January Novel Essential Information

Novel Title: Involved

Time Setting: 1881

Genre: Historical

Minimum Word Goal: 90,000

Timespan: May–June

Locations: Denver & Georgetown, Colorado

Main Characters: Samuel Manning, Charlotte Langridge

Background Information: 

One of seven children born to a Kentucky coal miner, Samuel actually spent the better part of his childhood in the care of his spinster aunt due to the death of his mother in childbirth when he was two. His father remarried when he was seven and he and his siblings moved back home and joined two step siblings and, over time, five half-siblings.

His only two brothers were significantly older than him, old enough, in fact, to enlist in the Union Army when the Civil War broke out, only to both be dead several years before the war concluded.

A year after the war’s end his father effectively suffocated to death from miner’s phthisis leaving him as the oldest man in the family at just sixteen.

Samuel was severely disinclined to work in the mines, so his oldest sister’s husband, a soldier who survived the Civil War, stepped in and got him a job helping out at an army barracks; his stepmother also got a job washing the soldiers’ laundry.

Through this his stepmother met a widowed soldier and the two were married before too long.

Although they were welcoming and caring toward him, Samuel felt awkward with two step parents and decided to head west with his youngest older sister, who’d just been married.

His middle older sister had already married and moved west, and he, his brother-in-law, and his youngest older sister stopped at their home on the way west. Because his brother-in-law wanted to go to Colorado and get into silver mining Samuel elected to remain behind with his middle older sister.

He worked with her husband in his store for some time before getting a job leading wagon trains that didn’t last long because his youth led many of the men he was leading to question his abilities, knowledge, and authority when it came to leading them.

So he decided to get work for the competition, the railway, quickly picking up on how to drive a train and soon guiding trains along the Transcontinental Railroad with ease, and enthusiasm, as driving trains proved to be the funnest job he’d ever had.

Unfortunately, he was involved in an incident in California from which he had to flee for his life and go into hiding, forcing him out of his job as an engineer and into hiding at an isolated ranch in Wyoming Territory under an alias.

It is at this ranch that he has worked in relative anonymity since, with only his youngest older sister — who was his closest childhood companion — knowing his true identity, and his true involvement in the incident in California.

Born the seventh of nine children to a pastor ministering in Ohio, Charlotte’s life has naturally revolved rather closely around the affairs of the church, which led to her, like her siblings, becoming a Christian at a rather young age.

Around when she was nine the church her father pastored and another church in the area voted to amalgamate into one church, and both her father and the other church’s pastor agreed that it would be best for this new church’s unity if they both moved on to other pastorates.

On the invitation of a friendly former member of his congregation who’d moved further west, Charlotte’s father took his family to Denver to fill in for the former congregant’s pastor, who’d fallen ill.

Her father continued to seek other positions — mostly further west out of adventurism — but ended up not taking any of the positions because of the fact that the minister he was filling in for died of his illness, leading the congregation to ask her father to remain permanently.

Since then Charlotte and her family have lived in the booming, bustling city of Denver, her father ministering at the church, her older siblings all getting married, with three of them travelling further west to Oregon, Montana, and New Mexico, respectively.

The youngest of Charlotte’s older brothers has a girl he’s interested in marrying, but they haven’t officially become betrothed as of yet; it is actually Charlotte’s closest childhood companion, her immediately older sister, who is likeliest to marry next, being engaged to a young man who came to Denver from Wisconsin to set up a livery.

Unfortunately, Denver doesn’t need any liveries at the present, so her sister’s fiancé has been travelling to nearby towns to see what he can find, and as yet, he hasn’t found anything, thus they haven’t yet married, although they plan to marry within the year, no matter what, because then he’ll be able to travel further afield to investigate more prospects.

Charlotte, too, has an acquaintance of romantic interest; he is a young man from the state of New York who has established himself in Denver as a shoemaker and a saddle maker in direct competition with the other shoemakers and saddle makers.

They aren’t officially betrothed, although they are courting, and because he’s hardly been in town for a year Charlotte’s not in too much of a hurry to be married, although on the other hand she is in somewhat of a hurry, because she’s not altogether sure what life will be like without having her older sister around constantly, thus she would like to get married quickly so that she and her husband can go live wherever her sister goes to live, thus allowing them to stay relatively close, compared to what present prospects are suggesting.