You Can Write, but You Can't Edit

My favorite thing about writing Vaganto will be the total lack of linear progress.

We are moving out of our apartment this weekend, and when we do I sincerely hope to find the moleskine Vaganto notebook I'd been keeping. It was a lot of interesting stuff in there, toward the building of a future world.

My challenge to myself is, what would the world look like if half the citizens in it actively undermined the notion of a geopolitical states? So many sparks came out of that simple premise - to have an entire class of people who do not even know where they came from, who were, in most cases, born into a life of travel, of vagrancy, basically living like gypsies. Unlike gypsies, though, they have a certain amount of political swagger due to sheer numbers and thus aren't necessarily criminals. But that's not even the whole story.

There are new political factions even within the vaganto, a whole mess of problems resulting from privitization of public services the gnarliest of which being transnational transportation. In this world, he who owns transportation owns the world.

They have reduced war, but war has gone corporate. Imagine for a second if it wasn't Israel or Palestine, but Pepsi and Coke. That's just pulled out of a hat, of course, Pepsi and Coke are kind of irrelevant.

But the nature of this book is the cross section of a new universe, told through fragments of myth, newspaper articles, the journal entries of Tempest 42, transcripts and new religious texts. Totally something I can treat like a series of small stories, which I've always wanted to do.

But right now, sadly, what I need is for some cruel overlord to crack a whip over my head and make me revise Mirror Men. Urg.