Palouse Writing Project

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In my hosted site are three new documents related to the Palouse Story. First, there is a summary of the story, at least as it stands today.

 

Second, there is a description of the main characters, which outlines some of the characteristics of those characters.

 

Finally, there is what I call an age table, which keeps track of the ages of the main character. The main reason for this table is as reference for a story that will extend over a decade or so. As an aside, I decided to assign birth months and days to each character. To do so, I simply opened the World Almanac to the Entertainers section, where birthdays are listed. I started at one name and used the months and days of the names that followed. The table was created in Excel; here it is portrayed as a word-processor documents.

 

I made a story decision based on the age table. I had decided early to bring in Jake Cantwell's roommate Kingman into the story. But in trying to correlate the ages of the Kingman family and put it into the right timeframe, the only way it could happen reasonably is if Betty Kingman was pregnant with her son at an early age, which must have been a result of a teenage pregnancy and to the possiblity of a shotgun wedding.

 

The next posting will address some of the decisions that I have made, and I would appreciate other writers' comments on those decisions. Then, I'll post a document of the key scenes that will occur in Palouse, which will give another chance to comment.

 

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