I'm writing my first true take on the post-apocalyptic genre. I wanted to do something that would subvert the expectations of that sort of book--no love triangles, revolutions, weird government systems or groups, special chosen ones, etc.
It's a fusion of Genesis and the origin story of the Buddha, titled The Dove. Frey Sorensen lives twenty years after the "Tar Bombs" destroyed all Earth's agriculture, in a seed vault built on the former site of Yellowstone National Park. She's trained to be the Dove her whole life--the resident who is sent out into the ruins of the American West to search for arable land. She assumes there's nothing her training can't handle.
What she doesn't expect is to be saddled with a partner, Mika Salisbury, whose parents betrayed the seed vault years ago. Mika is both more cynical and more devoted to justice than Frey, and is quick to see the new world as nothing but a brutal jungle where violence is law. What these two explorers will learn as they journey is that neither of them is quite correct about human nature.
The story is split into four chapters, each of which is named after one of the Sacred Sights that convinced Siddhartha that there was suffering in the world: the Sick Man, the Old Man, the Dead Man, and the Ascetic. Characters are named after important figures in Genesis. The villains are a group of well-dressed, well-mannered cannibals, teaming up with a psychopathic former anesthesiologist named Dr. Abe Malick. And it'll be set in real locations around the West, ending in Walla Walla where I currently live. I'm really excited!
Very excited--and scared for them, haha.
