Apocalypse Not

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Yay!  I get the Apocalypse post! 

I know, I shouldn’t joke, the day is young... but apparently they all survived in New Zealand and Australia, so I’m optimistic.

Actually this end of the world is turning out to be a lot less viral than the one with the crazy – or Really Media-Savvy - preacher last year. Maybe we just had too much lead time on the aptly named Mayan Long Count - sort of the way I feel about hurricanes as opposed to earthquakes, actually. There’s so much anticipation to a hurricane that by the time it hits, no matter how much of a disaster it really is you’re already emotionally burned out on it. Earthquakes, you get all your adrenaline rush at once.

More likely, though, we’re all too numb from our two most recent real-life end of the world tragedies, Superstorm Sandy, and the Sandy Hook massacre that Gar and PD have so eloquently posted about this week, to be able to make light of any theoretical apocalypse. It feels like we’ve had it. 

And then there’s just the ordinary anxiety of the holidays. The first day of January is really just one day after the last day of December, so why do we put all this pressure on the END of one year and the BEGINNING of another?

A better way to look at it would be that we get to let all of the baggage of the old year go and start over fresh. Maybe some people do do that and I’m just late to that party.

I think a lot of my Christmas anxiety is because my tendency is ALWAYS to think I’m not doing enough, and the end of the year brings that out (What did you DO all year, anyway?). So today I’m going to go back over my year to remind myself I got a hell of a lot done, and even enjoyed myself doing it. (Sort of like Facebook is encouraging us all to do now with some app about our 2012 Year in Review highlights.  If someone could tell me how Facebook knows what the highlights of my year were, I’d be grateful.)

But these were my own highlights, in relative order.

E books have been good to me. I got my backlist up; every one of my books is now available for the infinitely reasonable prices of $2.99 or $3.99, and I’m thrilled to have more control over my writing schedule, release schedule, and book pricing, not to mention a regular, understandable, and perfectly livable income.

I launched a new series, my first direct-to-e thriller, Huntress Moon, which instantly became an Amazon bestseller in mysteries and police procedurals, and I’m thrilled to report that it made Suspense Magazine’s list of Best Books of 2012.

Writing the series is giving me a chance to get reacquainted with all my favorite places in California, where I’m living again, though I’m still unsure if I’m going to settle in the Bay Area or the Los Angeles area. I love them both! I’m loving the research, though, and Book Two in the series, Blood Moon, will be out in late January or early February. 

My dear friends Heather Graham, Harley Jane Kozak and I had a blast co-writing the next installments in our paranormal mystery series The Keepers; this time we took the series to L.A., and the new books come out in January, March and May.  

I’ve also been teaching a film class in L.A. – basically I screen my favorite movies and talk all the way through them, raving about all the visual excellence and story structure brilliance. And they call this working! Such a scam!

This summer I was the keynote speaker at the Romance Writers of Australia National Conference on the Gold Coast, and had a wonderful time teaching my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop and doing panels on e books and writing paranormal suspense with all those crazy Aussies.  Then my friend Elle Lothlorien and I did a wild road trip down to Sydney, driving on the wrong side of the road and leveling – I mean visiting - every beach city along the way.  Love the country, love the people, want to go back as soon as possible.

Then I came back and put my house on the market (meaning two months of the worst kind of emotionally fraught prep), and it’s currently “under contract”, so a lot of the beginning of my 2013 is going to be house-hunting. If I can ever narrow the prospective location down from just “somewhere in the world, possibly California.”

Throughout the year I did my usual insane conference traveling, with appearances at Left Coast Crime, Romance Writers of America National Conference, Romance Writers of Australia National Conference, the ever –inspiring Bouchercon – and I just returned from paneling, performing, and dancing the night away at Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans, my favorite conference in my favorite city, which is just as fabulous at Christmas as it is every other time of year. (French Quarter photo with Chantelle Osman and Elle Lothlorien)

Somewhere in there I did an entire website overhaul: designed by the fabulous Madeira James of Xuni.com. 

- I've also embraced Facebook as the virtual cocktail party it really can be. This might not sound like an accomplishment, but promotion and networking is a fact of life for authors, and to find a way to do that that feels a little like taking a break to hang out at the conference bar with witty and like-minded friends - without ever leaving my chair - is pretty damn cool, if you ask me.  

