2020 was not the year for writing grim apocalyptic fiction.
Well, not according to me anyway. If that’s the jam in your jelly roll… okay, I’m not judging. You do you, Boo.
Nevertheless, ‘Apocalypse’ was the theme for the 2020 CSFG / Conflux short story competition that I wanted to enter. No. That I wanted to win – because I was so very pleased when my creepy little tale of an archivist and a skin-bound book won last year’s competition.
So, it was just a matter of writing my way into an apocalyptic story which wasn’t unbearably grim. Simple, right?
Step 1 was the opening lines of Lord Byron’s poem Darkness:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space…
Alright, still a little grim, but cut the guy some slack – it was the Year Without Summer so pretty gloomy all round. Anyway, I liked the idea of a dream which was not all a dream.
Step 2… I thought about making a character who had been born on the 10th of August 1997. Why? Because according to Aggai, the Bishop of Edessa in the 1st Century, that was when we could expect the Antichrist to be born and the end of the world to begin. Errr… still a bit grim, I suppose.
But… step 3, there were lots of apocalyptic theories for 2012, which would make someone born in 1997 just 15 years old and that could be fun…
Inspired by a dash of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic and a pinch of Maggie Stiefvater’s Blue Lily, Lily Blue (Book III of the Raven Cycle), I came up with the Delangeur women who foretell the future by various means – cartomancy, ailuromancy, augury and scrying – and Molly Delangeur, a teenager who dreams of the end of the world.
I just needed to set it in a small hinterland town, surrounded by dairy farms, so I could lighten the tone with an apocalypse cow, a cash cow and the sort of cheerfully cheesy, regional festival that rural Australia does so well and I had my story – Herding Cats.
And the really great thing?
It won the CSFG / Conflux 2020 short story competition, and you can read it here, on the Conflux site, along with the apocalypse stories The Cusp by Kathryn Gossow and Yestermonth by Tim Borella.
Let me know what you think – still too grim or did it make you smile?
(The apocalypse cow banner image was cropped from a photograph by Cally Lawson on Pixabay.)