[jaxx6166]

I've made my decision. Since I don't have the time to research a perfectly detailed historical adventure, I'm going to not stray far from my comfort zone.

It'll be a PA/fantasy adventure story.

My main character will be "The Tinkerer," Basil Rossim (a play on my uncle's name,) he's an old sailor who remembers the way things used to be. He's been working on a ship for the past seven years so he can sail through the oil slicked wasteland of what's left of the oceans. I'm debating on whether I want to make him a sickly thing and make him quest for the antidote in the old lands, or just kind of pressured by a younger secondary protagonist to have the old man relive his youth.

I think the second option has more of an appeal.

I haven't really decided on if I want a "real villain" or not. I'll probably fall back on 7th grade Grammar and Composition and just call it "Man vs. Nature" and "Man vs. Self"

Then, I found this on wikipedia: In 1938, E. Allen Petersen escaped the advancing Japanese armies by sailing a 36-foot (11 m) junk, Hummel Hummel, from Shanghai to California with his wife Tani and two White Russians (Czar loyalists)

Somehow I want to work my aunt into the whole thing, but I don't want it to be any more obvious than it already will be with Basil Rossim and the seven year ship. Maybe I'll give her a cameo when he reaches land. I'll make her an archivist or something...she was a public school librarian.

Ideas?