The Calendar Is Ending! We Are All Doomed!
My middle-grade fantasy, Finders
Keepers, turns partly on the struggle to avert a disaster that will occur
when the calendar changes to the year 4000. As the story approaches New Year's
Eve, 3999, a plague kills many people, earthquakes swallow buildings,
and floods threaten to drown the city. All will be lost unless the book's
12-year-old hero, Cade, is willing to risk his own well-being to save everyone
else.
I got the idea for the plot while I was drafting this
book in 2012. The internet was abuzz with speculation over what might happen on
12/21/12, the last date on an ancient Mayan calendar. Speculation that the
world would end was so common that NASA put up an information page thatexplained why it wouldn't.
The furor reminded me of similar fears when the calendar
rolled over to the year 2000, and we endured the so-called Y2K panic. Even some
rational people feared civilization would collapse because of computer problems
caused by the date change. Given how dependent we are on computers, it was hard
to say people had no reason to worry, but a portion of the population entered
into the panic with gusto, buying guns and stocking up on food and fuel. They
generalized from a computer glitch to a gigantic social meltdown and possibly the end of the world.
Why do people put so much weight on the change from one page
of the calendar to the next? After all, dates are created by humans and are somewhat arbitrary. So why do we lend them such significance?
I think it's because we human beings want to understand the
unknown. We want cause and effect. We
want meaning. Psychologists say our brains are wired to find patterns, to connect
one thing to another even though there's no necessary connection. So in a
primal way, the link between the end of a calendar and the end of the world
makes sense.
Given this need, fiction is satisfying partly because a plot
shapes events into a pattern. If something happens, experienced readers expect
it to matter. If an event has no consequences, we're likely to be annoyed, or
at least wonder why the editor didn't insist the scene should be cut.
Events that matter and form a pattern create the difference
between plot (one thing causes another) and chronology (one thing simply comes
after another). My life has chronology, but not much of a plot. What I'm doing
now probably has little connection to what I'll do this afternoon. On the other
hand, my character Cade's life has a plot. Everything matters. That's one
reason fiction often feels richer and more satisfying than daily life.
Of course, Cade's plot causes him a lot of problems
and pain. I was happy to still be around to give an open house on January 1,
2000. I'm contented to stick with my chronology and enjoy my plots in fiction.
D. A. Winsor spent years as a technical communications
professor, studying the writing of engineers, before discovering that writing
YA and MG fantasy was much more fun. Finders Keepers is Winsor's first novel,
though if you look closely, you can probably find a literal million words of
Winsor's Tolkien fanfiction posted somewhere. Winsor lives in Iowa.
A summary
of Finders Keepers on twitter would
read: Boy senses presence of heart stones. Girl recruits him to steal some.
World ends at New Year if they fail. Boy also rescues mother. Tricky.
