The End of Days: Brainstorming
Feb. 10th, 2012 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaBack-Cover Blurb:
On October 13th, 2012, Earth Eta Standard Time, the End of Days arrives in the multiverse. It doesn’t come in fire and brimstone, as promised by the prophets, but in rain: across all worlds, across all times, to remove sentient life from every iteration of Earth. But when the rain clears away, seven humans remain, inexplicably left behind to cope with the decimation of their species and their own continued survival. Why were they left behind? What is the End of Days, and is it still around to haunt them? More urgently, is that an allosaurus eating a house cat?
Our heroes are:
Violet Krikorian, the Simultaneous Cosmic Horror,representing Earth Eta;
Alanna Black, the Sociopathic Empath, representing Earth Zeta;
Marat, the Uncontrollable Healer, representing Earth Epsilon;
Saoirse of Amranai, a Daughter of the Sea, representing Earth Delta;
Eirian Lionsgrip, the Prince of the Glass Island, representing Earth Gamma;
Czattim Ƈhatma, the Shapeshifting Pterosaur, representing Earth Beta;
Kephri Emeka Obi, the Reality Warping Serf, representing True Earth
Inside this book, you will find the travails of these seven unwitting companions as they attempt to survive in a Late Jurassic Period world interspersed with occasional interludes of the thirteenth century and the original Primordial Soup, and their adventures as they search for an answer to the question: What, exactly, is the End of Days?
Potential Chapter Titles (with Focus Character)
1. Alanna – Undesired Sociopathic Tendencies
2. Kephri – Time Spaghetti in the Primordial Soup
3. Marat – Zeppelins Were Always A Terrible Idea
4. Eirian – Aderyn's Second Law of Thermodynamics
5. Saoirse – On the Wings of the Great Quetzalcoatlus
6. Ƈhatma – Polygamy, Polyamory, and Polysexuality
7. Violet – Ninth-Dimensional Horrors and Synchronicity
Potential Themes, Conflicts, and Resolutions
I like to think that if this is ever published, the reviews will talk about how it’s a dazzlingly absurdist view of the world, which takes readers’ expectations and turns them on their heads to create a world that is, at its heart, about what it means to be a human being. Because I'm an English major, and it would warm the cockles of my heart if I was able to write stories about metahumans riding dinosaurs around sixteenth-century Toledo which also explore the many different forms of love, preferably at the same time and in the same scenes. Antsy Does Time has proved to me that this can be done: for a young adult book about a kid selling contracts to keep a histrionic classmate alive is surprisingly complex and thoughtful.
The plot, such as it is, that I imagine them following is one in which they set out on a quest for the End of Days, to find out what it is, because they’ve noticed that every prophecy talks about the ‘arrival’ of the End of Days as though it’s a thing – even in cultures where such personifications aren’t typical. So they travel around, having all sorts of wacky adventures and forming relationships and probably having a couple of other subplots, too, involving the repopulation of the earth, how to be a family and get along and raise Marat, et cetera. At the end, when they finally do meet the End of Days, it’s either (a) them, (b) a button that they have to push because they’ve travelled back in time the farther they walk, and they have to either do it, or risk not having their friendships at all, (c) a very young Eldritch Abomination whose very existence warps reality without it even trying; all it wanted to do was meet other life forms and not live out its exile from the Beyond alone, but instead it created the apocalypse, (d) they find a way to press the reset button, kind of like in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur Dent goes back to Earth 2 like nothing ever happened. Shoot, I just realized that that’s probably where I got my idea from. But it turns out to be so deadly bizarre that they can’t cope with it, so they all, independently, set off to find the reset button again and undo it so that they can go back to having their found family. I’d like to think that the novel spans about a decade, and that when they hit ‘reset’, they’re dumped back into their old bodies as well.
I don't know, I think it'd be fun to try to write something wacky and surreal with Meaningful Themes, especially after hacking my way through the amoral jungle of People Being Selfish Bastards that is my current endeavor.
