A few sample paragraphs...

Here's a few sample paragraphs that I was playing with for the introduction to the novel...

"To the average observer, the town would have seemed abandoned. Empty of occupants. Abandoned to the inevitable effects of entropy by way of time and tide. But those that knew would know that the city was sill inhabited by those that had died, then lived, returned by force of habit to the places that they knew best, where their hearts called home, to await a rapture that was not forthcoming."

"It was ten years after the end of the world as we knew it, but unlike the song suggested in its catchy sing-along chorus no one felt fine. Most people felt lonesome most of the time most of all because of the hole in their heart where everything they knew used to be, burned away, or faded like an old photograph, and almost everyone they used to know and love was dead or not quite dead but close enough and no one was in the mood to argue the finer points of the issue in the mostly empty world that everyone that survived the end of the world inherited."

"When things went from bad to worse, and then from worse to worst, and then to something even worse than that that we never bothered to make up a word to describe, the few survivors from the smaller surrounding towns were evacuated to the major cities in the hopes that collecting all of the survivors into regional centers for the intent of collective survival would allow some of the survivors to continue to survive but no one could have anticipated just how little common sense and common interest influences the behavior of people in the shadow of the end of the world."

"People that were of a predisposition to religious belief were of the opinion that this was the end of times and the rapture was upon us as promised in the books which supposedly contained the plan for everything ever as revealed by their imaginary father figure of choice who lived invisible and all-powerfully in the sky and was the reason that everyone and everything existed according to his divine and perfect and unfathomable plan. And they were right. And they were wrong. It was the end of times at least as far as most of them was concerned, but the rapture they received wasn't the one that they expected."

"There were no angels riding down from heaven mounted atop steeds whose hooves wrought whirlwinds and whose nostrils spewed plumes of fire like equine dragons. There were no trumpets sounding from above calling one and all to their eternal reward if they had lived their lives according to the philosophical guidelines of their religion of choice. The dead did not rise from their graves and no one rose into the air to be airlifted into heaven. Instead there was much screaming and death and the smoke of the cities of man blackened the skies as everything that could burn, did, and although even the atheists, against their certain instincts almost unconsciously looked towards the sky hoping for the clouds to part and salvation to appear, divine intervention did not occur. Either there was no God as the atheists of the world had always suspected, or God had bored with having humans as his playthings to do with as his will, or everything that happened was part of his divine plan, but towards the end of the end of the world as we knew it there was less time for philosophical disagreement and religious differences became less important than the difference between who was alive and who was dead and who was dead but not dead and although only the strong survived it was a matter of opinion as to whether or not the meek had inherited the earth."

I wrote these paragraphs on my phone, because my laptop is dead, which is part of my I need to raise some money to make it happen.
Either I can get a second job and ignore my hopes and dreams like everyone else does, or I can try to be somewhat crass and commercial and materialistic and try to raise enough money to allow me to fend off the constant pressure of life long enough to allow me the freedom to explore the world I'm sketching out with these brief bursts.
Only you can decide if this happens.
I'd probably write it anyway, but I want to be able to make something special that really means something to the people involved.
If you think you want to be a part of a novel-length exploration of some of the themes I presented preceding, then please do comment, share, etc.