I’ve been working on this short story for a while now, and the rough draft is finally finished… but I feel like it needs some work. This will likely be the final story in the first Zedekiah Wight anthology, but the story ends on quite a downer—in fact, the whole story itself is kind of a downer—and I’m not sure what to do about that.
I think the opening is pretty good, though:
In ancient times, bombs fell from the sky. People sought refuge from them underground—they did not fear that the ground beneath their feet would betray them.
Of course, until this last war—this war to end all interstellar wars—neither did we. The very thought of the ground opening up and swallowing us, or belching brimstone and hellfire, was unthinkable. We were a multi-planet species, after all. Wasn’t this sort of Biblical cataclysm something that we had evolved beyond?
Unfortunately, no. The age of galactic colonization was glorious but brief, because in the end, the bombs did not fall from above, but came up from beneath.
I should know.
I was on the team that developed them.
Interestingly, this story borrows much more from Romans than it does from Isaiah. That may change, though, as I go through and edit it. But I’m going to get some feedback first—hopefully that will help me to identify what the story needs. So it will probably be another month before it comes out.
In the meantime, General Conference is coming up, and I need to get October’s short story single out before then. Going to be rather busy!
