Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer - Posts Tagged "apocalypse"

A few years back, I had a particularly disturbing dream in which there had been some sort of world-changing disaster. In the dream, people were walking the roads, trying to get to better places.

The neighborhood in which we lived at the time was the Cumberland Road Subdivision in Griffin, Georgia. In the dream, folks there were getting ready for this new situation.

In the dream, I found myself going to a neighbor's home and talking my way inside. Once I got inside, I killed the neighbor and casually took all his food back to my house for me and my family.

It was a cold, cruel dream, but a pretty darned cool inciting incident for a story. I've leaned on that dream a few times to write unpublished and incomplete stories about the much-anticipated event that changes the world for this generation.

I anticipate we'll see a lot of people behaving as badly as I did in my dream, though I am hoping that I am not one of them. I'd like to think that I'll be one of the cooler heads that prevails. But. Things don't always go as planned.

Like most folks, I keep thinking that I really ought to stock up on canned goods and ammo. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. The folks who have -- and who make a big deal about it -- kind of scare me.

One thing is for sure: I'd much rather write about the apocalypse than live through it. But. Just in case you and I do manage to experience it, I hope you don't mind if I drop by your place for a short visit. It should only take a few minutes

I love the whole post-apocalypse scenario. It's a chance to have epic stories in worlds with fewer people and, thus, fewer complications.

For example, one of my side projects is called Worst Murder Mystery Ever. I set it in 1968 because I needed it to be a simpler time. Still, because legal matters are involved, I am running into complications that limit the plot.

Even 1968 has too many people and too many complications.

My novel Evil Is Always Human was set in 1912 and has pretty limited involvement with legal matters. Well. Other than the murders of a few people and the prosecution of the innocent. Still. I could have injustice in 1912 without worrying that it would be illogical. It was 1912, after all.

So.

The idea of a novel set in a post-Apocalyptic America is appealing for that same reason. I think Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of the best of the genre. It is a simple tale surrounded by horror, rooted in reality and yet unbound by our world.

So, yeah, I'm thinking about that.

Although I had several chapters of a zombie apocalypse novel going, I think there are too many zombie books out there right now. Showing the world after a different disaster would probably be better. The unfortunate truth is that there are a lot of ways things could get worse and relatively few ways things could get better.

I would also like to consider the medium itself as an opportunity to create. Rather than simply telling the tale in third person -- or even in first person -- I think it might be interesting to combine some different narrators as well as some different ways of introducing information. It could be fun.

With November rapidly approaching, I am thinking that I want to do another book, but do one totally different from the last one. We'll see. We'll see.