Last week, I reported on the proposed sale of a "principality" off the coast of England, in the form of a World War II anti-aircraft platform.
After posting the story, I remembered the phenomenon of "cyber nations" that I happened to discover last summer, where website owners would invent their own sovereignties, with histories, governments, stuff like that.
Then I started writing. Continuously. By the time I finished a few days later, I had written a long and detailed draft of a Wikipedia-style description of an island nation in the North Atlantic, located about one hundred miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. (No, it's not Sable Island.) There are a few things to left to research (as things like geography and history require a certain plausiblity), but it could make for a great website someday.
Or I could just forget the whole thing and live in the present. Is that really the choice here?
Discuss.
4 comments:
What a crazy, worthless idea . . . but it might be fun to finish and put up the web site.
Consider a STORE, like Sealand.
Consider locating the island in the Chesapeake Bay near the VA/MD border.
DocJim
PS I want to be surgeon general . . . I guess you get to be General everything else?
"What a crazy, worthless idea..."
Nice.
I suppose someone told J R R Tolkien the same thing about Middle Earth. I'm glad he ignored them. So are others, from what I have gathered. Unlike some "cyber nation" sites, what I described is an entirely fictional account, without using real people. You'll have to be a surgeon general somewhere else.
David,
In this case, hone your prose well and let your imagination fly, the competition with Tolkien is stiff. Still, consider an island in the Chesapeake Bay. It could run along the lines of several other literary works about old agreements that were never abrogated. As a matter of fact, chosing a "Maryland" island amongst the Virginia islands might be just the ticket.
DocJim
I'd be curious about those "literary works about old agreements" to which you refer. (Really. I'd like to know.)
I hadn't thought about the Bay. Most islands there lay pretty low (and getting lower), are mostly marshland, and heavily dependent on only one industry.
I picked the area of the North Atlantic due to its relative isolation, the shallowness of that part of the Ocean (sand dunes below the surface to the northeast and southwest of Sable Island) which makes land above sea level more likely, and the proximity to the Gulf Stream. Also, no hurricanes.
Plus, there's a mountain in my story. Middle Earth has mountains after all.
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