When I visited the parental house recently, a new laptop case was waiting for me. (My mother loves to thrift-shop as much as I do, or possibly more, and she’ll pick up things and stick them in my old room. It’s a surprise every time I come home!) My old one was slowly losing the black faux-leather on the handle to expose it’s soft white-underbelly and it looked very disreputable and piebald, so I was glad of the new case.<\/p>\n
Apparently someone forgot to clean out the front pocket before they sent it to the thrift store, though. I opened it up and found exactly what I would have in it as a writer. There was a boarding pass, a receipt for coffee at the airport, and a piece of scrap paper with the corner torn off with notes about restaurants. I found that the most fun, because it seemed not to be directions to one in particular, but rather attributes of several, like “good fish” and “two blocks from the water”.<\/p>\n
The best part was several stapled sheets of paper photocopied from something that had been printed in a really ancient font. It was a character worksheet! Obviously I was fated to receive this laptop case. (Alternately, serendipity is fun. Whatever floats your boat!) I don’t think I’d ever actually use it, because it was very clearly meant for a contemporary story (What’s his education level? What job does he have?) and also it exclusively used male pronouns. I write women too, tyvm!<\/p>\n
Also worksheets don’t particularly fit into my process, because for me they fall prey to the Ceramic Owls Syndrome. That’s when you have a question like “what are her hobbies?” and you randomly slap in “collects ceramic owls” because you want to fill the hole and round out the character, rather than thinking in a more linked manner, and deciding her hobby is scuba-diving because she’d living on the ocean when we first meet her. I mean, for some people worksheets are great evoking the scuba diving aspects, I just know I’m prone to ceramic owls so I can finish the thing.<\/p>\n
(Someday I’ll write a short story with a ceramic owl collector in it, just for all of you, my loyal blog readers…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I visited the parental house recently, a new laptop case was waiting for me. (My mother loves to thrift-shop as much as I do, or possibly more, and she’ll pick up things and stick them in my old room. It’s a surprise every time I come home!) My old one was slowly losing the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,16],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-humor-around-me","tag-ceramic-owls-syndrome"],"yoast_head":"\n