Saturday, September 17, 2011

Around the World... and MilHalfy... and a Blood Feud

I'm going around the world with my family... as people may or may not know. We leave October 16th, 2011, and should be back January, 2013. We'll be going everywhere, practically, but that's besides the point.

The point is, I'm making up my own little challenge (if 'little' can be used as an adjective for this kind of project), and writing 1,600,000 words in 16 months. I dubbed it MilHalfy, short for Million and a Half. The challenge started on the first of September, and I am happy to say that I am kind of on track. Though perhaps I should be a bit aheader.

Anyway, I have a new story at the moment (Kathy and Co. has been relegated to a "When I can Sort Through This" Pile at the moment-- it should be finished by the end of 2012 though), whose working title is The Blood Feud.

It's about two families, the Martins and the Lundquists, who are engaged in a blood feud, believe it or not. It's going to have a really intricate plot, with a Romeo-Juliet complex, a duel (ending in DEATH), revenge, the paparazzi (for it all takes place in Modern Times-- which is code for I Don't Have Time to Research), online blogs, cellphones, an island in Malta, future-seeing twins, a psychopath murderer kept under wraps, and two ghosts... whose great grandparents invented the blood feud as a sham to propel the families to fame and fortune.

These two ghosts are some of my main characters: George Martin and Arabella Lundquist think they are still alive, and don't think it strange at all that they don't look a day over fifty, even if they're about ninety five each. They are the masterminds of all that has been happening lately with Grigory Martin and Natalie Lundquist (the Romeo-Juliet complex), James Lundquist and Gerald Hughes (the duel), and the twins, Rebecca and Roxanne.

Things would be normal, relatively, if the alive members of the clans knew that the blood feud was a sham, because then things would all be 'made up' and people would live quite comfortably. But it seems that whatever George and Arabella think up actually happens, with catastrophic results.

There's a lot of stuff to look through in this world at the moment, because I quite possibly might suddenly decide to SHIFT it all from modern times into some other world I've been working on, and the psychopath murder could quite possibly simply disappear. I'll probably have a plethora of background info by the time I actually start writing the book, but I'm looking forward to entertainment for quite some time: My word goal for this novel is twice as much as I've ever written: 200,000 words. And that doesn't include the 50,000 words I'm estimating the planning and word-building will take.

After I finish this, I'll probably start work on some of the other novel ideas that have been waiting around, but that got pushed off unceremoniously in favor of The Blood Feud.

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