The Origin Of The Eye Society
Have you ever experienced the urgency to write something down because within yourself you felt like it could be the only way to solve a problem?
I have.
It all happened on a Friday, during a march for the climate organised by Fridays for Future. I had attended a few strikes already and I was very moved by the huge participation. Yet, the amount of people who underestimated the power of these actions or who denied the veracity of the climate crisis made me feel powerless. That day, while I was taking a picture of the crowd marching before n° 10 Downing Street, something clicked, and it wasn’t the camera. It was my brain. The first images of the story I would some time later begin writing, started taking shape in my head.
I tried to forget about them and continue my life, but I couldn’t. Those images didn’t stop crossing my mind and the urgency of writing them down didn’t leave me alone until, eventually, I decided to do it.
The very second I stopped fighting that urgency, I realised I wanted to write a novel that would answer the question: what is going to happen in fifty years from now if we do nothing to stop global warming? So, I set the story in 2072 and I created a world where the atmospheric conditions were so bad that a world lockdown had been in place for twenty years.
In December 2019 I had already written the first part of the book and picked a title: The Eye society.
Then, the pandemic started.
When Covid began spreading all over the world, I was working on the second part of the novel and I couldn’t believe that the things I was writing were happening for real. A world lockdown was precisely what The Eye Society was about, and even if the story wasn’t focused on a virus outbreak, viruses were mentioned in regard to the glaciers melting and releasing viruses hidden underneath them for millions of years.
The whole thing slowed me down, but it gave me the opportunity to look at the lockdown from an unexpectedly close perspective. The novel started to make more sense.
I slightly reshaped the plot and found a way to connect the story to the current situation. I thought that would make the readers empathise more with the characters and help them understand the importance of what the novel was trying to explain. Basically, it would have helped the readers going beyond the story and understand the moral.
I am currently approaching the end of the first draft. Between researching and actual writing, I’ve been working on the book for a year and a half, and I can’t wait to see it finished.
I don’t know if The Eye Society will ever help anyone changing their approach towards global warming, but this is definitely what I hope.
Fingers crossed!
© Brooxy Moon
Brooxy Moon 