I Know What I'm Doing For NaNoWriMo
Steampunk has always been a thing that gives me a pleasant tickle. Some architects - wild and crazy outlaw geniuses of the spires ! - have come up with an idea that does more than tickle: it siezes me by the shoulders and shouts "Write about me! Write about me, or perish!"
Here is the Helicopter Archipelago:
A kind of flying Hawaii, or anti-gravitational Micronesia, with tanned deck-hands leaping across aerodynamic tailfins to the soundtrack of ceaseless enginery, the helicopter archipelago would act as an escape hatch from traditional, nation-state sovereignty. Its government would be a parliament of pilots, led by experts in storms, whose access to climatological data - future weather, air speed, barometric pressure - would determine the nation’s route and direction. Never leaving the international airspace of unregulated trade winds, the archipelago would be impossible to map. Atlas-makers and manufacturers of globes will simply include a pack of removable stickers, featuring small clouds of helicopters, to approximate the country’s location…
...
Once the archipelago is aloft for more than a century, the International Geological Society will declare it a flying continent, the world’s first airborne tectonic plate. Some speculate that, two million years from now, the archipelago’s ruins will still hover in the sky: a ghostly blur across the north Atlantic horizon…
Yes, that was in fact the sound of Skynet no longer being the coolest airborne robot in town.
Good lord. Airborne nation! There's room there for all sorts of brilliant nonsense and assorted species of derring-do. There will probably be cognitive drift from Zeal - and I will laugh like a hyena if Famous Architects actually ended up being inspired by Chrono Trigger - from Doc Savage's air fortress, and possibly from Manfred von Zorbo, possessor of a premier villain name.
A daring protagonist might travel by line and grappling hook, mechanical genius is pretty much a prerequisite for citizenship, and there might naturally be some groundling who has to be introduced to the world and help readers figure it out. Patagia! There will be people with patagia in their suits, retractable of course, aiding in all kinds of aerial trickery.
Yeah, I know what I'm up to in November.