Right, no fretting over the imperfections of last week’s post or missing my self-appointed Monday date with blogging. I may be a day (or two) late, but I’m here. Let’s get on with it, shall we?
For a very long time, I’ve had a vague idea about writing (or “telling”) a sort of apocalypse story. Not post-apocalyptic, but of an apocalypse, a story about the world directly before and during its end. But I also say “sort of” because—I suppose like many post-apocalyptic narratives—the world doesn’t actually end. The world as we know it ends; the world and its inhabitants undergo dramatic change, and the rules change (this is the important bit, to which I’ll return later). So to be more precise, I want to tell a story about the events leading up to the world-as-we-know-it falling apart, then paint the epic beauty that is that falling apart. I know, it’s been done, almost as often as all the stories about “the world after the fall”. What do I have new to offer, especially if my idea is only vague? Well, that’s a very important question that I’m going to set aside for a moment. Don’t worry, I don’t want to tell another zombie story. But I first want to dig into my current creative process here.
My vague ideas have followed numerous paths, often stopping before they start, so that despite reoccurring themes and concepts, I’ve never followed any one idea to its conclusive apocalypse. In fact, I often find myself more caught up in what happens before the end. Perhaps my wanting to tell this story is a bit like the millenarian Christian prophesies of Armageddon with which I grew up as a child; although ever present in my mind, just ahead in the near future, it never actually comes to fruition. Or perhaps I’m caught up in a particular zeitgeist—that portion of human civilization that seems hellbent on (the idea of) its own destruction.