Guest Blog: Shannon Skaer and The Last Climb

Dear Readers,

I hope you are doing well! This week, I am off to New Orleans for a psychology conference. Here's hoping for safe travels and a smooth conference. What things are going on in your life?

Introduce yourself—name, where you’re from, and something people notice when they meet you.

Good morning! My name is Shannon Skaer, and I’m from Oregon, (but not Portland.) One thing people notice when they meet me is that I have ten children. In fact, it’s rare that someone doesn’t notice this. I’m told it's my most memorable feature, which is fine by me, because by some odd trick of fate I happen to have ten of the most extraordinarily good looking and angelic children on the planet (except when they aren't.)

Tell us about your book—title and back cover blurb.

The Last Climb

In the fading days of the Ice Age, a monster is unleashed.

The Last Climb is a pulse-pounding, bite-sized tale of survival based on one of history’s greatest floods.

When young Chief Tupak feels the ground shake beneath his feet, he knows something is terribly wrong. The great river is not just rising—it’s coming, a wall of water taller than the trees, faster than an arrow in flight. As an unstoppable deluge crashes toward his village, Tupak must make an impossible choice: follow the advice of the past or forge a new path before the water swallows them all.

Inspired by real catastrophic geology, The Last Climb is a gripping survival story that echoes the legacy of the global flood. With the article What Was the Missoula Flood by Michael Oard, this snapshot of the apocalyptic disaster that shaped the landscape of the Pacific Northwest will be hard to forget.

Share one thing that you found difficult or challenging about writing this book.

When writing this book, one of my greatest challenges was research. Much research is required for a historical tale. The problem is, no one tells you exactly how much. Case in point: let’s say a character walks though a forest. As an author, there’s no one by your elbow to cry stop once you’ve compiled a list of five possible species of tree for your forest and before you begin charting the historical climate data to determine which deciduous trees would still have leaves.

Somewhere between genius and insanity lies the knowledge of where to stop. I haven’t found it yet.

Ask the blog reader a quirky question or two?

Discussion questions:

1.      Would you rather run full speed up a mountain, like Tupak did in The Last Climb, or die? Would there be a difference between the two?

2.      Have you ever witnessed a natural disaster? How did it change your life?

And since Christina said I have to answer my own questions:

1.      I’d be stuck charging up the mountain, because what else can you do when you’re carrying a baby?

2.      Can I count the time the upstairs toilet flooded so badly it rained in the kitchen below? Like most disasters, it included rioting, mass panic and widespread devastation—confined to one room.

Share your social media and buy links!

Pick up a free copy of The Last Climb on my website https://shannonskaer.com/freebook/

Or order a paperback on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Last-Climb-Missoula-Disaster-Fiction/dp/B0DL3V5MLN

Find out more about me at my website https://shannonskaer.com/

Interesting questions, Shannon! Thank you for being a guest.