National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) kicked off last night at midnight and thousands of aspiring “novelists” around the country are pounding on their keyboards in the first mile of the the marathon to 50,000 words by the end of November. I’ve got my own story sort of outlined ââ�¬â�� I bet I’ve got 20,000 words worth sketched out ââ�¬â�� but I’ve yet to write a word. This is the first time I’ve tried NaNo while also working a real full-time job. It’s not going to be easy.

The novel I’m not writing this year, but which I may write in the future, or which someone should maybe write, comes from an idea of my mom’s. Basically it would be a novel in which the U.S. President’s daughter, let’s call her “Jenna,” gets picked up as an enemy combatant, held in secret, and tortured, as a result of the president’s own decisions to ignore our Constitutional rights.

Here’s how it goes:

President asks Congress to give him unfettered power to pick up anyone, anywhere, and at any time, and to hold those people forever and in secret without charging them, and to torture them in any way he sees fit so long as he doesn’t call it torture. Congress gives the president this power, as well as the power to delegate these powers to anyone the president wants. This part of the story is trueââ�¬â��it all just happened in the last month or so.

Next, “Jenna” is a party girl. She likes to go to clubs in D.C. and dance nasty with dangerous men. She meets, um, Ahmed, who is totally hot. She dances with him week after week and then gets his phone number. She starts calling him frequently and he starts calling her. He doesn’t like to talk about himself or his past much, but he seems very mysterious and dangerous and Jenna gets the idea that maybe he was in Iraq or Afghanistan and was or is somehow connected with some of those bad men her daddy is so obsessed with. Talk about dangerous! When the two of them get busy, the fantasizes that she’s getting down with a terrorist! Talk about a thrill!

Meanwhile, the president has delegated his authority to kidnap, incarcerate, and torture to Ronald Dumsfeldcroft (yeah, that’s a Rumsfeld-Ashcroft hybrid; we’re talking super-zealot here). Dumsfeldcroft takes his new responsibility very seriously and declares a zero-tolerance policy for fraternizing with the enemy. You so much as talk to the enemy, you are the enemy. Unbeknownst to Jenna, Dumsfeldcroft’s henchmen have had their eye on her hottie Ahmed for some time. One late night after Jenna and Ahmed have been dancing up a storm and have retired to his boudoir for a bit of cuddly-coo, the Dumsfeldcroftian henchmen storm the loft and arrest both Ahmed and Jenna. The two lovebrids are thrown into a secret prison somewhere where the torture begins.

Within a few days, people are starting to worry. No one knows what has happened to Jenna. Dumsfeldcroft knows, of course, but he’s not telling b/c he doesn’t want to put his beloved president in the awkward position of having to say that his daughter can get away w/fraternizing with the enemy. Unfortunately, a sort of low-level panic grips the country. People start believing that terrorists have kidnapped Jenna and that maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg. Other people have disappeared, after all. What’s next?

Where the “novel” goes from there, I’m not sure. Got any ideas? [tags]nanowrimo, novel ideas, politics[/tags]

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