It takes place in the near future, where a financial scandal has just lead to the church to be broke, and a sitting prophet, and several apostles to admit the whole thing is a scam. While the church is crumbling, with mass quitting from the corporate staff, and abandonment of callings, we move to a group of missionaries in a third world country, who must now find their way home.

However, their mission president had all their passports in a safe, was the only one who knew the combination, and he has just shot himself.

The former missionaries don't realize how much trouble they are in trouble, instead they just want to get to the US embassy, in a far away city, while they come to terms with all the parts of the world that are no longer off limits. While trying to make it to the embassy, they inadvertently make a bunch of dangerous enemies.

I am willing to work on it as a group project, and would love ideas or suggestions.

I think you have the ideas for one hell of a book! You actually write this, save me a copy in Kindle format.

Can we call it a collaboration of The Forbidden Coke Drinker and His Lost Kolob Airmen?

If you'll drop me a note at my email above, I'll reply with some immediate reactions and ideas, and you can see if you think any is a good fit.

There needs to be some girlfriends back home trying to find their man, while parents are having mental breakdowns.
I'ts always good to have a little love story thread, while not the main theme, it could widen your audience and add a human element to it.

I was thinking more of a comedy, but that could be a fun element.

Rather than meltdowns, they are trying to help get their men back home because premarital sex is now permissible without the shackles of the cult. They are trying to save themselves for their men, but the temptations of no rules, crossed with the ingrained, encouraged "casual dating while the mish is away" is too much for them to take. Can they resist? Can they bake and sell enough bread and send their men the proceeds to get them home?

This would work very well as a Blair Witch Project video format.

You could have various people keeping video diaries. Plus the missionaries sending Skype messages home.

They'd have no money, as TSCC would have spent it all on some project, so the missionary fund would be empty.

Also, you could have a rump Mormon Church with one of the GAs getting a revelation that he is the right and truthful prophet and calling for a return to polygamy, gathering the fundies -or some of them- around him.

He could re-introduce the Danites to deal with the enemies of God.

That's brilliant. I am going to make it so that one of them unknowingly has the key to billions of dollars of missing church money, and I could see a battle between old school Danites, and the henchmen of the corrupt GA who lost all the money, in order to abduct and extract the information from the Elder through either murder/torture.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2012 07:51PM by forbiddencokedrinker.

Sorry, I thought I remember my name being clickable to get email. Oh well, I'll pontificate here.

I see them in a very remote area with no Internet, few phones, very little plumbing and scarce electricity. Mormonism of the future only works if the audience has no ability to verify anything they say.

Then let those things haunt them as they try to work their way out.

I'd throw in a small village along the way where the only phone in town is inside the village's brothel. No need for anything graphic, but will our boys "avoid the appearance of evil" or actually try to get help?

You could have one of the boys wound a bit too tight and insist they have to wait til Mother's day to make the call.

This could be fun.

Maybe in hiding in a cave with a few of his wives, the original gold plates, and a few other artifacts he's rescued from the vaults. Holding secret ceremonies for the inner circle, living off of food storage.

There needs to be a female character somewhere in a leading role. Perhaps your male mishies encounter some sister mish girls (one of whom is street-smarter than the boys).

I was not only thinking of that, but I was going to put it in. I was going to create a love triangle thing. The sisters keep going off alone, and popping up at odd times, when the elders really need help. In my original vision the elders are clueless about what happened, and are always getting close to finding out, when one of the upright ones turns off the TV, or reprimands the elders for trying to read a newspaper.

One of the best parts of this is that it's only the Mormon world in crisis, so the rest of the world is just going by like always. Meanwhile these missionaries are in an end-of-world sort of situation... locals are sipping coffee and doing laundry.

Can we name them Shadrach, Meshach, and Larry?

I am going to make the country the former missionaries must travel through a fictional one, but I haven't figured out which continent. Africa or South America? Africa could get really wild, but South America has the promise of the elders thinking they are in the land of the Laminites.

South America!

have the last living and fertile, unresigned, Temple-sealed couple have an internet epiphany about the fraud and decide to abort the last BIC monster!

