This is the End

[image error] It's 23.39, which means I have twenty minutes before I turn into a pumpkin. Eyelids are getting heavy and I've had to stop the latest book before I start writing gibberish or fall asleep with my finger on the Z key again. But my latest plot has got me thinking and that spells a sleepless night if I don't divulge a little.

My new book is about the future, not so much flying cars but continued recession and civil unrest (I may throw in a wizard I haven't decided yet). The back drop to the plot is significant only in so far as it encumbers a current feeling which I think we can all relate to. In fact when I wrote this book I have side stepped my usual comfort zone of general fantasy and have tried my hand at something grittier and more realistic. This manoeuvre left me wondering whether I was dancing around genres a little too freely for someone who is barely established in one category, but then it occurred to me, I don't write fantasy stories, I write apocalyptic stories.

If I was a bearded man with crazy eyes I would be marching up and down some high street with a board hung round my neck preaching Armageddon. And why is this my focus? Why do I have at least eighteen contingency plans for when the end finally comes? I honestly don't know, but as I look at the world around me at the moment I can't help but feel, in the pit of my stomach, that something is wrong and something has to change if we're to make it unscathed.

When you think about it we're facing so many threats to our existence our chances of not facing certain doom are probably not worth betting on. Global warming, war, famine, poverty, super volcanoes, asteroids and zombie plagues are all waiting on the touch line screaming "pick me, pick me." The worst cause of all though, the one that captains the team is man itself. Our dominant species rules Earth like mold conquers a bathroom. We are there festering and unwelcome, ruining the white grouting and threatening the rubber duck. We are Armageddon.

In Dark Waters the end of the world comes in a zombie plague but this is instigated by one insane despot. The back drop to the story is the unravelling of existence and my characters battle to stop the end and then to survive it. Whereas in my WIP the end has already happened and we are just trawling through a Tolkein prologue. My characters are survivors, hardened yet still unmistakably human and flawed.

So do I really think our days are numbered and John Cusack is going to take the lead in some implausible, pointless finale? Oh god I seriously hope not, but I think we can all feel an atmospheric change around us. Maybe it's just global warming or maybe it's the fact that we're finally waking up and realising our mistakes. This shift in barometric pressure as far as I am concerned is only an inspirational fuel to my writing, but when I look at the world around me and see men and women rising against the current climate I think, perhaps I've only just scratched the surface.

(Psst - given that "this is the end" (The Doors) you can download Dark Waters for free from Smashwords using this code AX29U)