There’s something seductive about ruin.

Something strangely beautiful in imagining what’s left behind when the world as we know it ends — not with a bang, but with a slow unraveling. Poetic, even. Skyscrapers overtaken by vines. Roads cracked open and swallowed by the earth. Silence where there was once traffic, crowds, sirens, noise.

I’ve always been drawn to that silence. In fact, I’ve often said that I should have been born in an era long before modern technology. But I digress.

Post-apocalyptic stories strip away the excess. No more systems or status games. No endless scrolling. No fake smiles for coworkers you hate. What’s left is raw, primal, real. The world narrows to survival, to purpose, to instinct. And in that space — the quiet after everything collapses — we see who people really are. Who we might really be.

When I started building the world for The Wanderer Trilogy, I knew I didn’t want ash-choked skies or nuclear winter. No zombies. No high-tech dystopia. I wanted something more grounded. Something closer to what might actually happen if the world fell apart slowly — and then was forgotten.

I wanted nature to win.

Not in some utopian way. But in a way that feels eerily plausible: humans fade, and the world grows back over us. Trees burst through concrete. Wolves return to the highways. Feral cities, echoing with memories. And in the center of it all — scattered groups of survivors trying to make sense of what’s left. Some cling to power. Some build something new. Some just wander. And years later, have they fully rebuilt? Or do we find that once societal expectations are gone, the descendants of survivors never truly return to those same systems?

That’s where my characters come in. They’re not heroes in the traditional sense. They’re flawed. Scarred. Some of them are barely holding on. But in this world — a world of broken systems and ancient echoes — survival isn’t just about food or shelter. It’s about who you choose to be when no one’s watching. When no one’s coming to save you.

And I think that’s why we’re so fascinated by post-apocalyptic stories — not because we want the world to end, but because we crave that kind of clarity. To experience the opportunity of our raw, unapologetic selves. It’s a fantasy, really. We wonder, deep down, if we’d find something better once the noise is gone. If maybe, in the ashes, we’d find ourselves.

Would we protect others or only ourselves? Would we build, or would we burn?

Would we survive — and more importantly — would we deserve to?

These are the questions I explore in my books. They’re not always comfortable. But they feel true. And sometimes, truth is the most powerful thing we can create in a broken world.