A couple of friends of mine are participating in NaNoWriMo, a project centered around inspiring people to write a first novel, by encouraging them to write 50,000 words during the month of November and reporting their progress. It's engrossing to watch, and inspiring. Maybe next year I'll try.

I know what my third book is going to be about. It's an idea too choice, too irresistible to pass up, but it's also too ambitious for a first try.

It's science fiction, like most of my ideas, but also political. The idea is that mankind has sent off a "generation ship" (as has been suggested in sci-fi numerous times as a way to reach the stars -- because it takes so long to get to any other star, you create a large spaceship that's self-supporting, and generations live and die on it before it reaches its destination). Just before it gets where it's going, there is an election on the ship, that's close, and hotly contested (the parallels to recent history should be obvious). When they arrive, they discover two planets orbiting the star that are habitable. So all the liberal supporters of the one candidate go to settle the one planet, and all the conservatives supporters of the other candidate go to settle the other.

That would just be how it starts. There's worlds of interesting and comical possibilities that can grow from that seed, methinks.