Novel Idea

Okay, so I'm going to have to be careful about how much information I give away here, but I have recently had an idea for my next novel. It's a surprise to me, but it appears that (if I can get myself into the writing mode again and actually write it) it will be a sequel to Fortress Beverly Hills.

You see, I've been reading the Omnivore's Dilemma, a book about our food system. In the course of this book, I've read about this very cool farm called Polyface Farms in Virginia which does what appears to me to be about as close as you can get to sustainable farming. There's also a local farm here in Petaluma that is patterned on Polyface called Tara Firma Farms. We actually went for a visit to Tara Firma this weekend. But even before we went, the idea bubbled up in my head that a farm like Polyface would be a perfect place for my heroes to reappear - to figure out that their original ideas of what a sustainable farm looked like may have been wrong and that if they adopted the ideas and systems of a place like Polyface or Tara Firma, they could feed their populations off the land they already controlled and defended. And that they could impart this knowledge to the folks on the outside and help them get started as well.

Stay tuned. I used Stickk.com to keep my motivated and on task last time and I may need a herculean effort to do the same this time with all the different things on my plate right now.