My first plot for this year’s noveling attempt is about a 16-year-old girl named Kiora.  My inspiration for the idea came from a couple different sources.  I happened to catch 1st Daughter on TV, and my imagination sprang into action.  It also reminded me of one of last year’s novels, so I started coming up with characters and possible reasons as to why a 16-year-old girl would need secret service protection.  The idea has changed a lot since my coming up with my original notes. 

I had originally planned on them falling in love, but promptly put that on the backburner once I realized there would be a huge age gap between them.  I did a rough timeline of the career path of a Secret Service special agent, and assuming he went right from college to the secret service, I placed him at around 29-30.  13-14 years is quite a big difference.  And yes, I could make her older.  I could even make him younger, but at most a couple years.  I decided not to change up their ages at this point because I definitely want their age difference to be a major source of conflict/tension throughout the novel.  For now, I’ve decided to go for a more one-sided thing.  She has a crush on him, thinks he’s cute, will do whatever he says because of her crush.  And as for Dustin, he resents her because he’d rather be protecting the president instead of some 16-year-old girl. 

Going back to my original idea, I had come up with the idea of her being a niece of the president, but slowly the idea morphed into her being the daughter of a cabinet member.  I’m leaning towards the idea of threats towards the cabinet and their families.

I still need to work out some details on her family.  Her family tree is seen below.  Her mom died when she was a baby, her aunt Arabella has spent a lot of time in and out of psych wards, and her dad doesn’t get along with his sisters, so she has no connections to her other two aunts.  Her grandparents aren’t in the picture, since 3 have died before the story starts, and the opening scene is Poppy’s funeral.  Poppy will most likely be (at the very least) mentioned, since she helped Blake raise Kiora.  Arabella may be mentioned as well.

As far as the other characters go, there’s Dustin (who is one of the special agents assigned to kiora), the president, the 1st lady, and their three children.  I’ll probably add a few other minor characters as well, but that still needs to be determined. 

I have character profiles for each of the characters above, although some are much more in-depth than others.  It pretty much amounts to Kiora and Dustin having a more complete profile than anyone else, but I’m pretty sure I can come up with likes and dislikes for everyone. 

I have a pretty decent collection of notes and websites that I will (hopefully) refer to during November if I need a bit of research.  I’m not aiming for accuracy right now, especially since most of what I want to know is stuff I probably won’t be able to find out anyway.  Wikipedia has been a really good starting point for research…everything else can wait until editing starts.

I think that pretty much sums up this novel.  As November progresses, I’ll probably post random tidbits about my characters, and some of the more interesting things I’ve come across during my research.