There's a lot of stories I want to write, many of which I've been working on longer and have more developed than this one. But this one seems the most important to me, which is why I want to work on it after I finish Katani (Katani was actually a relatively new idea when I started it, although I incroporated a lot of older ideas into it, like the whole prophecy thing.
That Aftermath episode only helped a little bit in developing my story, and it remained on the back burner for a while longer.
But then I started my climate change class this semester, and ideas came pouring in. I've been building up this society since the beginning of the semester, and I'm getting a pretty good idea about the 3 main characters and the world they're plunged into. I also discovered what will trigger the last breaking of society. And I recently realized that this will probably be the next story I work on.
The story takes place where I live, in the future by about 50 years, maybe? No doubt some countries have gotten off better than America, but some countries are in much worse shape also. I'm not sure what too do about them yet.
I'll start just before the collapse of society, following one girl. I'll go through the collapse, and some time after it. Then I'll skip about 10 years to what the society sort of solidified into given time.
There will be a few people who live in cities where they manage to live off the scant amount of renewable energy available, and they try to develop better energy sources. They can still use technology there. The cities are the only places that keep contact with other countries.
The majority of people will be stuck in the newly formed slums, which were once the suburbs of the old world. They scavenge on what's left of the old society and do their best to grow food and keep alive.
But then a few people will have taken to the woods. The first girl we meet in my story decided to move to the woods to try to protect them from the swarm of people who try to kill all the animals for food and cut down all the trees for fuel and shelter.
I'm going to have one main character from each of these 3 settings.
There's a man that lives relatively well in the city. A girl that lives in the slums, taking care of abandoned cats and growing her garden. The girl that took to the woods lives with a pack of abandoned dogs, trying to protect the wilderness. She also has some horses that were turned loose or escaped, which let her travel fairly well.
This girl was my original character idea. Being the nature fanatic that I am, I was worried that if society came to a messy end, people would swarm all over the forests and totally destroy them in their desperate attempt to get resources (Which in turn makes me feel equally bad for those people). So I thought what if some people decided to try to protect the forests? Good for the forests, but not so good for the people who want wood and game. Which means that the forest guardians are pretty much universally hated.
Last week I finished reading a book that gave me some more ideas for my story. The book was called Tracker, and it's the true story of this boy who learned to track and live in the woods from an old Native American man. There's some really amazing stuff in that book. But the part with the wild dogs is what I want to use in my story. Because the woods this boy hiked all over in had packs of wild dogs. These dogs had no qualms about attacking ad killing humans. Some of that stuff is terrifying. But the most amazing part of the book is when the boy and his friend actually help a pack of dogs out of a hole, and what happened after.
This is what gave me the ideas about the wild dogs that the woods girl has to deal with.
So, I won't go into any more detail here (I could talk about a lot of my stories for ages), but there ya go. the Pandora's box of the end of society has been opened. I did it all tonight after all, even though I have class tomorrow. ^-^'
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