Not only that, but - even though I didn’t quite get Blood Moon finished (finished in my definition of the word) for a December release - I’ve put together a boxed set of three of my spooky thrillers called Haunted. Anyone who doesn’t already have these books can now get them all for just $5.99, and give themselves or special friends nightmares for days! 

 Buy now on Amazon.

And to bring this back to the end of the world: I have a brand new anthology out this weekend: Apocalypse: Year Zero, with four end-of-the-world novellas by me and my award-winning dark fantasy friends Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, and Rhodi Hawk. We cover 9/11, tsunamis, Hurricane Katrina, and The Big One, as well as, in no particular order, Hollywood, sex, rage, and the Four Horsemen, who turn out to be not men at all.  (Nook link to come shortly...)

On Amazon

So if tomorrow you wake up, are still here, and feel cheated out of your Apocalypse, no worries - we’ve got you covered.

Okay, I bet you know the question of the day!  What were the highlights of your 2012?

Or if that's too personal, let's talk Apocalypse.  What are some of your favorite Apocalypse stories, in any media?  Yes, I am already missing The Walking Dead... and since I just got back from Australia, I'm thinking The Last Wave...

And don't forget - today is not just the end of the world, it's also the winter solstice, a very powerful day for manifestation. Make a wish.

- Alex

The End of the World as We Know It

by David Corbett

Today’s post is largely just to pose a few questions and get a conversation going. So I’ll try to make my windup brief.

A week or so ago I treated myself to a summer movie, Searching for a Friend for the End of the World, the story for which is only too aptly captured in its title.

I enjoyed the picture quite a bit, partly because it’s cleverly written and charmingly acted and deftly directed, partly because I have a mild crush on Keira Knightley, but mostly because what the film got right, in a number of truly funny and poignant scenes, was the variety of ass-backward ways we deal with love in the face of the inevitability of death. I’m a hopeless romantic and the idea of true love in the face of total annihilation has a certain resonance for me. I cried. More than once.

Then over the weekend I noticed that Showtime was playing 28 Days Later, a film I also very much enjoy, for much different reasons, even though I’ve never seen the whole thing. I’d watched it from the midpoint to the end, and this weekend got to watch from the beginning to the midpoint. In my head, it all makes sense now. I think.

But these two films got me thinking about the end of the world as a story motif. Perhaps I’m wrong, but there seem to be a great many apocalyptic scenarios cropping up in the narrative ether these days, from all manner of zombie fare to games like Wasteland and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (based on a Harlan Ellison short story), to films such as I Am Legend and Melancholia and Children of Men to literary novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, José Saramago’s Blindness and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

Even comedians have gotten in on the act -- what greater pratfall or punchline can there be than self-inflicted extinction:

Of course there’s a long tradition of such stories, reaching back to Gilgamesh and Genesis to the constanly recycled Book of Revelations, interpreted anew by each generation. In the modern era H.G. Wells rejuvenated the secular approach, kicking us along through two world wars to the nuclear era, which gave earth’s utter destruction a real shot in the arm.

One might have thought the tempo would have decreased after the end of the Cold War, but the opposite seems to be the case. Nuclear Armageddon just began sharing the stage with virulent pestilence, environmental devastation, alien invasion -- or the old standby, man's monstrous egotistical stupidity.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about such stories is they're never really about the end per se. (Though the ones that are about the real end seem to stick with us longer.) Most such films are about the apparent end, and serve as cautionary tales. There but for fortune, they seem to say. Or: There but for the hero.

I’m going to propose a few theories for this, all of them utterly non-scientific. Then I’m going to ask folks to chime in with their thoughts on whether we are truly obsessing over the end of the world more than ever, and if so why. Or is this a theme as old as man, and we're just churning out the most recent iterations.

Who knows, maybe it's just in the air. Stories beget stories. The more we think about something the more we keep thinking about it. Picture it as a kind of narrative snowball. Rolling all the way to hell.

