Assignment 1: Premise

Saturday, Oct. 01
Required: Idea/Premise
Identify the following:
(1) Protagonist(s). Who is(are) your main character(s)?
(2) Flaw(s). What is(are) the protagonist's major flaw(s)?
(3) Goal(s). What does the protagonist want?
(4) Conflict. What is keeping them from their goal?
(5) Antagonist(s). Who(what) is creating the conflict?

Bonus: Theme
Identify the theme or moral of the story. Brainstorm ways you could resolve your conflict within the confines of the theme.

The story idea is inspired by using dimensional doorways to move an interested person from one timeline to another. My story uses a vortex to exchange people from one reality to another. I envision a sci fi thriller that explores one person's impact on future events and whether history is really inviolate.

My protagonist stumbles on the vortex by accident and will be the one making the jumps, and the antagonist is the one who caused it and is not in a hurry in righting the mistake she made.

My protagonist is a female from 1858 Oregon. Her name is Evangeline Whitehead. Evangeline is a mail order bride who left her home in Pennsylvania to try to make a better life for herself in Oregon.

Her main flaw is that she is not educated. She scares easily and is the unfortunate victim of a freak accident where she falls into a vortex and lands 250 years in her future and it is not pretty.

All she wants is to go back to her own timeline but is not giving herself time to figure out how to do that. She cannot do so because she does not understand the technology that got her here in the first place.

The antagonist, Kate Blanchard, is the woman who created a vortex gate without a fail-safe. That woman is in a different dilemma. She knows how to get back, but does not have the tools to do so, and may even have a case of the I-don’t-wannas.

These two women will soon learn how to communicate. Kate needs to learn patience to communicate over time and distance. Evangeline does not know who to trust and has the gut instinct to run, and is now falling through the vortex into different timelines. The ability to communicate will be key to getting these women back to their own timeline, if that’s what they want.
How much of this tripping through timelines is what both women want? Still debating on whether I want a happy ending, a cliffhanger or dark ending.

The theme will be about trust with a sub theme about how one person can change the course of history. For instance Kate did not leave Oregon in a state of environmental disaster, but that is the world that Evangeline ended up in.