Stranger on a Bus

I figured it out. :)

Okay. So God is this average-looking guy on the bus, and he's trying to "go home" by taking the bus from the east coast to the west coast. Just now I figured out exactly why he's doing this (which helps solve what specifically he's doing). It goes something like this...

God is a computer programmer who created the universe. Unfortunately, he has inadvertently misplaced the root password. So the whole point of the bus ride is that he's trying to finagle it back out of the universe so that he can get back to being root. (This also has the side effect of answering the first question in the song: "If God had a name, what would it be?" ... Answer: "root." :p)

Somewhere near the end of the story, the Pope in Rome is going to call him on the phone and tell him what the root password is. Everything else that happens, leading up to it, is where he's trying to set up reality to cough up that bit of info for him. Meanwhile, the universe itself (aka "Nature") is not exactly willing to just hand it over... It'll be surreal and completely incomprehensible to the outside observer, meaning the MC, who is the bus driver.

Woot. :) This is going to be fun to write. I just have to figure out the details now. By the way, for anyone with strongly religious beliefs of any kind, please do tell me if anything I have planned is going to be offensive (or, well, moreso than the original song). This is supposed to be a comedy, not a blasphemy. ;)

***

In other news, Taint is still languishing in the first scene. I got through the first few paragraphs and don't like most of it, so now I have to rewrite them. This is going to take a while. :p Hopefully only the first scene will take so long to work out, though - once I get started, I don't usually have as much problem. It's just that this first scene has to introduce the reader to the world as a whole and hook them into wanting to keep reading. And it has to do it from scratch. Something out of nothing. Once I have the first scene down, I can build from it and it'll snowball its way along until I get to the end. But getting the initial seed down is hard.