What if losing your voice means you found it?

 

I cannot stop the famous Chinese curse ‘May you live in interesting times’ from constantly running through my head. I, like many others, had no idea things were about to go sideways so quickly after last November's election...Well, part of me did, my gut. It knew the day after and one of the things it devoured was my ability to write.

Imagine waking up morning after morning and as soon as your brain kicks it, it shrugs and says, “why bother?” I’m not talking writer’s block. This was more like the old joke about the light at the end of the tunnel being a gasoline tanker driven by drunken monkeys, all flicking disposable lighters.

I’ve been writing books, essays, newspaper columns, and short stories for close to forty years, with, for lack of a better description, a sliding style. Think academic when I wrote regularly for Behavioral and Social Sciences Journal, political for things like my weekly column “Right-Minded, But Left of Center,” nature-oriented when I contributed regularly to Wolf Moon Journal when it was still publishing. When it came to fiction, I started leaning into science fiction/fantasy, then into dark or light when writing short stories. In recent stuff, I’ve gone into paranormal and alternate realities with dashes of romance.

The election smothered my connection to any of those, leaving me balanced on the razor’s edge between apathy and despair. Forget knowing what my voice was, I could barely gather the energy necessary to choose between scrambled eggs and oatmeal for breakfast, let alone sit down and write.

I experienced nuclear attack drills in elementary school, protesting the Vietnam War, got through the Arab Oil embargo, Tricky Dick’s Watergate and silent majority days, 9/11, the ever-growing climate deterioration, and Trump’s first term. I was able to hold on to my cynical sense of optimism through all of them, not to mention writing (although 9/11 hit me so hard, I stopped for more than six months). This time, the precipitating event was bigger, darker, and one hell of a lot closer to my exiting this world and heading to the next.

It took a lot of lying on my bed, letting the strange regions in the back of my brain set about brewing whatever it is that they do, for me to realize the only path out of my darkness was to embrace it and go. The exit happened just over three weeks ago when a very dark plot crawled out from where those dark regions in my head reside. Since then, I’ve averaged 1,000 words a day, often plotting what comes next on my way to, or from dreamland.

Here’s a flyleaf type summary. A rolling electromagnetic pulse-EMP begins in the far east, effectively wiping out all technology, but moves slowly enough to give our current president time to panic and hit the red button, launching all our nuclear missiles. However, they’re hit by the EMP just as they reach sub-space, leaving them floating until gravity randomly pulls them back to earth. Some detonate, others blow big holes in the ground, scattering radioactive material with ever scarier results.

There are four main characters who don’t know each other as the story begins, a 21 year old man with high functioning autism, a seventeen year old girl who had to watch her parents meet a horrible end, a ten year old girl who the other two rescue from a bizarre group who are under the girl’s mother’s spell, and lastly, a telepathic boa constrictor named Feather.

Once they realize all the falling missiles are creating a nuclear winter, they must find a way to warmer climes. That ain’t gonna be easy. It’s dark and there’s plenty of gore and unexpected mutants. Stay tuned to find out if, or how they make it from the eerie wasteland we know as Maine, to a tropical paradise (if any remain).