Point by Colleen Nelson Blog Tour (Guest Post)

Title: Pulse Point

Author: Colleen Nelson & Nancy Chappell-Pollack

Genre: Fantasy/YA
Publisher: Yellow Dog

Release Date: May 8, 2018

Summary (Goodreads)

Pulse Point is set in a future where the climate has made the world inhospitable to humans. In order to survive, people live in self-sustaining domed cities. The City that Kaia and her family live in is run by Overseers, guards that ensure all the Citizens follow the guidelines so the City can maintain its ‘Energy In = Energy Out’ policy. Citizens are only allowed to use the energy they create. Energy production is calculated and displayed on their pulse point, a transmitter embedded in a person’s finger. When a Citizen is no longer able to produce energy, they are Balanced, or killed.

Guest Post

Top 5 things We Learned Writing Dystopian

1) Be Specific and Research - The end of the world has occurred so how do these characters survive?  The world building has to be logical and plausible, so we researched how people living in a domed city would use solar panels, manage waste and what crops they’d grow. We were lucky to have an editor in Catharina de Bakker who pushed us and asked challenging questions about the minutiae in the story.

2) Higher Stakes - In a dystopian world, survival becomes a much greater stake than love, money, or status.  The push through each chapter was to make sure Kaia could cope, first in her world in the dome and then outside the dome.  Survival was the driving force for Kaia and Lev.

3) Dystopian Names - If you write a dystopian novel, for some reason the character names need to be different.  Our characters have been renamed a few times.  We really wanted staccato names in the City that were harsh sounding: Tar, Raf, Kaia and Sy. The Citizens are all about efficiency, so their names would resonate with this belief. The Prims had different names that were older and more melodic: Gideon, Nadia, Ezekiel.

4)Setting - The setting of a Dystopian world needs to be highly descriptive as you are creating something that may be familiar but has also been greatly changed, in our case due to climate change.  The detailed description was challenging at times to write (are we writing too much?) and necessary at times (Lev felt rain drops for the first time).  The sensations and visuals of this alternate reality on earth after tremendous climatic changes was a far reach from writing realistic novels.

5)The Past needs to be referenced - The past needs to be mentioned as a point of reference to a dystopian novel.  I have never before needed to reference the past in a novel like I have with this one.  Referring to it too much is overkill, but too little doesn’t allow the reader to understand what has happened.   

Pulse Point Blog Tour

Colleen Nelson & Nancy Chappell-Pollack

May 28 Stuck In YA Books
May 29 Can Lit for Little Canadians
May 30 Reading Maria
May 31 Chapter by Chapter
June 1 Biblio Virgo 

#PulsePoint @ColleenNelson14 @NancyCPollack
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