There’s a particular weight that comes with finishing a book set in a world you didn’t create—but deeply respect.
I’ve just completed writing Book One in a new series set in the Light Dies World, originally created by David Saylor, for Raventhorne Books. And rather than treating that moment as a finish line, I wanted to pause here and talk about what it means to enter an existing apocalypse—and why this one matters so much to me.
Because the Light Dies World doesn’t begin with bombs or monsters.
It begins with the sun.
A World Ended by Light, Not Fire
At the heart of this universe is a catastrophic solar flare—a massive, global event that devastates electrical systems, infrastructure, and modern life almost instantly. No warning sirens. No enemy to point to. Just a sudden, irreversible collapse driven by physics and fragility.
That premise is one of the reasons this kind of apocalypse has always resonated with me.
Solar events don’t feel cinematic in the traditional sense, but they are profoundly destabilizing. Power grids fail. Communications vanish. Vehicles stall. Supply chains fracture. And what’s left is a world where survival becomes local again—dependent on skills, relationships, and adaptability rather than technology.
When I stepped into this setting, my goal wasn’t to reinvent it. It was to honor what already existed and explore the human consequences that naturally follow.
Writing in the Aftermath
My new series doesn’t focus on the moment the light goes out.
It focuses on what happens after—when people realize the outage isn’t temporary, when systems don’t come back online, and when the old assumptions about safety and normalcy no longer apply.
While writing Book One, I kept asking myself questions that mirror the ones I ask in preparedness spaces:
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What still works when electricity doesn’t?
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What knowledge becomes invaluable overnight?
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How do people organize when institutions are gone?
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What breaks first: infrastructure—or trust?
The answers aren’t neat. and they certainly aren’t comfortable. And that’s intentional.
Real collapse is messy. It creates winners and losers not by morality, but by proximity, preparation, and chance. Writing within the Light Dies World meant leaning into that realism and letting consequences unfold without shortcuts.
Where Fiction and Preparedness Overlap
This is where my fiction life and my preparedness life overlap in ways that feel increasingly inseparable.
Apocalyptic fiction—at its best—isn’t about fear. It’s about awareness. It gives us a safe place to explore scenarios we’d rather not experience firsthand. It lets us mentally walk through failure points, resource shortages, and social strain without paying the real-world cost.
That’s one of the reasons I use Patreon as a space for these conversations. This post is free because I want readers to understand why I write these stories—not just what happens in them.
Preparedness isn’t about expecting the worst every day. It’s about understanding how fragile modern systems are, and how much of our comfort depends on things working exactly as intended.
Sidenote: Solar Flares & EM
Ps (Plain Language)
What actually happens when the sun decides to throw a tantrum?
A massive solar flare—sometimes called a coronal mass ejection (CME)—is essentially the sun throwing a huge burst of energy and charged particles into space. If that energy slams into Earth just right, it can overwhelm electrical systems.
Here’s the simple version:
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Power grids rely on long transmission lines that act like antennas
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A strong solar event can overload those lines almost instantly
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Transformers can burn out—not trip, not reset, but physically fail, even catch on fire!
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Replacement parts are rare, expensive, and slow to manufacture
Unlike a localized disaster, this isn’t something you “fix” in a few days. In a worst-case scenario, power could be down for months—or years.
An EMP (electromagnetic pulse) caused by a solar event isn’t dramatic in the Hollywood sense. There’s no explosion you can see. The lights just go out… and don’t come back on.
That’s what makes it so dangerous.
Modern life assumes electricity is always there. When it isn’t, everything from water treatment to food distribution starts to unravel. And the longer it lasts, the more survival depends on preparation, adaptability, and community rather than technology.
That reality is what makes the Light Dies World feel uncomfortably plausible.
From Fiction to Real-World Conversations
Writing apocalyptic fiction has reinforced something I already believed long before I ever put these stories on the page: preparedness isn’t about fear. It’s about awareness.
Fiction lets us explore the what if.
Preparedness asks us to consider the now what.
That’s one of the reasons I also do events like the Thrive Self-Reliance Summit—a real-world gathering focused on resilience, skills, and community in uncertain times. While the worlds I write about are fictional, the conversations happening at Thrive are very real: food security, energy independence, medical readiness, communication, even how fiction plays into the larger picture of preparing, and what it actually means to be adaptable when systems fail.
In many ways, these stories and the summit are part of the same continuum.
One explores consequences —•—•—The other explores solutions.
If the themes in this post resonate with you—if you find yourself drawn to questions about resilience, self-reliance, and how people endure after the lights go out—I invite you to learn more about the summit here:
👉 https://thriveselfreliance.com
Whether through fiction, conversation, or hands-on learning, the goal is the same: to think clearly about fragile systems before we’re forced to live without them.
The light may die in this world.
But resilience—imagined, practiced, and shared—doesn’t have to.
The hard work begins now…
That is the revision process where I will most likely hate every word of it and yet push through and get the future books going.
ps… I hope to have these release in rapid succession, so I already have the plots created for the next two books and then some.