Creative Writing

Brushing up on our creative writing skills, the purpose of this class was to create a short story or excerpt of a longer story, that was entertaining and incorporated skills that were taught during the course of the class.

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I chose to write the beginning of a novel. The pilot episode, if you will, is inspired by a feminist approach to the video game Death Stranding and the Broken Earth trilogy. 

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The setting of the story is set 736 years after the BioWars (an extreme response to the COVID-19 pandemic) and the fall of humanity. Communities are spread across North America and regions are loosely named after what they resembled in the past  (i.e. Appalachia, Yorker, the Tail). Community members are placed in specific work-castes, the rarest is Journeyman, which is what the protagonist does. Journeymen travel from community to community, spreading news and making special deliveries between communities. There's nothing special about where Tabitha lives in Appalachia, besides the fact that they're an entire community that lives inside a mountain, protected from the extreme natural elements that have changed with the Earth after the BioWars. Acid rain, purple lighting, the sinking southern tip of North America. 

 

After returning from a normal excursion, Taby's parents asked her to do something outside her normal duties as a Journeywoman: bring back her niece and nephew from a neighboring community. There's talk of a new virus emerging that's targeting children; essentially killing off the next generation of communities. But, there's something different about this virus that only impacts the natural dying process in the split second between the last breath and death.