Wanted!

Today, while once again trying to distract myself from my NaNo project, I started to think about that other plot outline for a story I had come up with about the same time the Demyan plot was created. It is a story that takes place in the real world, most likely New York because I love using that city as a setting and the Misfits are based in Massachusetts.

I had two characters, Drake and Laurie, and knew they would need friends and I went with the stereotypes to get different personalities and decide which of these stereotypes would be friends of Laurie and who would hang out with Drake. One thing is similar to most of my characters in this one: There are more guys than girls. I don’t know why I always seem to end up with that, but that is just how it works.

When coming up with a story and characters, there is always one character I feel I can identify with the most for a certain period and in this case, I had to discover that from early on I enjoyed every single one of them as I came up with them. As this is about young adults, I kept asking myself with every single one of them, would I like to be friends with them? And the thing I love about most of them is that there are things I absolutely don’t like about them. Their flaws. I love character flaws.

The most fun I probably had coming up with a rude Englishman named Richard who is at least ten years older than the rest of the characters who are all in their very early twenties. Richard was supposed to be an asshole. Good-looking but an offensive asshole that nobody liked or wanted to hang out with too much. He works at some corporation in the administration and gets to do the dirty work nobody wants to do: fire people, lower budgets … He is the official scapegoat and enjoys the job because he can be himself with it. And Kat, a rich American girl, has an internship at the corporation he works at and they clash frequently and she keeps calling her friends back in the States complaining about “that dick”. They are fun to write. And as I notice now, Richard would have been an interesting addition to the Misfits as well.

There is Heather who I thought would be a background character and a friend of Laurie and Kat’s who had run off with some rock star during the summer months much to her parents annoyance but somehow she became a lot more.

The characters are fun. They aren’t that serious because they are young and don’t have that many issues and I can write something light (yeah, right, let’s see if I really can do that). Anyway, I thought this would be a small little boring story for October to distract me from NaNo, but I think “Wanted” will be my project once I’m done with Demyan’s story that still doesn’t have a name. Need to work on that.

b-day card

So, it’s my grandma’s birthday tomorrow and I had totally forgotten that I don’t have a present. My sister came to my rescue (yeah, I know how unlikely that sounds) remembering that many, many years ago, we did those things to put under the plates in form of turtles wanting to use them as a present for her but forgot it. She still had them somewhere in her room and now that will be our great birthday present for her. 

I am also going to make a last minute birthday card for her using Photoshop, but as of now I don’t have the slightest idea of a design. I’ll have to work on that and the card before going to bed. I’m thinking of using a picture of hers so it’s very personalized, but I need some cool tagline to go with it. Not something totally boring like “happy birthday”. I want something that is provoking, fun. I’ll go looking for quotes about wisdom and aging, I think. And once I find something, I hope I know better what to add to the tagline and the picture.

If I’m doing something by myself instead of going out and buying a card, I want it to be creative. It won’t be a masterpiece, but I don’t want it to be totally lame either.

So, I should get working.