End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I’ve always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there’s so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.

Walker is describing the peculiar realism and emotional pull of apocalyptic fiction: by stripping away the infrastructure of ordinary life, such stories make the everyday newly visible. The “ring true” quality comes less from literal prediction than from how catastrophe clarifies human priorities—safety, companionship, habit, and small comforts. In writing her own end-of-the-world narrative, she discovers an unexpected creative pleasure: imagining radical change as a lens that intensifies gratitude and attention. The quote frames apocalypse not as spectacle but as a moral and perceptual reset, where meaning is rebuilt from basics—food, water, friendship, routine—things normally overlooked until they are threatened.