First off, I want to appologize for my absence recently...I was active for a while a few months ago, then some stuff cropped up forcing me to move(yet again) and I've been busy with work.

At any rate, in trying to flesh out my story that I posted the First 13 of a while back, I came to a realization: I want to tell the story of what happened, not what happened after.

So I've begun a complete rewrite of my story. I'm going to keep the old one in case I want to go back to it, but for now I want to write this...

So, my question:
The story I want to write is about the End of the World with a nuclear war followed by a fallout-generated pandemic. However, I don't think I can make the changes I need to make to society go so quickly. I want to break it up into four parts(white, red, black, pale) set many years after eachother, often abandoning previous characters. Now, I got this idea after reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz"(great book by the way) and was wondering if it would be in poor taste to follow in the same style as this book? I feel that while I'm inspired by it, I'd be 'stealing' a very interesting plot design.

What are peoples thoughts?

Write it and see where it takes you.

I wasn't sure if it would be right to use the style. Specifically, the fractioning of the main story into 3 seperate parts with different characters. The story I want to tell takes place over the course of about 200 years, and I couldn't figure out how to break that up smoothly. This is the answer I needed.

I was just worried that it would be poor taste to use the layout similarly. I'll be using it to my own end and differently, but already everything has fallen into place. Basically it will be 4 shorter stories that tie into eachother, each influencing the next in a large way.

One suggestion that I usually use in this kind of situation, take it or leave it: You may want to wait and give it some time for "Canticle of Whatever" to fade into the back recesses of your mind before you write this, to keep the style theft to a minimum. There are certain authors whose style I tend to pick up autmatically when I read them (Henry James for instance, although he is WAY better at it than I am. Steinbeck is another one.) I try to avoid them when I'm writing, because if I pick up their style too much, I'll just be a pale imitation of a master instead of developing my own mastery of writing.

Please, allow me to elaborate. I got the idea to fragment the story from A Canticle for Leibowitz, not the idea for my own story. I was reading Canticle to get me in that mindset, of the apocalypse.

Now, that clarification made(I hope) I want to thank all of you for your support on this. I was worried that I might just be stealing a great idea, cause it's not something I've run across in any other book(Speaker for the Dead doesn't count, that was a seperate book from the first and still had the same character thousands of years later)

The comment from Willy that you'd buy it, really encouraging. Lets me know that the plot itself is a catch. I've been writing all day, and only have a few paragraphs written. I need to just plow through it before going back and correcting things, but I'm already finding glaring problems with the first 13(a POV shift after the first paragraph, for instance) that I need to fix before I post even that. I'll post it[the first 13] tomorrow night though, promise, let you guys take a look.