My book launch for When the Trees All Burned at my local art gallery turned out to be everything I’d hoped for—and quite the opposite of my 5 a.m. anxiety spiral where I imagined speaking to an empty room. Instead, we had a standing-room-only crowd gathered in a space where apocalyptic fiction beautifully intersected with the gallery’s “Margins & Peripheries” exhibition.

When The Trees All Burned launched into the world on April 1, not as a joke I was playing on all the fools out there, but as a cautionary tale—reminding people that we are called to be stewards of our planet and that there might be some wisdom in heeding the warnings of those who are experts in such areas.