Firstly, anyone ever writing anything with even a few fantasy/sci-fi elements should check out The Nano Fantasy/Sci-Fi Dares Thread in the Nano forums. It's because of those damn things that I don't have a workable plot- but I do have post-it note cats!

Secondly, things are getting muddled; I may abandon the nano journal and talk about it here, since I haven't been keeping up much with this blog, and I won't have much else to say during November.

Of course, last November was completely different; last November was severely traumatic, what with me being sick and thinking I had cancer and all that crap. (No, y'all didn't miss anything, I just didn't tell you. I was being stupid, and it didn't last very long.) This November is looking to be relatively trauma free, and I can babble about trauma freely on lj.

So. The idea for the nano as it stands: Waterworld meets Fight Club meets Urban Arcana meets The Revolution is Over.

Yes, I am on bad crack. And it looks like I'll be writing about Trent whether I want to or not, and Virgil will also figure prominently. I think the two of them have become multipurpose characters- Trent because he's a few cards short of a full deck, and Virgil because he's secretly a dimension travelling space pirate. *sigh* They'll pop up out of the blue anywhere, make a few snarky comments, and disappear.

But the nano- it's all quite vague right now, but the gist is that a company (we'll say HavenCore, and put Haven somewhere in the Pacific, far away from where this story takes place) came out with a weather control device (mock not my cliches, for they are sharp and pointy and full of doom!) and used it to take over the world. But, as is illustrated in Revolution, HavenCore employees are hardly intelligent, and all they really managed to do was replicate Noah's flood, only about fourty times worse. It rained for approximately five years in some places.

The story starts out in what was once New York; after the floods, more people died from not having sanitized water or functioning medical technology than died from drowning or flood related injuries. It's been a few years since the rains have stopped, and the population has been decimated several times over, espeically in the metropolitan and suburban areas of the US.

I know it's sad that I'm drawing on a Kevin Costner movie for inspiration, but the real reason behind this came from driving over a bridge on the way back from the mall; there was a building along the side of the river that looked as though it were rising out of the water from the angle I was at. So, in places where there were tall buildings or in places of high elevation, there is land, and remains of civilization. But the area between the Rockies and the Appalachians is more or less one giant, brackish lake. Most of California is gone, sunk into the ocean. Stupid earthquakes. Seattle is still thriving, and didn't notice much difference after the flood. New York is underwater, but people still live in the gutted remains of the taller buildings. New Jersey is gone. There's a very large amount of physical improbability in this, but I'm really not interested in looking up elevations and slopes and soil types for various areas; some places were just rained on, others suffered hurricanes, tornadoes, and firestorms. New Jersey, being mostly a swamp, sank for a while, stayed up, sank again, then finally burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. On a good day, when the tide is low, you can see bits of Hilsborough and Watchung, but that's about it.

Virgil and Trent live on a houseboat, and run a taxi service of sorts. They've got a converted bathtub tied to a gondola made of old aluminum siding and office furniture. You put your baggage in the bathtub, and one of them will take you wherever you need to go.

Being New York, the water is pretty scummy, but there are areas (Central Park and the like) where the water is startlingly clear. The fish have taken over, and there are rumors of mermaids living in the Met and the MoMa.

Feck. Zela and Arxi might make a cameo here; this story is just begging for pirates. And where there are pirates, there will be ninjas, and where there are ninjas, there will be cheese. And those mermaids weren't there a moment ago. *sigh*

I may scrap the idea of HavenCore, and just have it be Atlantis' revenge- Illuminati, anyone? (I should read that book again, if only for the info on sex, drugs, and conspiracy theories.)

Anyway, Trent has no memory of the last twenty years of his life, so he missed the flood and the anarchy and all that jazz; Virgil fished him out of the Sound one day and decided to keep him. Virgil might know more than he's letting on; Trent isn't sane by any stretch of the imagination, though he does a very good impression of a sane person.

He wavers between an absentminded, somewhat immature adult of 26, and the bratty, orphaned problem child he was before his black out. He still suffers from occasional black outs where he'll disappear for a few hours at a time. Someone usually finds him and returns him to Virgil, who had the foresight to give him dog tags; Trent will have no idea where he went or what he was doing. Sometimes he'll just turn up in the bow, rocking back and forth and babbling incoherently to himself- Virgil usually gets really, really freaked out by this and really doesn't like having to deal with it. He'll typically leave Trent there until he's quieted down a bit, and then see what he can do to help.

Ah, The X-Files just became an inspiration. This is what I get for reading Mulder/Krycek slash at three in the morning. *sigh*

Virgil and Trent are not in any sort of a relationship; Trent owes Virgil his life, and Virgil is something of a humanitarian. He was tired of trying to find excuses to not move in with Nuala. (Should probably ask Sarah if it's okay to include Nuala...) He honestly likes Trent, and they get along quite well, as long as Trent is being sane. (Trent is older than Virgil by a few years, but is much less mature most of the time.) Perry will also show up (from Aviators, where Trent originally came from) as Virgil's friend. Perry trains homing pigeons, naturally; they're one of the more effective means of communication in the world after the flood.

"What are you doing?!"
"Trying to blow things up; I should think that would be obvious."
"Damnit, man! Don't you know how hard it is to find TNT in a post-apocalyptic world?"

If vampires appear in this story, I'll probably be very annoyed at myself...people keep asking questions at the nano forums, and it pisses me off to see people taking Anne Rice's universe as law. *grr* I'm enjoying the books, but I still think her take on the mythos is utter bunk.

Character profiles and portraits for Virgil and Trent will be forthcoming at a later date, as will further plot aspects, world characteristics, and minor characters. There may even be a villain or three.

The title, however, for all intents and purposes, is still All Directions GO. I blame the parfait.