After Ancient is one of those great ideas for a sweeping, grand story that got too big for me to handle. I have confidence that someday I will be able to tackle it again and whip it into shape, but for now it’s a half-written, scattered-scene mess.
The idea behind After Ancient is that in 1000 years the Earth’s oceans rose 1000ft, effectively covering anything that wasn’t a mountain in water. The Mississippi River becomes an ocean, and Atlanta (half of which is below sea-level at 1000ft) built a giant wall to keep the water out and is the only city left with major technology. The rest of the world has gone back to agricultural society and city states, and society has become once again pantheistic. Today’s culture icons are tomorrow’s gods and goddesses (Disney, for instance, is the goddess of childbirth and children in general). And everyone is worried about Global Cooling, which is going to kill the crops.
The plot came second to the world, and I think that’s where I fell into trouble. I had this awesome world built but no characters to play in it. So I threw some characters in right before NaNo ’06, and a loose plot about a train wreck, and wrote 50,000 words. Because I had no plot or characters until a few days before NaNo started I didn’t have any idea what to write and ended up skipping around all over the place as far as writing scenes, and then I got confused as to what I had and had not written and what went where in the timeline, and then I gave up.
I still really like the idea of the world, so I will try again, but for now After Ancient is on the farthest back burner I have.