There’s something mesmerizing about the end of the world.
Maybe conjuring it in fiction is a way of keeping it at bay.
If we can imagine a worst-case scenario, perhaps it won’t come true.
Credit: Sourcebooks Fire
That’s where my mind went when authorK.M.
Some are wistful and melancholy, others are funny or inspiring, a few are pretty twisted.
Mine is definitely a tale from the dark side.
If anyone finds out, it could put her life and her family at risk.
One day, an unscrupulous newcomer to her school puts together the pieces… and begins to blackmail her.
Here’s how I came up with one of my own.
I didn’t have anything at the ready when K.M.
invited me to play along.
No premise, no song.
Since she is on the road a lot, she uses our place as her home base.
One day, she put the group’s 2012 song “Miss Atomic Bomb” back on my radar.
What if he was a predator?
It’s 1-minute long… and horrifying.
It opens on a three-year-old girl who is plucking petals off a daisy.
Sort of a “he loves me, he loves me not” thing.
As she counts, she adorably mixes up some of her numbers.
(I used this in my story, too.)
As she reaches the end, an ominous countdown begins.
The image freezes as she looks into the sky.
Moments later, her eye becomes a mushroom cloud from a nuclear blast.
As the fireball swirls, we hear Johnson’s Texas drawl: “These are the stakes.
We must either love each other, or we must die.”
(it’s possible for you to see her interview below.)
The nuclear blast and voiceover were added later, of course.
Goldwater and his supporters remained enraged by the ad, which they saw as dangerous fearmongering.
Some even wanted the people associated with the ad to be arrested for inciting panic.
Even decades later, as an adult, she kept this part of her past hidden.
She and her husband had settled in Phoenix, Ariz. deep Goldwater country.
Anger and grudges remained.
It’s amazing drama for a story.
There are many ways to end life as we know it, after all.
I just hope the rest of this story stays fiction.
The end of the world is always better at a distance.
