plot...maybe. a character, at least.

There might be one. Okay, not really, anyone reading this knows my writing better than that. BUT! I wasn't really as in love with the idea of doing a series of short stories as I was a month ago, it's just not really exciting me. Coming up with eight gazillion new characters all month, and not having a chance to really dig in to any of them...just felt like a chore. So, we're going Requiem for a Princess with this (I realized last NaNo that that is the novel I want to write), and getting a main character, who somehow or another is going to learn the stories of this garden.

In Requiem (which is by Ruth M. Arthur, and if ANYONE can find me another one of her books - written mostly in the '60s and '70s, nothing left in print now - I will bake you so many cookies in gratitude you'll think it's Christmas), the main character learns the story of a girl from centuries earlier via a series of dreams. They're incredibly vivid dreams, but that's still a pretty plausible thing, and the main girl finds juuust enough traces around the house to find proof of the dreams.

I ran into this problem last NaNo, too - finding a way to reveal the secrets of a location. Tom refused to let me have my main character find an old journal or diary or anything, and I grudgingly agreed to think of something else. Going on the fact that cameras, by their very nature, "see" things differently than human eyes, I let things show up in the girl's photographs that she didn't see herself. That worked. This time around, I have no idea. I really like the idea of psychic imprints in locations, and I'm totally fascinated by the Moberly-Jourdain incident... but getting "a feeling" about a place is far too vague for my purposes, and out-and-out seeing things will make my character sound completely crazy.

I have... oh, three days to figure this out. Good times.

In terms of plot... there should really be some issue in my main character's life that the garden's stories resolve. I'm trying to decide if artistic burnout is dramatic enough - I don't think it is, but it feels dramatic enough when I've had it so much lately. I have a few story elements sketched out, but we'll see what happens.