Regardless, here's my top ten theories for why we’re now (more than ever?) obsessing about the apocalypse:

1. The American Dream is disintegrating into a Hobbesian "war of all against all," a period of radical historical transformation, that we symbolically understand as “the end of the world.”
2. The Mayans were right.
3. The end really is nigh, and our animal brains or our intuition or the Collective Unconscious or whatever understands this, and is trying to alert our conscious selves so we can spiritually prepare for our collective demise.
4. The dogs are taking over.
5. In an era of relatively few wars, and relatively minor ones (to all but the combatants and affected civilians, obviously), plus a worldwide economic downturn no one seems to know how to solve, severely restricting a ravenous consumer culture, people need some form of violent outlet to expiate their guilt and shame for having been so consumed with self-gratification. The apocalypse, with its savage violence and moral message of good versus evil, serves the symbolic need for cataclysmic violence, cultural upheaval, and moral certainty.
6. The UrGod Demon Slavengorg has escaped the Tunnel of Doom, and now seeks revenge against the Sybarite Prince Ramalama and all those who have served him so blindly (read: us).
7. The planet’s climate is changing so dramatically that our bodies—and thus our unconscious minds—are trying to alert our habit-besotted brains that a real different tomorrow is right around the sweltering bend.
8. We’re constitutionally, psychologically, biologically and culturally ill-adapted to change, evolution be damned, and as we enter a period of rapid, devastating and unpredictable change -- including the end of mainstream publishing as we know it -- the uncertainty of our fate creates a profound anxiety that we relieve through creating nightmares we can control.
9. The Boomers are aging, and this is their way of processing their collective, generational demise.
10. The cats are taking over.

* * * * *

What do you think, ladies and gents?

Why can’t we seem to get enough of the end of the world?

What’s your theory?

Better yet, what's your favorite end-of-the-word book or film or video game? Why?

* * * * *

JukeBox Heroes of the Week: Who else, what else? (Incidentally -- I used to think the lyrics went, "It's the end of the world AND we know it. Quite a different message there.)

The Walking Dead

 by Alexandra Sokoloff

That would be me, after two weeks of something that never quite turned into flu but wasn't much fun anyway.

I don’t really watch television, no time and very little tolerance, but I do occasionally binge on it.

And I don’t know whether it’s my way of avoiding the traditional Christmas chocolate binge, or the fact that I’ve been sick for a lot longer than I figured on being, but I have been having a mother of a TV binge this week.

In the past I have become obsessed with shows like DEADWOOD (still the best of all), THE WIRE (excruciatingly close second), ROME, and MAD MEN. Obsessed means that I watch every episode as soon as I can get it, which can present a time management problem when I discover a show that has actually been on the air for several seasons already.

I may be able to blame this current one on Our Steve, because it actually started when I was feverish and I guess I needed to see people sicker than I was or something, so I watched Outbreak (a movie Steve helped develop) on Netflix. I’ll see Dustin Hoffman and Kevin Spacey in anything, and this is them together, and I’ve been kind of wanting to see it again after seeing one of what must be one of the year’s most excruciatingly dull movies—CONTAGION.

I don’t know what it is about the plague that is so hard to get right in a feature film.  At least I didn’t until I discovered the AMC TV series THE WALKING DEAD.  And now I know what has been missing from these plague movies.

Zombies.

Now you have to understand this. I like apocalypse stuff but I am NOT a zombie girl. Couldn’t care less. Mystified by the popularity (plus, that wave has   l  o  n  g  passed, hasn’t it?)  I read THE PASSAGE (good book) and some of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES (cute, but you get it after a few chapters and don’t have to keep reading.  ZOMBIELAND was funny and 28 DAYS LATER was scary but has one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen from a talent like Danny Boyle.

But WALKING DEAD – well, it’s created by Frank Darabont, based on the graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard.  Darabont is one of my favorite filmmakers. Only person who’s every pulled off a Stephen King novel on film (besides Cronenberg with DEAD ZONE. I love Kubrick’s THE SHINING but it’s not King’s THE SHINING. And yes, STAND BY ME is great but it’s not a King NOVEL.).

The first episode of WD is so scary I had to turn it off periodically and calm myself down. I am beyond stunned that it didn’t give me nightmares.

It’s cinematic and riveting, often heartbreaking, purely wonderful storytelling.

Well, only the first 13 episodes are available so far and I went through that in a day.  (When I say binge, I mean binge.).

Which meant that I could actually resume writing the next day, which is the good news.

The bad news was I was jonesing for more apocalypse.  So I did some searching and discovered the BBC series SURVIVORS (the recent remake, or revision), which is post-flu apocalyptic.