Have the other living but infertile Temple couples be like zombies trying to re-convert them and thwart the abortion appointment and process... zombie VTs and HT's busting through walls and such whenever they come into close proximity of additional facts, etc, etc.

I bet as a screenplay you could have tons of fun with it!

That would be a great story to tell in the same universe, but it might detract from my main focus, which will be the on trapped elders.

Oh, and have the last fertile couple be hispanic so that the last BIC monster is a gonna be a lamanite, so even that even among the zombies there are all kinds of complex mixed emotions about the whole deal.

You could have two groups of missionaries, one in Africa, one in South America. Somehow, something links the two groups and they must all get back to SLC to do something or another. Have them both have a genuine Joe Smith talisman, handed down the families since Joe died in a gun battle. They are both needed to open a vault.

Have them find a "Third Testament of Jesus Christ" inscribed in Reformed Egyptian, just like the BOM, but on the facets of a big 10 pound princess cut diamond dug up in South Africa!

And make it so that it takes a vintage set of Vuarnet sunglasses (like the VS347s pictured here: http://www.vintage-designer-sunglasses.com/brands_vuarnet_2.html) to view the correct translation, instead of scrying or using a Urim and Thumim, because God wanted to show that he was liberalizing access to sacred instruments and the gift of translation.

Don't worry, I'll come up with more stuff on the storyline for ya... consider me your "Sidney Rigdon" on this project! LOL

(This is how I imagine it was with JS. I don't know if he was working with others or just doing his own make-believe, all I hear is him saying over and over again in Jon Lovitz fashion... Yeah! Yeah! That's the ticket! That's the ticket!)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/11/2012 12:32AM by drjekyll.

Well, sounds like the plot is just about worked out.

Whatever you do, DON'T let ANYONE borrow the first 116 pages!!

If only Joseph Smith had subscribed to Carbonite, eh what?

The church has fallen due to enormous embezzlement by GBH, which Monson and crew tried to hide through the bold money-laundering scheme, a failed City Creek Mall.

Thousands of missionaries are trapped abroad with visas in safes and members stop paying the church for their upkeep, thinking the church will simply send their children home. Instead, the church holds the missionaries as randsom, asking members for exhorbitant$$ as "processing expenses" to get their missionary sons and daughters back. The members revolt, whistleblowers finally emerge from the COB, revealing international corruption on a scale unimaginable.

Two families join forces to rescue their missionaries, who are companions in England/France. They are very worried because the pair was known to be working in the southern area, which has become a Muslim enclave and operates under sharia law. One family is BIC and the other is a convert family with a street-smart apostate sister who clashes with the BYU virgin girlfriend-in-waiting of her brother. (Possible romantic subplots here between BIC RM brother of family #1 and apostate sister of companion in family #2.

By telling it third person from the POV of the members, you get a chance to delve into all your favorite dark-vault Danite-loving, lack-of-transparency alien parasite controls Monson--any and all theories, and there's plenty of mystery about what happened to the missionaries.

The plot would be like the present TV show "The River" where the family is looking for a lost jungle explorer, but with so much more dimension.

Apocalyptic events can take place around the travels of the family as they discover their missionaries were actually sent as vanguards to test the possibility of opening a mission in ...a Muslim country!

The Mormons press on to the imaginary Muslim country, seeing first hand how polygamy works and having uncomfortable moments juggling their required garment wearing with the required hair covering and other odd contrasts and similarities of the Mormon and Muslim women. Religious discussions start with "Angel! We also saw that Angel!"

The mystery of the disappearance of the missionaries ends up revealing how the church has been using them for experiments on teaching a completely different religion. They were given new scripts based on "revelation" (which the family knows from what they found out back home from the whistleblowers is actually based on a financial deal with the Saudis gone wrong...and the new religion their sons are happily teaching (and don't even realize it because the church used confusing euphemisms in the new discussions)

SPOILER ALERT

is Islaam.



Such Fun!

Anagrammy

You ought to included the misshies parents who are TBM and who can't/won't accept the premise of a coverup