A novel I’ve been working on for a couple of years is refusing to die. The story is so strong in my mind that it keeps reminding me that it’s waiting for me.
So, tonight I plan to pull the story out, dust it off (figuratively speaking, it’s in bits and bytes, lol) and have a look.
I’ve got two choices; pitch what I’ve written and redraft from the beginning or pick up where I left off and keep going.
I’d started this story before I knew anything about cycling (see Dean Wesley Smith’s book on Writing into The Dark for this concept), so after writing a good deal of it I felt lost…there was simply too much to remember.
So we’re going to remedy that situation, because Chrissy deserves to have her story told.
Here’s a bit of background of the world Chrissy lives in.:
Once the Ministry had put a chokehold on every resource the country had (which unfortunately wasn’t much because of the many years of economic redistribution the enemies of the country had delivered) people began walking the streets, searching for anything which could be used to feed their families.
After many years of living in riotous decadence the population or at a least a majority of them had no life skills whatsoever. They knew nothing of growing or killing their food – how to rig a shelter to keep themselves warm and dry…nothing!
It wasn’t long after the financial collapse began that the Ministry troops went into areas with the sole purpose of eliminating the populace. Their targets were the very young and the elderly. Those whom they didn’t kill were taken into slave labor, those who escaped were left alone for a time until the Ministry began to hunt them down.
The Christians in the community where Chrissy lives and grew up are slaves. They were smart enough to do the work required of the Ministry. The more clever ones, the ones who showed promise despite the deliberate dumbing down of the indoctrination centers, were given jobs in the Ministry together with those born to the Ministry citizens.
Many years of fascist, corporate rule have left the country in shambles. The Northern Hemisphere (The Sphere) is the primary headquarters of the Ministry, which spans the entire globe.
Those who survived the Sarin gas bombs during the Purge and fought back were shot point blank or killed by the Ministry’s huge drone army.
Entire cities, once populated by millions, became ghost towns within a few short years from Ministry purges and designer viral outbreaks.
The Ministry began to roll out its plans for world domination by following the same protocol everywhere; decimate the population, reduce the brain power of their slaves by feeding them mind altering, mind suppressing foods and drugs while educating them in the ways of the Ministry which were of course the only accepted law in the land.
This is the only world young Chrissy, her stepsiblings and Jacob have ever known.
