30 days on writing: Entry #10:

More memeage: In this edition, Young Geoffrey expresses dissatisfaction with question 10 and complains about the previous four and makes somewhat gratuitous use of the word disillusionment after using Google to remember how to spell it.

Before I attempt to answer it, though, I want to talk about something almost related to yesterday's questions about creating characters. In thinking about it, I stumbled across a story I wrote back in September, 2006 (and which I linked to on Livejournal with this entry, if you want commentary from people who knew me in person).

I say 'stumbled' because I had very nearly forgotten that it existed. That is, I remembered it when I saw it, but had I not seen it I would not have remembered it.

And frankly, though it's a little creepy, I think it's a pretty damned good story, if you like stories in which the only action consists of a middle-aged men climbing over a cafe's fencing between itself and the sidewalk. (You should read it. I took a few extraneous lines out of it and corrected a half-dozen typos and re-posted it to Edifice Rex.)

Self-promotion aside, I was struck by the character of Lawrence. To be honest, I was looking for an antagonist, or rather a foil, to my regular stand-in Orson, and pulled the mannerisms and physicality of an old friend right off the shelf. I wasn't concerned with creating an original character, but only a believable one, one I could picture in the conversation depicted.

(I should probably add that I haven't hung out with Lawrence's real-life counterpart on a regular basis for many, many years and that I have no reason to believe he ever chased after pubescent girls since the days when he was a pubescent boy. The story is entirely fiction and the only the surface traits of the character are based on anything approaching reality. Well, that and the environs of the Java Hut. Onwards.)

( Click for Question 10, 'What are some really weird situations your characters have been in?' )

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