{"id":61142,"date":"2025-06-05T08:46:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T12:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=61142"},"modified":"2025-06-05T08:46:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T12:46:10","slug":"tim-weed-five-things-i-learned-writing-the-afterlife-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2025\/06\/05\/tim-weed-five-things-i-learned-writing-the-afterlife-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Tim Weed: Five Things I Learned Writing The Afterlife Project"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The year is 10151. For the last ten thousand years, Nick Hindman\u2014a microbiologist and member of the prestigious research team the Centauri Project\u2014slept in a state of cryogenic suspension as a quantum-powered system originally designed for interstellar travel propelled him forward through <\/em>the millennia, a test subject for an emergency project to secure the survival of the human species by colonizing not the stars, but a deep future Earth. His protocol? 1) Survive. 2) Find if there are any other humans left alive. 3) Hope against hope for the arrival of a second test subject, a female.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Featuring a plausible mechanism for one-way time travel, a voyage across the post-apocalyptic seas, and lovers separated by ten thousand years, The Afterlife Project is a meditation on the future of humanity and the natural world we have unbalanced, the true meaning of deep time, and the possibility of hope in the darkness.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dark fiction is good for you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things fiction does better than any other art form is to allow us to vividly experience the world through a consciousness not our own, imagining alternative lives and alternative futures\u2014sometimes very dark ones\u2014from the relative safety of our favorite reading nook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dark fiction isn\u2019t for everyone, but if you like it\u2014if you\u2019re drawn to the writing of Stephen King, for example, or Shirley Jackson or Margaret Atwood or our own Chuck Wendig\u2014then it\u2019s possible that you\u2019re the kind of reader for whom the horrific offers a particular kind of reading pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because let\u2019s face it: there\u2019s power in darkness. It\u2019s an essential source of narrative drive for one thing\u2014what keeps the pages turning\u2014and it\u2019s also a healthy response to personal stress and the ongoing shit-show of current events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putting ourselves in the position of fictional characters as they confront tense and difficult challenges, then processing those experiences and the emotions they evoke into wisdom or at least working theories about life, is a cathartic, healthy, uniquely human practice. \u201cWe need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary,\u201d wrote Ian McEwan, \u201cas a form of hopeful exorcism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life on this planet is going to be okay in the long run. But humanity? Well . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

if there\u2019s one piece of wisdom I\u2019ve taken away from researching and writing The Afterlife Project<\/em>, it\u2019s that we\u2019re not facing the end of the amazing, ever-evolving panoply of life on Earth. Far from it. Rather, we are\u2014or should be\u2014facing the end of the illusion that the human species is not part<\/em> of nature. That we haven\u2019t from our very emergence as a species been embedded in the ebb and flow, the stew and ferment, of this complex and beautiful 4.5 billion year-old planet. The widespread adoption of this way of thinking would be a timely and necessary paradigm shift. Because it\u2019s still not too late to save ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One-way time travel into the deep future isn\u2019t all that far-fetched.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the inspiration for The Afterlife Project<\/em> was a conversation I had with an eminent astrophysicist in Tierra del Fuego (it\u2019s a long story) who was kind enough to give me his opinion on the plausibility of one-way time travel into the deep future. Using quantum physics and a series of complex mathematical equations scribbled on napkins, he was able to theorize a mechanism based on existing or easily foreseeable technology to send a test subject 10,000 years into the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are good reasons we should want to explore this option\u2014for example to facilitate the kind of interstellar travel that would us to colonize the nearest viable exoplanet, or, as in the case of the team of scientists in The Afterlife Project<\/em>, to colonize a deep future Earth after the current iteration of humanity has done its worst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time\u2019s a river, not an arrow<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time doesn\u2019t actually exist in the way we perceive it. It\u2019s not an arrow, it\u2019s a river. This is mathematically proven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The water in the river of time does flow downstream, but if you were to trace the river back upstream a few miles you would find the same water flowing between the same banks\u2014so in a certain sense all the moments that have ever passed are still unfolding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of the way it feels for us to live in our aging bodies, it\u2019s almost impossible for us to to accept this truth intuitively, but rest assured: it\u2019s one of the fundamental precepts of physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forget about the market. You really do have to write what\u2019s in your heart.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know you\u2019ve heard this before, but you really need to listen. I know novelists who haven\u2019t listened, and it never ends well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mean it\u2019s okay to think about the market before you start, and you\u2019ll need to think about it eventually if you want to pitch and sell it, but don\u2019t focus on the market when you\u2019re writing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote a weird, dark novel. I didn\u2019t set out to make it that way, it just happened. It turned out to be one of those books that felt like it was being dictated from on high, though, and when a story feels like that\u2014when it starts to tell itself like this one did, you just ride the wave and hope for the best. As a well-known Mexican novelist and filmmaker recently reminded me, you\u2019re writing for your own particular \u201cspecies.\u201d You just have to trust that there are other members of that species out there, and that they will find your book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Learn about the market, of course; study it and understand your genres. But if you try to write purely for the market, the muse will turn her back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tim Weed is the author of three books of fiction. His work has won or been shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Writer\u2019s Digest Annual Fiction Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Fish International Short Story Award, the New Rivers Many Voices Project, and many others. Co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, Tim is on the core faculty of the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. His new novel, The Afterlife Project<\/em><\/a>, was a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Literature and Uncharted<\/em> magazine\u2019s Novel Excerpt Award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Afterlife Project<\/strong>: Bookshop.org<\/a> | B&N<\/a> | Amazon<\/a> | Audible<\/a> | Podium<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The year is 10151. For the last ten thousand years, Nick Hindman\u2014a microbiologist and member of the prestigious research team the Centauri Project\u2014slept in a state of cryogenic suspension as a quantum-powered system originally designed for interstellar travel propelled him forward through the millennia, a test subject for an emergency project to secure the survival […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-61142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-fUa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61144,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61142\/revisions\/61144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}