Watching both series back to back was a seriously interesting exercise.  I’m not entirely sure in what – British vs. American TV, British vs. American gun culture, British vs. American people. . .  zombies vs. flu. . .

Here’s the thing.  I’m not a particularly violent person or writer; I avoid gore in my reading and my own writing. But after 13 episodes of WALKING DEAD, I am seriously craving bloodshed on SURIVIVORS.  Sure, everyone but a dozen people died in the first episode (shown through tasteful shots of the soles of tennis shoes and limp manicured hands).

But once the human encounters started again, there were some people who needed to be dead. And the British characters in SURVIVORS just refuse to kill people.  Also, I know this series aired on the BBC, but I have to think that in actuality there are more than two guns in Britain.  I’m sure Zoe has at least that many.  Okay, I’ve actually seen four guns on the show so far, but only two in play at once. 

Now come on, Brits, in case of an apocalypse, even without zombies—wouldn’t guns be one of the FIRST things you’d be looking for?  Like, after water, but before food?  That seems to me basic survival.  I know that you don’t have gun shops at every random strip mall, but you do have a military, and in the world of the show, the military is just as dead as the rest of the world.  So there would be guns to be had, right?

I’m sorry, but tire irons aren’t going to cut it.

That’s me being logical, there. But there’s another aspect to it, not logical at all.  I have to confess, thatcompared to WD, where zombies are shot, arrowed, pickaxed... skulls crushed with shovels, bodies torn apart by ropes (and by other zombies) – gruesome casualties by the dozens almost every episode . . .

Well, it sounds terrible to say it, but after all the excruciating tension of WD I just was not sure SURVIVORS was going to be violent enough for me. Even with all those British accents, I wasn’t getting into it.  It was, no big surprise, sex that kept me with it for the first two episodes.  There are two pretty fine leading men in this show, Max Beesley and Paterson Joseph;  I’m happy to see the producers realized they should be shirtless more often.  The other characters grew on me and the lead actress I disliked in the first episode turned out to be a villain, so that was okay. The lead actress I like best got to kick some serious ass a few episodes in, which was a pleasant—or maybe I mean gratifying—surprise. And I like the conceit of the show, which is that, at least so far, the Odyssey-like encounters the main group has with other survivors are modeled around famous stories from literature, like Peter Pan and Oliver Twist. It could have been corny but it works.

I am having one continuing problem with it, on the morality front.

With zombies of course you don’t have to have debates about morality, you can just break skulls—although THE WALKING DEAD does pretty well finding moral dilemmas, with some zombie killing anyway.

But I’m starting to wonder if my own morality got a little warped by the show, as with SURIVORS I am getting TIRED of the good guys letting the bad guys go. Especially in the case of two would-be rapists, who should have been put permanently out of commission.  The good guys could have talked about it, argued it, but someone should AT LEAST have brought up the idea.  Instead of turning them loose to attack other women. Or children, if there don’t happen to be any women handy.

There’s another weasel I’m sure the writers are just keeping around to keep people’s blood boiling, but it makes me long for the take-no-prisoners skull-crushing of WD.

I bet you’re all starting to wonder what my point is.  I’m not sure, actually.  My questions are not so much about zombies, but if you’d like to talk about them, have at it.  Give us some classics. But what I was really wondering was - have other people started to experience holiday meltdowns?  How did or do they show up for you? 

There’s also a question for the Brits.  Do you have more than two guns in the entire country?  (Sorry, kidding.)  But I can’t say that I’ve seen a lot of gunplay in my favorite British series.  Am I just missing the gory ones, or do you all look aghast at the level of violence in American cable TV, especially?

And I’m up for any recommendations of apocalyptic favorites. I only have five more episodes of SURVIVORS to go . . .

The very happiest holidays to all (with or without zombies), and hoping all wonderful things for everyone in the new year.

- Alex

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P.S.   If I have not responded to anyone who requested review copies of THE HARROWING, THE PRICE or BOOK OF SHADOWS, please re-mail me at alex AT alexandrasokoloff DOT com.  I was late getting to my webmail on this because of my bout with plague, and may have deleted a few e mails along with the deluge of spam.

(And Reine - your e mail is not working for me....)

Alex