‘When the Darkness’ my science fiction collab story is updated on wattpad

‘When the Darkness’ is a sci-fi collab story that I’m working on with Emily Hurricane. The book is split between our two profiles, with readers needing to alternate between our profiles for each chapter.

The basic premise of the story is that the world is going to end when it is swallowed up by a black hole. The catch is that it won’t be happening for 15 years. So everyone in the world just has to live with the fact that there IS no future and yet carry on with life as normally as possible.

I’m so incredibly proud of the shape the story is taking. I feel like this is my most deeply-felt work since ‘Combustion.’ It’s incredibly honest and emotionally vulnerable. (Okay, maybe it sucks and I’m really feeling myself way too much right now lol).

Anyway, the title “When the Darkness Takes Us” has a bit of a double-meaning, because obviously there is an imminent black hole that will quite literally take them, but also both protagonists have to deal with their own “darkness.” Both main characters are incredibly flawed and do many things to create their own problems.

The book probably has its flaws, as I did make an attempt to abstract some events from my own life that were emotionally painful and revealed to me a lot of ugly stuff in my own character. The problem with that is that nobody is truly objective about their own behavior. Ever. Our brains have ways of convincing us we are the victim, even when we’re the antagonist. So as honest as I try to be, it will never lose that lens of subjectivity. There will always be somewhat of a veneer of dishonesty on it. There just isn’t any way for me to ever truly tell which parts are dishonest. I view the world with myself as the main character, and I don’t know what it looks like to other people.

But then, that’s why I love fiction. It’s a way to briefly get out of your own head and into someone else’s.

Anyway, latest chapter is here