tenative summary

SUGGESTIONS WELCOME like you would not believe. My main character needs to not be me, therefore, I need input from people besides me. ;)


So here's the plan, so far. Main character is a girl, I'm pretty sure she's in college. She is a photographer - but views it more as a technicality, an interest, she's not exactly a passionate artist (but doesn't see that as an issue or anything, until farther along, when she finds things that move her). She's hanging out in the college town for the summer, probably renting a room in an older couple's house just outside of town. There's also a little boy, possibly the homeowners' grandson, who runs around a lot and is an endearing little kid for her to take pictures of.

What the story will center around, is an abandoned house she finds out in the woods. Not so much a cottage, more like a villa, this incredibly gorgeous elaborate thing in the middle of nowhere, empty for probably about a century. I believe she'll eventually find a diary, of a woman who lived there a hundred years ago... The house was built for her, by her lover, a mysterious and somewhat dark and very rich and artsy and dramatic guy (aka, probably basically a Phisto, though I don't know yet if he'll be shown as that, probably not). Obviously, Phistos do not deal well with human relationships, so she suffers all sorts of drama, and there will be something that caused her incredible sadness in her life there.

Our photographess will find little clues here and there to the lives lived in the house (a la "Beneath the Dust"), and somewhere between there and images of the boy turning up unexpectedly, she'll find a passion for creating beautiful images awakening. She may also spot the woman's ghost in some of her photos (mega-props to Jane for giving me a less-cheesy way to do this!).

...only, I need her to learn something more than that, there needs to be a deeper connection between her and the woman, and I don't know what it is yet. Chances are pretty good that if I just plunge into things, I'll find out, but I'd be just as happy if I knew ahead of time. Some sort of shared sorrow maybe, but we'll see. (I'm going to re-read "Requiem for a Princess" YET again if I get a chance, the author does an amaaaazing job with just the sort of connection I need, and I need to learn how to do it.)

I need to pick the brains of some of my coworkers - one of them may actually be a decent model for my photographer-chick (given that she's a photographer herself, and has the coolest artsy fashion style). And I'm a smidge out of touch with current music again, I'm not 100% on what the art-kids are listening to at the moment. Not that my character will stick with it - I have a plot to get her listening to my inherited cassette tape stash, mwahahaha.

Comments are open! So's the email and the facebook and however the heck you feel like helping me out in my insane quest for 50K. :)

layout

...was not made by me. Though I'm sure I could have made something just as pretty, Blogger's back-end code has gotten much more complicated, and I really don't want to delve into the headache of making code work. It's all I can do to tweak the xml and css and whatever the hell else is in there to what I want. I still can't get it through my head that line breaks are now br/ instead of /br. gah. So I'm cheating and making use of the vast amounts of work done by better coders than me.

Credits were already built into the layout, so check them out if you want more like this. (I found this layout like, two or three pages removed from the actual author, so the links they gave are better than I used. :p)

Oddly enough, sifting through potential templates helped me sort out my thoughts on my main character, I was looking for something that would reflect her... and I almost went for a kitschy sort of '50s look, which might be a good look for her. I was thinking more art-kid, like most of the photographers I've bumped into, but I could almost see her doing the kitsch thing.

...ehh, only dresses wouldn't be conducive to poking around all sorts of potentially grungy areas to take pictures, so maybe not. Maybe for her bedroom though.

In any event, I think this is the sort of photo she'd like. Or at least, it's the kind she's going to grow to like. (Authorial omnipotence is a wonderful, wonderful thing. XD) It's also scarily apt for my storyline, so yay.

welcome!

...to, hopefully, a new novel. Or the start of one, anyway, lord knows I have yet to finish a single one I cranked out in a November. I came close last year...but Revision January made me see the giant chunks that were missing from the storyline. They're big enough chunks that I've actually considered working on that novel for *this* NaNo, in hopes of actually finishing it. It feels a little like cheating, but, hey, if I get another 50K, it's all to the artistic good.

But I do have a few more story ideas I've had kicking around for awhile, and I may give one of them a shot. I spent a lunch break jotting down notes on one idea I've wanted to do more with...and suddenly had three little pages filled with outlines and ideas. So that might be the one I go with, but I still need to work out a few kinks. Like the age of my main character. And, uh, what the whole point of the story will be, besides giving me an excuse to invent a haunted house. ;p

Now it is possible that in the middle of this beast, I will be moving across the country. BUT, I pulled off my first NaNo win last year, when I'd just taken on a second job that had 12-hour shifts and ate my soul, SO, a cross-country move is no excuse.

(Now someone please remind me I said that, about halfway through next month.)