Well, here we are at the final NaNoWriMo prep before the actual NaNoWriMo! So anything else I do after this is all going to be my own personal secrets! Ahahaha.

But let’s recap where we left off. I had decided on an urban fantasy genre, though whether that’s from a horror or mystery angle is yet to be determined. My last entry I settled on basing a character on a friend of mine who I haven’t used as a model yet. Today, I will be hammering out some more details.

Having focused on a model for my character, I now need to establish what that character is. Now, I’m not going to say what is or is not based on the real world model. It’ll just start doing a rough character sketch. I’ve talked before about character sketches for my stories. These let me get a good grasp of their personality. They usually form as a short story about a pivotal moment in their life. Here, it will mostly be a stream of consciousness of my thoughts.

But before I begin that, I need to lay out a few more of my thoughts.

I’m thinking this story is going to have at least two major characters. In my early musings I wanted to have some non-authority associated individuals looking into a mystery. I had an early vision of a mystery lovers club that meets to discuss unsolved cases and try to apply their love of mystery novels in solving those cases. I then thought this would be a cute way to start a mystery by having a person appeal to them for help in doing something (leaning towards a missing persons case). I’m leaning towards a young character who has joined this club because they’re smitten with a girl that attends and wants to get in their good graces. This will tie in to some of my other character’s design.

First, I’m leaning towards a young father. I mentioned before that I like taking the mundane and making things extraordinary from there and what could be more mundane than parenting? There’s feeding, napping, diaper changes and bathing. Sure, it’s a rewarding and exciting experience. But let’s be honest with ourselves, we really don’t care to hear about stranger’s struggles about waking up at 2 am to give their child a bottle. I think I’m also going to make him a single father. With the aforementioned missing person’s case, I’m leaning towards the mother having “left” one night, possibly without warning. The story could then pick up this personal tragedy if the mother was roped into the events of the novel in some level. It will also force the character to continue down whatever road unwinds before them.

Alright, we have a single father. What else really defines a person? Well, their occupation. This ties back to the earlier paragraph as I decided this person will be a teacher. However, I don’t see a teacher attending a mystery appreciation club even if he is looking to get back into the dating pool. And I would like to write some scenes of him trying to go on dates while dodging the fact that he’s a father and worried someone else’s kid will turn off dating prospects. So I will need some tie with this character and the young paramour. The easiest solution, to me, would to make him the teacher of the other. I can worry about the details of how that plays out for later.

Lastly, I want some personality quirks for my character. While I have a rather sombre backstory, I’d actually like to contrast that with a sun disposition and childlike wonder for the world. I recall how amused I was when in Japan and seeing all the adults obsessed with Pokemon Go. And while I’m not going to lean into some other intellectual property, even if there’s no chance of infringement, I do like the idea of him preoccupying himself with chasing down digital “pokemon” or whatnot while weird things are happening. I’m also tempted to wrap this phone game into the greater story and it got me thinking.

Way back in university I came up with… well… I don’t even know what to call it. I was working on a project with Derek to make something and ended up making all this complicated lore for supernatural entities, different realms of reality and a whole slew of other stuff. It never really materialized into anything, however. But while thinking about this character and musing of a Pokemon alternative, I recalled this concept. Loosely titled Plemora, it would make an excellent game and if the game itself ties into the urban fantasy, would cover a whole lot of groundwork that I won’t have to do later.

A brief rundown of the Plemora was that our world was simply one layer of a multilayered existence. Entities from a higher layer had a tendency for coming down into ours to avoid conflicts there. Oftentimes this led to them being hunted and, given the physics of the world, they might be chased into lower layers of ours. It was a weird blend of things like Planescape and White Wolf roleplaying and I certainly have no interest in trying to make this story an introduction to that mess. However, it certainly works perfectly for a stupid mobile game my teacher can obsess over and since it dealt with demons… well… let’s just say that I have some ideas to consider in regards to my paranormal portion. Whether I will have sympathetic, intelligent demons that pass for human like… alright I don’t watch or read a lot of urban fantasy but that’s what I imagine Supernatural or that tv show about Satan were like. Alternatively, I can make them more mindless and beastlike in the vein of Stranger Things or Lovecraft Country.

And I likely won’t make a decision until I’m halfway through November anyway!