October Novel Essential Information

Novel Title: Disconcerting

Time Setting: 2018

Genre: Equine Life

Minimum Word Goal: 90,000

Timespan: June–July

Locations: Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, United Kingdom; Haute-Aboujagane, Westmoreland County, New Brunswick, Canada.

Main Characters: Macaulay Baird, Caetline Griffin

Background Information:

Macaulay is the youngest child of his father's first marriage, which ended when his mother died under suspicious circumstances when Macaulay was three years old, but he ends up being the middle child overall because his father has had two further children with his second wife.

His father works as a surgeon, as well as being a member of the Peerage and running a breeding farm that raises renowned and critically endangered Cleveland Bay horses, and both medicine and horses are interests father and son share.

Initially, Macaulay was going to pursue show jumping to the level of competing in the Olympics, as well as veterinary medicine. He'd become quite involved with the horse operations even to the point of pairing a stallion and mare together to breed and being given full ownership of the resultant foal.

Unfortunately, his colt was stolen just weeks after having been weaned, which distressed him and prompted him to give up everything related to horses, much to his stepmother's dismay, leading to conflict between the two of them.

Macaulay misses his colt — who is now long a full-grown horse — but the investigators came up with no leads as to where his colt could've been taken, and to hide the pain he's thrown himself into more advanced medicinal studies; and not veterinary medicine, but human medicine, with the goal of becoming a surgeon, like his father, in a good fifteen years or so.

Caetline is the second youngest child in her family, which is a mixture of English and French heritage, and her family has been involved with horses since before she was born.

Her great-uncle runs a stable that teaches riding lessons in the community, as well as serving as a training base for his daughter, who also competes internationally.

Caetline's father is one of his cousin's staff who travel with her to her various competitions and look after her horses, especially helping keep her reserve horses in competition-ready form should she need them.

Meanwhile Caetline's mother works as a teacher at the riding school, and so Caetline and her sisters have all received complimentary riding lessons.

Caetline's oldest sister is currently pursuing veterinary medicine, and her next sister is pursuing music, while her youngest sister is as-yet undecided; Caetline has decided that she would like to ride internationally like her father's cousin.

The only thing that she lacks to pursue that, however, is a horse of her own. It's not really that her parents necessarily lack the funds to get her a horse, but they would like her to contribute some money, little of which she personally possesses at the moment.

She will be starting a job of her own at the riding school, teaching early riding — as she is a very good rider — but considering the price tag of the horse she's set her heart on, she knows that three years won't be enough time to raise even a quarter of the money she needs.

The horse she's set her heart on is Queen's Pride, a handsome bay part-Thoroughbred owned by one of the school's up-and-coming young international competitors: Lucas-Oliver Johnstone.

Pride has gone largely unused by Lucas-Oliver because of the fact that he and Pride don't get along well, and, in fact, Caetline's great-uncle is pressuring Lucas-Oliver to find someone to ride Pride so that he will be ready to compete if Lucas-Oliver should ever need him.

Caetline wishes that she could become Pride's rider — being as Pride stays at the school because of Lucas-Oliver's rather brazen confidence in the good health of his main horse — but being as Pride is a stallion, she's pretty sure that she wouldn't be allowed to ride him at this point in time.

Even still, considering that Lucas-Oliver doesn't seem to like Pride, Caetline would love to get enough money to buy the stallion and have him be the horse she rides when she gets to the point of competing internationally at the same level as Lucas-Oliver and her father's cousin.

Pronunciations:

Haute-Aboujagane: h'oh ahboozhahgahn'

Macaulay: mahkohlee

Caetline: kateleen

Novel Begins: Monday, October 1