— The Author
Stu McEwing
Writer. World Builder.
Some stories start with a single question you can’t shake. Mine started with this one: what happens to ordinary people the moment the world stops working?
I’ve always sought out fiction that earns its darkness. Stories grounded in the real texture of human life, where the stakes feel personal before they become universal. I’m a writer and world builder. My current project is a long-form thriller series set after a catastrophic EMP event the world comes to call The Blackout. The story begins on West 84th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, on a Friday evening in autumn 2021.
The stories take place in a recognizable America. New York City, 2021, the world just catching its breath after the pandemic. Characters navigate a collapse that is sudden, total, and not entirely accidental. At the center of it is Kimberly Sterns. She is seventeen years old. Her father is an Army captain at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Her mother died at Beth Israel Hospital during the first wave of COVID. The questions that drive the story aren’t just survival questions. They’re questions about power, grief, and who gets to decide what comes next.
“The blackout didn’t create the fractures in society. It just made them impossible to ignore.”
Alongside the fiction, I’m also building a tabletop RPG set in the same world. A pen and paper game where players inhabit the same streets, factions, and moral dilemmas as the characters in the books. I’m building the world to hold both. Stories you read and stories you live.
This site is where I document the work. The writing, the world building, the process. Think of it as thinking in public..
The Severed City
Book One follows Kimberly Sterns. She is seventeen, living alone in her family’s apartment on West 84th Street. Her father is an Army captain at Fort Dix. Her mother died at Beth Israel Hospital during COVID. Now she’s navigating a collapsed New York, looking for answers the government insists don’t exist. Something triggered the pulse. Someone knew it was coming.
Stu McEwing is a writer and world builder based in the United States. His debut series The Severed City is a post-EMP thriller set in New York City, following seventeen year old Kimberly Sterns through the collapse of modern civilization. Alongside the fiction, Stu McEwing is developing an immersive tabletop RPG set in the same world. Follow the development of the project through Field Notes, the blog where the writing process and world building are documented as the story grows.