Kat Fink

I had a story idea over the summer that refused to leave the forefront of my mind. I started writing about three women in different stages of their life…while they were living out the last days of humanity. I wanted to look at the idea of how we would live our lives differently if we, and everyone else in the world, only had a month left to live. What changes would we make? Would the best or the worst version of ourselves show up when the end was near? So, I started writing a novella called When the Time is Right (WTR). I made it through a few chapters of writing, and I really loved where the story was going, but then the school year started, and teaching took over all my thoughts as I navigated a new group of students, changes in the school-wide schedule, cell phone bans, and a series of school threats that plagued the first several weeks of school. Suffice to say, it’s been a hard semester, and writing a another book has fallen to the back burner.

Now that I’m finally getting a handle on things, I was looking for ways to stay accountable to writing during the school year (teacher life is insane), and to somehow be more consistent with this blog. Inspiration (or divine laziness) struck when I realized I could kill two birds with one stone. I’m going to simply write this book in real time as a blog. The voice of this book is coming out strange to me, and I’m not sure how it will all piece together still, but I know this story wants to be written, and I’m going to listen to that muse. Long story short, here’s the prologue, and stay tuned for more of the story throughout the next several months!

Prologue 

It started with a glacier and, in that frozen block of ice, a pathogen. A disease that slipped into the highways and byways of the water all around the world, sitting around for a while like a time bomb counting down, waiting for the heat. Then, there was spring and summer, which brought storms and fog. And the pathogen found its way into the air and into people. One of those people was a grad student at a no-name university who was testing the water in a man-made lake in the Midwest. A dreary, murky lake that was shallow and full of the dead trees they’d drowned when they flooded the bowl of earth. The grad student didn’t recognize the small entity wiggling its way through the water, so he asked his professor to take a look. Then, the professor asked a college buddy who had gone on to do bigger and better things at a bigger and better university. She didn’t recognize it either, but whereas the other people who saw the thing in the water were filled with curiosity, this scientist was filled with dread when she ran a predictive model on how the disease would impact the human population. Having never been in this situation, she wondered who you called when you were the first to learn about the end of the world.