What Comes After | ✔️

Author's Note

Note to FBE (Flexible Book Exchange) Club members. Please skip this chapter for book exchanges.

Blurb

Trapped between the stresses of high school life and his fear of upcoming college, Neal feels smothered by the overwhelming amount of change and responsibility he is going to face in college. However, all of this changes when an asteroid crashes into the moon, pushing it much closer to Earth than anticipated, leading to catastrophic disaster to his large coastal town as the power shuts down and the tidal tsunamis ravage their coastline.

Faithful to Life As We Knew It, the series this fanfiction is based on, it is written in a diary format, chronicling the fears and emotions of Neal as he and his family struggle to survive in this changed world. Each day is a struggle as the world falls further and further in decay as volcanic eruptions cloud the skies and the waves eat away at the land. No one thinks of the past anymore. The only thought on everyone's mind is about what comes after.

Featured Reviews

"Real. This is real. When the world is faced with an apocalyptic future, there might be the occasional badass on a motorcycle with a club fighting zombies - but let's be fair, most of us are trying to be like Neal's family, regular people who are trying to survive. Written in diary entry format, KingEmpo embodies their own version of the The Life As We Knew It story, where the moon fills the sky and the tides threaten to ruin all normality. A compelling fanfiction and a thorough independent read on its own!" - Felicia, judge for the Summer Zodiac Awards

"What Comes After is one of those stories that might actually happen. Stepping into Neal's shoes as well as his high school worries, we get to see a new kind of apocalypse, where the moon is suddenly closer to the Earth. Very realistic - makes you wonder what you'd do in Neal's place" - Gear, judge for the Summer Zodiac Awards

"Well, if it isn't the end of an ongoing road. The story is depressing, but I appreciate it. I feel like I needed it. Not the dramatic depressing stuff that gets people with a bang, but the slow ebbing away of hope into not despair but this grey mush of existence. The consequences of being alive with all the primal worries. In life you say goodbye to people you love. They're not dead, but they're out of your reach. You want, wish, pray for a life you won't ever have.

Anyway, before I ramble on, thanks for the story. It's the embodiment of bittersweet, and I loved it. We might not be living in a world where the moon is ripping the earth apart, but we are and have been living in dark times. I hope you and your loved ones stay well and safe. Much love." - Kai Asper, Tapas Reader

Note to Judges and Readers 

I've been getting a lot of feedback about my use of mixed tenses in the story, and I'd like to clarify something. The use of both present and past tense is intentional because of the hybrid-journalistic style of this story. The use of past tense is for the documentation of events that happened on that day, which are events of the past. The use of present tense is for the documentation of events occurring at the moment that the diary is being written. There is a mixture of past and present tenses to differentiate between events that had occurred and events that are occurring as Neal writes in his diary. 

Also, what I mean by hybrid-diary is that I incorporate conversations and lots of dialogue into the diary entries, not making it a true diary, which lacks these features, but a hybrid style between the common 1st person POV narrative storytelling and the diary entry storytelling. Hopefully, this clears things up!