Blog Post Idea Realized

This may ramble and not make a lot of sense, but here's where my NaNoWriMo is going to be coming from.

After the World Trade Center fell, my aunt was so afraid that she questioned letting her kids go to school. She lives 3,000 miles from New York. The green sign on the side of the highway that tells you that you have entered the town she lives in has about two hundred people. The entire county has about 55,000 people in it. The tallest building is, I think, six stories, but that's three miles away from the school her kids went to.

When I school started a few weeks later, I heard some of the students saying that they were scared to be there. What if something like what happened in New York happened there. And I thought they were crazy because no one was going to crash a plane into a university that no one, outside of the state, had heard of.

But hearing these sorts of things got me thinking. How would people like my aunt and those scared students react if terrorists attacked the US like they have attacked Israel? What would the average person here do if coffee shops or pizzerias were bombed? What if the places bombed were a store that had hundreds of branches in the US, earns billions of dollars each year, and nearly everyone has visited at one time or another? What if several bombings happened at exactly the same time? What if there was at least one bombing in each state?

How would people react? How quickly would people be able/willing to get on with their lives? Would those people try to have the exact same life as they had before? Would people be able to simply go to the grocery store to pick up some milk? Would the people in the cities and towns that weren't bombed be able to move on faster than the people in the cities and town that were bombed, or would they constantly be waiting for the other shoe to drop?

What would the government do? If the multibillion dollar company began failing, would they bail it out? Would stores start placing metal detectors at the doors? Would government security be provided for the stores? Would people be screened before they could enter a store to buy some ice cream? Would only a limited amount of people be allowed in at a time? (At the time, I wondered if the government would start looking at passports to get into the US from Canada or Mexico, but since that's starting at the end of this year I no longer have to speculate.)

So, I've been wondering these sorts of things for about five years, but I couldn't figure out how to use them (other than log on to some terrorist website and say, "Hey, guys, I have a suggestion..." but that didn't seem like a smart thing to do). Last month, I figured out how I can use them. Looking at all the thoughts now, it would probably make for a decent political thriller, but that's not my sort of thing (Okay, I enjoy watching political thrillers, but I don't think I could write one, at all.) and it seems like the usual way an idea like this would go.

Late last month, I figured out how to use this stuff and make it a real human story, how to make it about someone more than about something. I filed it away in my brain and assumed that I'd never write it. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a blog that mentioned the writing month and, after much hemming and hawing, I decided that this would be the place to get this out of me.

I only hope it works.