The Last Survivors Chronicles

reply to post by merkins


Lol, thanks a lot for your support, and am glad a few have taken a liking to it. I am reading your comments. I suppose most here are not comfortable with the subject matter, or perhaps they can't stand this style- dunno. But don't care really. As long as a few are enjoying it, that's enough to keep me going. I am considering taking it off this site though, and making it into a book or even movie script. It might make for an interesting film someday, who knows. Several more surprises await the reader though- promise.

I would also like to remind readers of the member tools dropdown under their avatars, which can be very useful in a situation like this. You for example can click that under mine, if you wanted to read only my posts- which can help with continuity. "View posts in thread" is the command. You think this might make a cool movie? Just curious...

reply to post by TrueAmerican


Great narrative.

Will check back for updates . . . hope hope.

Congrats on a job well done.

Quite a bleak situation as described. Could take some clever creativity to get out of that one!

reply to post by TrueAmerican


Yes, it would make a very good movie!
Exciting, scary, lots of unknown variables.
Not the kind of story where it's easy to guess what's coming next.

Some science for the cerebral minded.
A little innuendo for the more visually stimulated!

Your style is easy to read & the scenario easy to visualize.
And the way you've written it, much more believable than a lot of Stephen King's stuff!

Keep up the good work!!!
WOQ

Thanks again much folks! I'm loving your comments! And just as a bonus, I've uploaded some pics for yas I took one time when I was at the top. Should help with the visuals.





And yep, this is the actual observation deck!

Very well written. Keep them coming. Your writing style is just fine. Short and to the point is fine for short stories. Will be keeping tabs on how this goes.

reply to post by TrueAmerican


Thanks for the pics. Was thinking about your story . . . had a thought that perhaps you could 'discover' a bunker hidden under the observation deck well stocked etc.

Or a cave not much under the peak of the mountain . . . well stocked.

I have yet to comment on your story, although I've been following it closely from the start.

My comment for now: HURRY UP AND ADD THE NEXT CHAPTER!!!.......I'M HOOKED!!!

Very well written and grabbed my attention from the first line...I'm impatiently awaiting more...

reply to post by TrueAmerican

Hi TA

No worries mate you're welcome. Good fiction needs supporting.

I dropped my phone down the toilet a couple of days ago and my net access went with it. Finally got up and running again about an hour ago and first place I came was to this thread. I'm gutted I haven't got another episode to read lol!

Nice pics, the locale was very much how I'd imagined it, but the pic of the obs station is very helpful as I had an image in my head that wasn't working very well.

I meant to say earlier that I think you picked the perfect moment to begin the story. I'm a big believer of "in media res" and you pitched it spot on. So many get that wrong and start at the beginning. I'll be sad if you remove this but as a fellow writer I totally agree with you about making a serious go of this piece.

Apart from it being an excellent piece there's a big appetite for this kind of stuff at the moment. It reminds me of the seventies when here in the UK at least, there was a lot of fearmongering about nuclear war and an appettite (and agenda to push) for apocalyptic drama. I remember going to bed at the age of five and six and regularly having nuclear war nightmares. It probably wasn't helped by the 1975 terry nation tv show survivors that my mum let me watch at the age of six. A while back at a creative writing class I attended (where everyone else was half my age we discussed things that haunted you and gave you nightmares as a kid. They couldn't believe me when I told mine. The kids today have no concept of danger in that way.

In closing I also wanted to share that you've inspired me to make an effort to write again. Had to walk away not from writers block but paralysis analysis. I couldn't just write a rough draft all the way through to finishing, I'd have do a tenth draft of paragraph 1) before moving to paragraph 2) then doing a tenth draft with the firs tplus the scond together. So in the end I ditched wriiting and gave myself a year with my art. Only sold onepiece in 12 months.

reply to post by merkins


Excellent comments, thanks so much! I've had no training whatsoever. I scored pretty well in English in high school, but obviously I have taken a bit of artistic license with this style, sacrificing grammatical technicality for necessary brevity. I am pretty much just operating on the theory that I should pack a lot into a little, and each sentence has got to really add to the situation or it's outta there.

Each part is taking me about two hours on average to write. I dunno if that's good or bad, but hey, don't care really. It's kinda fun, and with what's coming up next in the piece, I have been taking some time to research certain things, so that I might be accurate. I'm just pretty much visualizing the scenario, putting myself in it, and then trying best I can to tell it from my perspective. Sorta weird I guess.

You think this might work better working from a third person perspective? I've been tempted already to rewrite it from that perspective, removing myself from the equation. But writing from the first person perspective does allow certain elements that I think might be impossible, or much less believable, from other perspectives- simply because I am able to relate what I actually felt and perceived while in it.

I did think about the start point actually very carefully, and I appreciate you helping me dissect this from a more technical standpoint, completely removed from the subject matter. Very interesting that is to me, cause I have no training in creative writing at all.

reply to post by TrueAmerican


You're a natural! aagh you natural writers make the rest of us look bad.

Two hours is very good, I could only very rarely attain those kinds of wordage per hour stats. I used to binge write, which is basically get enough food and refreshments to last 3 days go to my study and work round the clock. This allowed me to get deep into inside my characters kinda like a method actor would. Also evry main protagonist I write is really mostly me, which is good because they always say "write about what you know?" who do you know better than yourself.

As for your thoughts about the writing perspective. First person is so much more powerful with dramatic work because you are not putting a barrier between your main protagoist and the reader. There are some advantages of other perspectives like the god's eye view for example. However, in this story you want to trickle information slowly to the reader for suspense and the gods eye view would be awful for that. Nope, you've deinitely got it right. Of course this doesn't mean you can't do first persion for other characters too. The current trilogy that I am reading changes perspective every chapter. Each chapter is named after that character, and is from that characters first persion viewpoint.

