Sunday's Seven Sentence Snippet

Image from www.freedigitalphotos.net

I posted the following snippet from my book on Facebook today:

I turned on my tablet and tapped the history textbook icon. A table of contents popped up and I tapped the number 4. A picture of a large, barren landscape, dotted with ruins, topped the page, with the title, “Disaster Strikes”. The caption identified it as, “Denver in 2013, one year after a large meteor crashes to earth obliterating 75% percent of the world’s population.” I glanced up at Teacher 3. She had a map displayed at the front. It was extremely old and it looked strange with so much land on it.

Each Sunday between now and the release of my book (which I still don't have a firm date on), I'll post another to give you a peek at what you might find inside, along with a little background that didn't make it into the final cuts.

An important part of the premise in the X5 series (yes, there will be more) is that the world has changed a great deal due to the impact of a meteor in 2012. I had to look at quite a few sites to see what kinds of things might happen to the Earth if such a thing actually happened. Most of them agreed that so much debris would be thrown up into the atmosphere, that all light from the sun would be blocked out and most living things would die off. Just like the dinosaurs. Luckily, some people were able to build an underground habitat and preserve a variety of plant and animal species in anticipation of humanity's return to the surface. Most sources thought this period would last approximately 2-3 years.

The snippet talks about how the map of the Earth "looked strange with so much land on it." Another probable outcome of a giant meteor hitting Earth would be the almost immediate melting of all the polar ice caps, kind of like global warming in extreme fast forward. As a result of this, the sea level would rise dramatically. This was where I found a lot of disagreement over just which parts of the earth would be submerged. So for my purposes, I figured that survival would depend not just on having an underground habitat, but on having one that was still well above the new sea level. That's why I chose Colorado as my setting. The Rockies should be high enough to avoid the water. Any maps of the Earth that X5 and his classmates would have seen would certainly have a lot less land than the maps of our time. 

The final version of this classroom scene had a great deal cut out of it because it was boring exposition. However, I will be creating a page for deleted scenes, so you'll get to see some of the things that didn't survive the editing process. Stay tuned for next Sunday's Seven Sentence Snippet!

It's the End of the World As We Know It...

Okay, I saw this one in my Facebook feed and it yelled, "Write a blog post about me!" Who am I to ignore the demands of a picture?

For those who aren't familiar with Jumanji, it's the title of a book by Chris Van Allsburg. In it, some children find a board game (called Jumanji) in a park and decide to play. But whenever they land on a space, it really happens. For example, if it says, "Land in the Jungle", the players are immediately thrown into a jungle and have to get out somehow. There was also a movie made based on this book.

So basically, when bizarre things that you think would never happen, actually do happen, it could be like the game. For others, this could be a sign of the impending apocalypse!

Thanks to the Mayans, we all know the world was supposed to end on 12/21/12. And thankfully it didn't. But what if it had? What would actually constitute the end of the world? Are we talking total obliteration of the earth? Or the end of all life? Or just a really big disaster of some kind?

Last year when I was thinking about our impending doom, I thought about the various movies made on the subject. Armageddon and Deep Impact both deal with a meteor that is going to hit the earth and have devastating consequences. In the movie 2012, a solar storm wreaks havoc on the earth's surface, leading a select few to - well I won't say in case you haven't seen it! Also released that year was the movie Knowing, where a string of numbers that gets dug up in a time capsule really identifies disasters that have happened, and ones that haven't yet. The string of numbers was written by a girl who hears voices and has strange visions.

My book was influenced by all of these. It takes place 130 years in the future, after a meteor strikes the earth on 12/21/12. I wondered if such a thing were to occur, how could life possibly go on? I figure that since a meteor strike the magnitude of the one that killed the dinosaurs would wipe out all life on the surface, perhaps life could flourish underground. In my book, the Consortium (aided by guy who has visions) learn about this coming cataclysm and begin to build huge underground habitats, thus ensuring that humanity will survive. This was something they did in Deep Impact.

So when you're reading my book, don't be surprised if you find yourself saying, "This sounds like that movie!" It probably does. But I think I've given the end of the world a whole new twist, and I hope you'll enjoy it!