August Novel Essential Information

Novel Title: Derailment
Time Setting: 1887
Genre: historical fiction
Minimum Word Goal: 90,000
Timespan: April to September
Locations: Richland, Kansas; area of Eakly, Oklahoma (Territory)
Main Characters: Matthew Hawkswing, Fox Paw
Background Information: Matthew was born the oldest son and third child to a Comanche man and a white woman who'd been kidnapped by the Comanche from her Texas home when she was fifteen. He grew up living with the Comanche people with the name Antelope Horn until his father died of an infected wound when he was seventeen.
Later on that year a white man from Kansas was travelling through the area and noticed that Matthew's mother was a white woman; after they got to know each other for a time the man proposed to her and she married him, moving to Kansas.
Matthew and his four younger siblings went with their mother — their two older sisters who'd married Comanche men remaining behind — and took on white names, his siblings taking on their stepfather's surname while Matthew anglicized his father's name and took it as a surname.
His mother had been a staunch Baptist — even during her over twenty five years with the Comanche — and had raised all of her children Baptist, along with converting some of the Comanche. Matthew became a Christian at a young age and took keen interest in the Bible.
After a year of school in Kansas — in which he managed to complete all of the grades due to his mother educating him among the Comanche — Matthew decided he wanted to become a pastor; the pastor of the local church helped him to apply to a school, but he was rejected due to his noticeable ethnicity.
The pastor took Matthew as an apprentice and soon a church wanted Matthew as their senior pastor; however, Matthew thought it wouldn't be right unless he was ordained, so a massive petition was taken up and due to the overwhelming support Matthew was accepted in spite of his ethnicity.
Upon graduation, unfortunately, the church who'd wanted Matthew had found a new pastor, so Matthew took up circuit preaching in Iowa, where he met his wife, whom he married in 1883.
Matthew disliked the circuit preaching life, however, being as he didn't have the ability to develop meaningful relationships with his congregations. He searched throughout the area for a church who would want him as their pastor, but all of them refused, mostly due to his ethnicity.
Finally Matthew decided to go to the Comanche reserve where his sisters were living and start up a church there; his wife was reticent at the idea of bringing their young son Adonikam along, much less going along herself, but Matthew convinced her and so they prepared to set out in the spring of 1886.
Unfortunately his wife died while giving birth do their second child, daughter Shelomith, and so Matthew has spent a year mourning her at his mother's house, also waiting for his daughter to be fit enough to travel.

Fox Paw was born the third daughter and fourth child to her father's fourth wife; the twenty fourth of his forty nine children overall. Her family is all of the Wichita tribe and they moved peacefully onto their reservation in Oklahoma Territory when she was three years old.
Her family has lived in peace and freedom with very little white interference on the reserve for all of their years, not really engaging in any major conflicts with the other two tribes they share their reservation with, or even fellow tribe members.
Over the last year Fox Paw — mainly by the insistence of her father to be wed, being as she's nearly twenty — has been cultivating a relationship with one of the men in the tribe, Badger Ears, and the couple are planning to be married within the year.

Adonikam: uh-dohn-ih-kahm
Shelomith: shee-low-myth

The novel will begin on Monday.