What if God was a stranger on a bus?

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us?
Just a stranger on a bus, trying to find his way home?
Like a holy rolling stone,
Back up to Heaven all alone,
Nobody calling on the phone,
Except for the Pope maybe in Rome...

--Joan Osbourne, "If God was One of Us"

And thus began the seed for my 3 Day Novel story. :) A song on the radio while I was driving home from work last week. Immediately an opening scene popped into my head - a Greyhound bus station somewhere in Tennessee. And my main character is this average-looking guy with a duffle bag travelling cross country. Partly by bus, partly by driving (with a friend, I'm thinking), and the end bit on a plane.

He's God, but he doesn't know it. The story is about how he slowly realizes what he truly is as he goes from Georgia to Vancouver (or Alaska - haven't decided yet). Some of it will be things that happen to him along the way. Most of it will probably have to be in flashbacks, things that he remembers doing in the past, people he knew and helped.

So it starts with minor abilities that he has - superpowers that he can use to help people around him in ways that are as natural to him as breathing. As the story progresses, the abilities that get uncovered become more major, until he's doing things that can potentially move mountains. Each chapter will be about a different experience, each one a different puzzle piece to the whole picture. By the end of the book he's putting it all together and reaching the final moment of epiphany. I have a closing scene in mind too. Him on a plane, seated next to a small boy, who is putting together a puzzle. By asking the right innocent questions, the boy helps him figure out who he is.

Then he "ascends." Literally just turns into white light and vanishes out of the plane. (Yes, I'm a Stargate fan. :p) Goes back up to Heaven all alone.

The book closes on the scene of a newborn baby girl's first cry. I like cycles. He made it up to Heaven and got lonely, so he decided to forget again and do it all over with a new life. ;) Not sure yet whether this will actually work out as a good ending, or whether the book will end with the plane. That's something that will probably get decided while I'm actually writing it.

So that's the basic gist of it so far. I have the beginning and ending figured out. I always seem to do the middles of things last. That's what I have to figure out - what experiences, what rough order to put them in. What puzzle pieces. I don't want to have a final set order to tell the puzzle pieces until I actually start writing and see which ones follow smoothly from the previous ones, but they sort of need to go in an "early/middle/late" type of order.

The experiences themselves will be drawn partly from stuff that I've seen in real life, and partly from my own delusions of grandeur in my fantasies. ;) Except even more exaggerated, since this is God we're talking about and he's way better than me. ;)

And I'm hoping that I won't offend anyone by the religious beliefs I use. This is not going to be a God of any organized religion. I'm a modern pagan, and I do have my own view of what God is like, so my character is going to resemble that. But hopefully it will be vague and open enough that most people will be able to relate. It will be more about faith than religion, in any case, as one of my most important memories as an early teen was being in the children's choir for Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" - which is an allegorical abstract piece about Everyman and the testing of his faith. (Bernstein was Jewish. Mass is Catholic ... go figure. ;) And go watch/listen too if you get a chance - I highly recommend.)

The plan is to do something in the 30k range. That would mean 10k words per day, which shouldn't be too bad... I hope. I averaged 2300 words per day for Nano, and my best day was only around 4700ish, but I did waste a lot of time trying to figure out what to write next. So I'll have to work at making sure I know exactly what I'm doing at all times.

Hmm. Reading back over the rough idea, it doesn't look like it's going to be comedic. I can have a serious theme running through it while all of the actual scenes are humorous, though. Should still work out. I hope.

My main worry is to not make it like the Fortress Launne stuff. Every single plot is set up to be written like a mystery, where I have to know everything that's going on in great detail before I even start. You can't have characters uncovering clues if you don't know what the clues are ... I'd like for this one to be more linear, but I'm beginning to think I'm incapable of doing a linear plot. :p We'll see as the idea develops I guess.