The Revelation: In which several things are discovered mid-sentence, and the feeling of hopelessness swiftly abates

Crap, I've gone far too long without a post.  That will not do.  As the first post of the month, I wish I had something strong to start with.  But, in reality, I've almost exhausted the background information at this time.  There's a great big nefarious group known as the Collective I haven't mentioned much, but, to be honest, they're commies on steroids, and they don't need much more explanation then that.  They're living in the south in the story, they push north every so often, and they're more or less scary as shit.

What I'm struggling with right now is focus.  Put bluntly, the story is slipping away.  It always happens; I get involved in something, work hard on ideas for about a month, and then I just lose it, like a balloon at the fair.  One moment I have my hand wrapped tightly around it, and then, before I know what happened, it's floating away.  The longest I've made it was 1/3 of a story, in semi-rough draft.  It's currently living in a 80-page college rule spiral notebook, with a little spillover into a second, mostly-empty notebook.

I'm having difficulty keeping the goal in sight, so I'm going to do the one thing that seems the most alien and uncomfortable to me: I'm just gonna spill the whole thing right out here.

More or less, it's an adventure story.  The world is fucked up, and it needs to be fixed.  Does this mean finding the gods and restoring them?  Or taking down the Collective and freeing mankind?  Or both?  Or neither?  I don't know yet.  Better yet, when does this story take place?  I switch between medieval and modern, and I really can't choose which would fit better.  I have one, count 'em, one character created for this whole shebang: A semi-major character, a seer and possibly a reborn Child of Fate.

I haven't decided the setting yet because, in all reality, it could be both.  The story is pretty universal, and would tuck in nicely to either timeframe.  As for the timeline, all it would take is a few hundred years or so of padding to fix up the difference, and in a story about times of stagnation, I think a few hundred years can only help.  So, that's my biggest obstacle at the moment.  Also, the inclusion of an idea I worked on pretty hard at 3:00 in the morning about six months ago and now can't find, involving artifacts of the gods and the different powers they hold.  I'm not certain whether I want to take the whole idea over, or the idea over in any way at all, but it crept into my mind yesterday, and now it's stuck there.

Basically, it's the idea that the gods were able to create physical manifestations of their power on the planet; similar to how a mage would channel their energy, but without dispelling it in the form of magic.  If these exist, then there are sources of magic left in the world, though finite, and some of the more "civilized" magic arts could be practiced by those with the luck and ability to find such artifacts.

Now, if this is the case, then it is obvious that the Collective wants them all.  I don't know if I mentioned this before, but the blood mages work almost exclusively with the Collective by this point, and as all blood mages are the remnants of all old schools of magic, they would of course be interested in these relics of power.  And, since the Collective is patently evil, there must be a nefarious plot behind why these artifacts would be desired.  Perhaps they could be used to rule the entire world?  Or maybe they can use their power to keep their Leader alive for all eternity, and rule not just the entire world, but the entire world for all eternity.  Or, here's a real kicker, maybe the Collective is using the artifacts to keep the gods away.

Holy balls, I wish I'd had that idea earlier.  It almost fits like a glove.  On the one hand, the gods used the power of men to keep themselves alive and prevalent; now, men are using the power of the gods to keep the gods away.  I swear I didn't have this idea until that previous paragraph.  This blog is already showing itself to be a good idea.

Anyways, if the Collective is indeed collecting these artifacts (on a side note, if this plot element does indeed survive, I must come up with a better name for the Collective; it was meant to refer to the collection of different nations and people who make up this great and mighty supernation, but now that there's actual collecting going on, it really seems pretty lame), then of course the main characters will be trying to stop them.  Seems a little Scooby Doo-ish, but shit, I'm not Dickens.

So here we are, now with artifacts and the possibility of a counter-movement against the gods, and suddenly the idea seems less stale.  Thank you blog, and thank you any people who managed to read through this junkpile of narrative structure.