Strange Stories II

This is the way the world ends. That could've been the name of this book. Most of the stories I write start as fragmented visions and ideas birthed by a dream. As soon as I wake, the dreams begin t to crumble and fall apart like clouds shredded by the wind What remains is little more than a seed, a small, fragile thing that might, with a little imagination, become a story. That's how the Strange Stories II collection came about. Strange Stories II is a shorter book than I wanted it to be; it has three stories. Turns out you can't force a new story into existence. It is there, or isn't. These are the stories i have, for now. Two of them are about possible climate crisis scenarios. Both are rather long for a short story. If word count counts (and I'm not sure it does), they are almost, but not quite, long enough to live in the land of the novella. The climate change tales are differing accounts of how the world ends told by one person who lives through it all. The original idea came from a dream that, in time, became the seeds of a story. The dream (you could call it a nightmare and not be too far off) came from too much reading of different scientific theories about how the climate crisis might play out. The possibilities I based the stories on are remote and almost certainly will never happen. Still, the idea of very rapid global warming or an unknown virus emerging from a frozen sleep as the permafrost thaws were just too good to pass up.Alone: A tale of the climate crisis, left unconstrained for years. The warming earth thaws the arctic tundra releasing thousands of tons of greenhouse gases. Along with methane and CO2, an ancient virus, more deadly than anything we've ever seen, is set free. The hungry beast, once awakened, kills 99.9% of humanity. One young man, a lonely survivor, tells the story of the destruction and his journey to find a place safe from the virus.Tipping Point: Once a short story, now greatly expanded and approaching a novella in length, tells a story of global warming gone wild. The warming of the earth accelerates at an unheard of and unimagined pace. In ten years, cities are drowned by rising ocean waters. Once fertile farmlands are reduced to dry, hard-packed dirt. Nothing grows there anymore. Disease, hunger, death transforms the world. We knew it was coming for us, and we did nothing. One man, troubled by visions of death and destruction, believes his dreams are prophetic. He teaches his son to survive.A Ghost Story: This one is shorter than the others and is based entirely on a dream. I won't say the idea came from binge-watching The Walking Dead, but there may be a little truth there. The man died but still inhabits the U.S. as a roaming ghost. An unknown force has given the apparition a gift. He sees the spirits of the wandering dead, lost, and unable to move on. He now has the power to show them how to move forward into whatever reality comes next.