2023-02-21 Journal Entry
🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Tuesday 🗓 Date: February 21, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 20 – Feb 26, 2023
Spending this morning writing out some ideas for the main character of this story. This’ll probably spin off into more characters as it becomes necessary, but the main character is a pretty good starting point.
From yesterday:
What are the things we should know about a character? A bit of what they look like, their past, whom they love, whom they hate, the things they hate about their body, their comfort food, their comfort movie, the things that make their body tick, their fetishes, their surface level fears, their deeper fears, their surface level and deeper hopes, the things they tell their friends that are actually lies, the same for their families (if they have them). I imagine, unfortunately, that many of my characters will likely turn out like me, for better or worse.
What they look like: let’s say 28, so old enough to have gotten married at a young age but still gone through a pretty early divorce. I don’t want to make this character just be me, but it’s easiest to make someone kinda like me, so we’ll say they’re 5’11”; green eyes, straight brown hair. They’re thin, which in their younger years would have been fit but recently transformed into that thinness associated with “wasting away,” a thinness from an insatiate hunger.
They now live in a quiet neighborhood at the outer edge of a city — for now, I’m thinking this is something akin to Noe Valley — where they moved to get some distance from their now-ex-wife. Their wife still lives in the same city, but sufficiently far away that they’re unlikely (although not impossible) to run into each other. The house he bought instead is a small townhome, the bottom floor of one of the Rousseau-style “storybook” homes. Someone probably lives above him as well, but TBD on who that may be.
Whom do they love? Well, they clearly once-loved their wife, and while that isn’t really hate, it’s probably something like confusion or bitter resentment. I suppose the obvious question is why they separated: let’s say they had agreed early on in their marriage not to have children, but after living across the street from a small park with a playground for many years, she had changed her mind. With neither of them willing to change, the two separated.
The woman who lives above him is one of those palm-reading, new-age-y old women who claims to have clairvoyance, and she notes that his house is the home of many “final souls,” people who killed someone (and themselves, shortly after).
the things they hate about their body
They dislike their hands, which they wish were tougher, more calloused, more masculine. They recall how when they shook the hands of older men of another generation, they were tougher and somehow more real. He disdains the fact that his hands are soft from years of office work and the freedom of not having to do house work.
their comfort food, their favorite movie