I also don't see removing yourself from the picture will help much because you're the protagonist as it were and you'll be adding a narrator between the reader and the protagonist. Instead of encouraging them to imagine themsevles as the character it could put distance between them.

Found this site today. A lot of their work is apparently being added to and promoted on apples ibooks. And we all know there's money in that.

www.smashwords.com...

Two other things.

I swear by "George Orwell's rules of writng" here'sa link.

AND HURRY with th next part.

Edit to add link: www.pickthebrain.com...

I'm not claiming this as an authorative link on orwells rules, it was just the first result.

Please don't stop EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!! lol..... I am completely hooked and you have to go on for as long as humanly possible now. I used to have dreams about this stuff as a child, and actually up until recently, and wrote a lot of stories like this.... I LIVE for survival stuff.

reply to post by mellisamouse


Well said and this story also evokes memories of childhood dreams for me too.

If you haven't already flagged the thread (and this is for everyone else reading too) don't forget to do so because this thread will appear higher up the list so other people will see it and be able to enjoy it. I have no connection with the OP but I know that it makes the effort on the part of the author much less onerous when the author knows people are out there enjoying their work.

oh nearly forgot mellisamouse that's a fantastic avatar photo you've got. I love those kinds of shots where creatures of different species are caught in a moment together. Never seen one between a canine and a fish before so star for that.

I'd love to see the rest of this, but this essay seems focused on the East coast, when it seems far more likely, with every passing day, that the Ring of Fire will do the dirty deed eventually, in the very near future (unless Cumbre Viejo blows, and then all bets are off).

I have two kids living on the West Coast platform, one in Portland and one in SF, and have tried talking to them about this problem. All I get in response are the "Awwww, Mom, yer dreamin'..." type. Both are highly educated. I link studies of quake projections, etc., and get no response. The one in Portland knows academically that Mt. Hood is way overdue to blow, yet she is happy to snowboard, snowshoe, and continue living and working there. The one in SF just moved there from NYC and probably has yet to really understand just how precarious that city is...Both are Reed College graduates. They should know better.

This would make a very good movie script. However, I wouldnt bother. Sutdios get thousands of scripts mailed in to them every year, they usually sit in a big pile. When they want to make another movie they just pick one. It is like winning the lottery. You will have a better chance if you write one that subtely promotes the OWG agenda.

You cant imagine the amount of good talent there is out there, why some get picked and others dont? Same with singers, there is so much good music out there, who makes it big is not a matter of talent, thats for sure.

reply to post by Cinrad


What you say is absolutely true, but I believe this story does support the current NWO and OWG agenda. Western governments and hollywood have been massively pushing apocalyptic scenarios for years now and there appears to be no let up. So TA could very well find a market for this. Who knows maybe terrorists set off an earthquake creating device. The story is still wide open.

Hey TA I know you've been busy with the ring of fire activities but when you get a chance mate....
Even if its just on more instalment. You can't make me go cold turkey without some warning. You've got to help me ween myself off this story....

This is just fantastic! I've been lurking in your "Confounding Sequence" thread for a couple of days and saw reference to this a couple of times so I decided to read it. I've been thoroughly engrossed in this for the past, damn, 90 minutes!?!?! Yup, this story sucked me in. It's very, very good. It has a kind of a Dan Brown punchy style of suspense.

Very well done. And thank you so much for sharing it with us! But I'd pay money to read this if it were a book on the shelf in a store. Not kidding.

But now for the sad part... I need more!

reply to post by TrueAmerican


Awesome!!!! I am loving this. Please, please, please put up the next chapter!!!

I am waiting with baited breath

reply to post by newsoul


lol, if I asked everyone of you to send me one measily buck, yeah, just one dollar, for a perpetual subscription to this story, you'd go scattering like cockroaches...

No, I am not going to ask you all for that...pfft... But it does take some serious time, and lately here with this situation in Santa Cruz Islands and the quakes, I can't tear myself away from my rig long enough to write any more chapters. So I am weighing, as I said before, writing the rest and approaching a publisher. But overall, there is still not really enough interest to bother... Now if this story was highly successful, I would most definitely be all over it.

But I do much appreciate all you that have commented. I have a feeling I lost many with a certain line in the beginning of the first chapter- just a hunch... In retrospect I should have phrased that differently...Oh well, live and learn.

I love a good post-apocalyptic tale and hope you will continue to write. I do think it's a shame the water came up so high as you've cut off many avenues of possible storylines encountering other survivors etc. And 5 poeople on a mountaintop can only survive so long in the middle of an ocean. A few weeks tops depending on the supplies they brought.

Is there any way to get an email when a new post is made? I never figured out that part of ATS.

reply to post by TrueAmerican


Nope, no cockroaches here!!! I'd pay to read it!
Especially $1 for a perpetual subscription. What a deal!
Maybe when you publish it, you can dedicate it to your ATS readers!

And I don't think you lost any readers because of one line in the first chapter!
Not 'serious' readers anyway. One line could never do that!
And if it's a line that evokes a real emotional response...isn't that what a writer wants???

I've been a voracious reader since I was a kid.
I've read books that were really bad, but had good endings.
But I've also read good books that had really bad endings.
Where I was so disappointed, that I was mad I even wasted the time reading it!
I have yelled at a few authors by the end..."What WERE you thinking?"
But I have never given up on a book and not finished it!
Books are kind of like a box of choc....... oh never mind!

When the Santa Cruz quakes started I was wondering if life might imitate art???!!!
You must admit the timing is a little spooky!
(Psst! Brian better hurry and gut that bear. It's getting a little ripe!)
WOQ