A tale of climate grief and vengeance

How would you feel about the climate crisis if your family died in a wildfire? How would you process your climate grief? What would you do to hold the people who caused the climate crisis responsible?

I’m exploring these questions and more in my forthcoming novel, Burning.

Burning is the story of a woman named Rionach who loses her family in a wildfire. In her grief, she decides to do the unthinkable – hunt the people she holds responsible for the climate crisis.

Rionach’s tale of climate grief and vengeance started out as a short story which is currently available for purchase on my Ko-fi page. Due to favorable responses from readers and my own passion for the story, I’m developing this story into a full-length novel.

The novel starts at about the same point as the short story but offers a much longer exploration of Rionach’s campaign of vigilante climate vengeance. It also delves more deeply into her climate grief, exploring the tension between her capacity for brutal violence and her deep grief at the loss of her loved ones.

Since the main character of the novel goes around killing people, I’m planning to emphasize that angle in the marketing. The TV show Dexter has had considerable influence on the story’s concept and execution, so I fully intend to reference that in the marketing. I hope to draw in some readers who have never read any climate fiction but enjoy a good thriller. 

I also foresee some heated discussion about the violence of the novel, especially if any climate deniers come across it. I wrote the short story and first chapters of Burning long before the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination. Even so, that real-world event will surely influence how many readers and critics alike will view a fictional character who responds to the climate crisis by attacking people in positions of power and influence. Someone somewhere will probably say that it’s “too soon” or “inappropriate” or even “criminal” to write a story like Burning, but I disagree. I see great value in using fiction to explore the relationship between individual violence and systemic violence, especially when the public is reflecting on that relationship in real life.

In my own discussions of the novel, though, I really like to emphasize the climate grief angle. As the climate crisis progresses, a growing number of people are experiencing climate grief, climate anxiety, and yes, even climate rage. Talking about these feelings, and how to deal with them, is an important part of responding to the climate crisis, individually and collectively. Rionach’s grief motivates her to undertake a sustained campaign of violence against climate criminals, but readers can make different choices about what to do with their climate grief. If we refuse to acknowledge or discuss our climate grief, we may either fail to take any action on climate change at all or find ourselves on an extreme action path like Rionach.

Since the themes of this novel are so timely, and the potential appeal of the novel is so broad, I’ve decided to spend this entire summer writing the rest of Burning. I currently only write a few hours per week due to my other commitments, but I intend to spend all of those fiction hours writing Burning from now until the first draft is complete.

This has been a difficult decision for me. I’m also very fond of my other major writing project, Welcome to Solardale, which also started as a short story for sale on my Ko-fi page. And I also see great relevance for that novel in light of current events. Here in the United States, a fascist coup has escalated the severity of violence and oppression undertaken by the federal government. This would be a particularly good time to publish a novel about a municipalist utopia in Small Town USA where the people create a wonderful community life together in spite of the ongoing collapse of the society around them.

I still plan to tell that story. It will just have to wait until after Burning. There are only so many hours in a day, and I spend most of my weekday hours on part-time minimum-wage work and other non-writing responsibilities. So I’ve decided to focus on completing and publishing Burning rather than dividing my energy between the two projects any longer.

If you’re excited to read Burning, that’s great! I’m excited to share it with you. Please subscribe to my newsletter and/or follow me on social media for the latest news on Burning and my other writing. 

You can read the short story that inspired the novel by purchasing it through my Ko-fi page. Your purchase of the short story will help support and encourage me as I develop Rionach’s tale into a full-length novel.

If you’re really excited about Burning, please subscribe to my Ko-fi campaign! Membership starts at $1 per month and gives you full access to my published works and works in progress, including the first draft of each chapter of Burning as it’s written. I’ve already written the first draft of fourteen chapters of the novel, so you can read quite a bit of the story right now. This also gives you a peek behind the curtain as you read the chapters before the novel has gone through the full revision process. 

The more people who subscribe or buy my writing, the sooner I’ll be able to finish the novel! If my income from sales and subscriptions starts to surpass my income from my minimum-wage part-time job, I can pause or end the part-time work in favor of writing. That’s my goal – and it would likely mean that my readers have the novel in hand sometime in Fall of 2025 rather than who knows when in 2026.

Either way, thank you for reading this post! I appreciate all of my readers, whether they buy everything I’ve ever written or just read a blog post occasionally.

If you have any questions about Burning or my writing generally, feel free to contact me. In the meantime, I’m excited to get back to work on Burning!