With 22 days until take-off, and 37 days until the start of NaNoWriMo, I've realized a couple of things:
(1) Information Overload is Bad. Why? Because if you overload, you can't concentrate, and your outlines begin to suck, and then you don't learn any psychology. Also, you get stressed.
(2) My novel is going to be work-intensive. I probably should have realized this when I came up with the story of a blood feud and a minimum word goal of 200,000 words, but I have a talent for not realizing things lately.
And… what have these two realizations come down to?
Well, addressing number one quite quickly, I'll be reviewing my Psychology up until we leave, and then working at that as we're gone. So instead of an enormous amount of pages every day, I'll be reviewing a small amount, and working at it better and more thoroughly. "Overlearning," as it were. And I have grammar down pat; I'll probably finish it before I go to bed tonight.
And, number two: Thanks to ikerrivercast, I have one of my plots nailed down rather well, I must say. And I have one of my characters figured out nicely.
Meet Jakob Anderson, who is a struggling journalist with foot and rent problems. He's been given one of the bigger columns in the Redland Informer, namely to report on the activities and whereabouts of the various members of Lundquist Estate and Martin Estate.
As Jakob starts reporting on the blood feud, he's suddenly drawn in: Frederick Martin uses him to uncover a plot of secrets, Natalie and Grigory use him to carry love notes to each other, and the clairvoyant twins, Roxanne and Rebecca, tell him ghastly stories of the future.
Jakob isn't absolutely sure that he's in trouble, though, until he breaks his leg tripping over a skateboard at Martin Estate, and even then he's not convinced until his landlord kicks him out because Jakob's apartment was booby trapped.
As Jakob tries to keep himself alive, he's dragged around by Frederick Martin, who is convinced that he's found a secret that is fundamental to the blood feud.
And I'll stop there, because 1) I'm not sure exactly what happens next to him, and 2) I might change it, even if I did know.
And now, the estates. Both Martin and Lundquist Estate hold many secrets about the blood feud and about the many family members that have lived in the house at one point or another. Thomas Lundquist, the founder of Lundquist House, has the key to the secret of the blood feud hidden in tubes in the walls. Joshua Martin, the winner of Martin Manor, has his own gambling debts that he'd rather not anyone know about.
One day, Frederick Martin, the current owner of Martin Manor, breaks a wall, and finds a piece of paper that hints at a bigger secret. A secret that Frederick has been wondering about for a while. It doesn't make sense to him, you see, that so many people would be fighting over something that happened nearly two hundred years ago. So he's been wondering… why the blood feud?
And this little piece of paper gives him a hint. When Jakob shows up, Frederick has just found out that a majority of the clues to solving the mystery are in Lundquist House, and he sends Jakob out after them.
What neither of them feel very comfortable with is that it seems that the houses are watching them, waiting for them to make a mistake, so that they can swallow them up.
Because the secrets the houses are keeping are not the sort the ghosts haunting them seem to want to come out.
I'm looking forward to finding out exactly what the secrets are, and the entire histories of both Martin and Lundquist Estate. In some respects of the story, I know (almost) exactly what's going on, but in others I am clueless.
Like Natalie and Grigory's story. WHAT, exactly, is preventing them from falling desperately in love?
I'll be exploring that later.
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