On October 13th, 2012, Earth Eta Standard Time, the End of Days arrives in the multiverse. It doesn’t come in fire and brimstone, as promised by the prophets, but in rain: across all worlds, across all times, to remove sentient life from every iteration of Earth. But when the rain clears away, seven humans remain, inexplicably left behind to cope with the decimation of their species and their own continued survival. Why were they left behind? What is the End of Days, and is it still around to haunt them? More urgently, is that an allosaurus eating a house cat?
Our heroes are:
Violet Krikorian, the Simultaneous Cosmic Horror,representing Earth Eta;
Alanna Black, the Sociopathic Empath, representing Earth Zeta;
Marat, the Uncontrollable Healer, representing Earth Epsilon;
Saoirse of Amranai, a Daughter of the Sea, representing Earth Delta;
Eirian Lionsgrip, the Prince of the Glass Island, representing Earth Gamma;
Czattim Ƈhatma, the Shapeshifting Pterosaur, representing Earth Beta;
Kephri Emeka Obi, the Reality Warping Serf, representing True Earth
Inside this book, you will find the travails of these seven unwitting companions as they attempt to survive in a Late Jurassic Period world interspersed with occasional interludes of the thirteenth century and the original Primordial Soup, and their adventures as they search for an answer to the question: What, exactly, is the End of Days?
Potential Chapter Titles (with Focus Character)
1. Alanna – Undesired Sociopathic Tendencies
2. Kephri – Time Spaghetti in the Primordial Soup
3. Marat – Zeppelins Were Always A Terrible Idea
4. Eirian – Aderyn's Second Law of Thermodynamics
5. Saoirse – On the Wings of the Great Quetzalcoatlus
6. Ƈhatma – Polygamy, Polyamory, and Polysexuality
7. Violet – Ninth-Dimensional Horrors and Synchronicity
Potential Themes, Conflicts, and Resolutions
I like to think that if this is ever published, the reviews will talk about how it’s a dazzlingly absurdist view of the world, which takes readers’ expectations and turns them on their heads to create a world that is, at its heart, about what it means to be a human being. Because I'm an English major, and it would warm the cockles of my heart if I was able to write stories about metahumans riding dinosaurs around sixteenth-century Toledo which also explore the many different forms of love, preferably at the same time and in the same scenes. Antsy Does Time has proved to me that this can be done: for a young adult book about a kid selling contracts to keep a histrionic classmate alive is surprisingly complex and thoughtful.
The plot, such as it is, that I imagine them following is one in which they set out on a quest for the End of Days, to find out what it is, because they’ve noticed that every prophecy talks about the ‘arrival’ of the End of Days as though it’s a thing – even in cultures where such personifications aren’t typical. So they travel around, having all sorts of wacky adventures and forming relationships and probably having a couple of other subplots, too, involving the repopulation of the earth, how to be a family and get along and raise Marat, et cetera. At the end, when they finally do meet the End of Days, it’s either (a) them, (b) a button that they have to push because they’ve travelled back in time the farther they walk, and they have to either do it, or risk not having their friendships at all, (c) a very young Eldritch Abomination whose very existence warps reality without it even trying; all it wanted to do was meet other life forms and not live out its exile from the Beyond alone, but instead it created the apocalypse, (d) they find a way to press the reset button, kind of like in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur Dent goes back to Earth 2 like nothing ever happened. Shoot, I just realized that that’s probably where I got my idea from. But it turns out to be so deadly bizarre that they can’t cope with it, so they all, independently, set off to find the reset button again and undo it so that they can go back to having their found family. I’d like to think that the novel spans about a decade, and that when they hit ‘reset’, they’re dumped back into their old bodies as well.
I don't know, I think it'd be fun to try to write something wacky and surreal with Meaningful Themes, especially after hacking my way through the amoral jungle of People Being Selfish Bastards that is my current endeavor.
