This project started the same way most of my writing projects start: with me reading about something interesting and immediately thinking, “That’s cool… but what if I did it in the most unnecessarily complicated way possible?”

A few years back I stumbled across the idea of multiple authors writing a single story from different perspectives. The concept fascinated me – dozens of people telling small pieces of the same larger story as it unfolds.

The problem is that organizing something like that requires, you know… multiple authors.

And coordinating creative people is historically only slightly easier than herding caffeinated raccoons.

So I thought: What if I just did it myself?

Which is how this apocalyptic project was born.

Instead of one narrator or even a handful of characters, this story is told through sixty different voices. Each entry comes from a completely different person experiencing the end of the world in their own strange way: a prepper who thinks the apocalypse is the greatest thing that ever happened to him, a radio DJ broadcasting to whoever might still be listening, a librarian trying to preserve knowledge, a chef worrying about recipes when food is running out, and a few people who are… not handling things particularly well.

Some entries are hopeful.
Some are dark.
Some are absurd.
And a few are probably evidence that the author should not be left alone with a keyboard.

Structurally, the pieces form a loose timeline of the collapse itself – rumors, strange incidents, the slow realization that something is very wrong, and eventually the full unraveling of society. In the fictional framing of the project, these writings are recovered documents compiled long after the catastrophe as a kind of historical record.

In reality, it’s also a bit of a writing challenge for me.

Each entry uses a completely different voice, format, and personality. Some are diary pages, some are logs, some are scraps of notes, emails, receipts, or whatever else the characters happened to be writing on when the world ended.

Which, if I’m being honest, works perfectly with my own slightly weird and borderline neurotic writing style anyway.

So this is Lost Voices – a patchwork history of the end of the world told by the people who lived through it… or at least managed to write something down before things got really bad.