This week on Sweet Fantasy Bytes, we’re talking chocolate and end of the world.
Chocolate comes from fermented, roasted ground beans of the Theobroma cacao, or cocoa tree, and can be retraced to both Mayan and Aztec royal and religious events. Priests offered cocoa seeds to the gods and presented chocolate drinks during sacred ceremonies. Cocoa beans were so valuable that all of the areas conquered by the Aztecs that grew cocoa beans were ordered to pay a tax, called ‘tribute’.
The Europeans sweetened and fattened chocolate, and in the nineteenth century, Briton John Cadbury created the first chocolate bar by developing an emulsification process to make solid chocolate. The rest is history. Chocolate spread during the industrial revolution to the entire Western world and our little taste buds learned to adore chocolate in every dessert and bonbon manufactured and sold in fancy containers of all shapes and sizes.
Given chocolate’s Mayan sacred origins, the idea of a fantasy story involving chocolate and the end of the world came naturally to me. You could draw an entire outline aimed at plotting the end of the world through the eyes of a character destined to receive a mysterious assortment of chocolates, and every piece he or she’ll pick would trigger a series of events that would eventually seal the fate of the universe. Imagine the elements you could incorporate in a story like this. Possibilities would be endless! I’m thinking time travel, a crazy love story between the two main protagonists and a villain ex-boyfriend/girlfriend who’s chasing the female/male MC everywhere she/he goes.
I’d like to draft a prologue for next week’s post, and I’d love to hear your suggestions, so comment away! Mostly, I’d like your input on the kind of MC you’d like to read about, and what sort of challenges she/he will meet on her/his fantastic journey. And remember, chocolate may be evil, but it’s still horribly delicious.
