NaNoWriMo!!!!

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Now that I have a plot, I'm thoroughly excited about it ;D

So this, more or less, will be my--and my Muses', since they're insisting--Journal de NaNo. Might post random excerpts from my story, plot stuffs and whatnot, complaints about my Muses. They might post complaints about me or each other, and similar things to what I'll post.

They're throwing out a looooot of information at me right now, so it may be awhile before I actually get the plot written out...

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Here's your quick plot-synopsis. I've got it up on my nano profile right now; I'll elaborate on it more later. I'm busy working on characters right now.

As a young man of the late 22nd century, Doctor Lloyd Amnus had a dream, one that he would watch progress through the duration his life: to prove religion through science. Things were going well for him, and all of his studies were met with great enthusiasm from the world of science and the general public. Through experimentation, this globally acclaimed doctor nearly accomplished this seemingly impossible feet in his late 40s. In this final experiment, he intended to prove the existence of the human soul.

Unfortunately, as Doctor Amnus would soon come to realize, things don't always go as planned.

In his experimentation, he created beings that the general public would come to know simply as zombies, undead creatures who hungered not for the flesh of the living, but for their very life essence--for their souls. They wander, acting upon impulse, latching onto any human with a soul to drain it from them, turning humans into walking shells damned to wander the earth in the same forsaken way.

It is rumored among some survivors that Doctor Amnus survived the chaotic experiment and is working diligently in an underground lab on a solution to this horrible mishap of his that brought along the apocalypse, but only rumored--most have lost hope of any solution. Some survivors, however, are still searching for Amnus--some in hopes of curing loved ones, others just wishing life could go back to the way it once was, and others yet in hopes of getting revenge on the man who started the madness.

One thing is certain; if Amnus is still around, he's done one hell of a job of hiding himself.

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A couple MCs I've got pretty much worked out. I'll post up physical descriptions of them later on, as I'm still working on background/personality for all of them. I may end up opening a thread specifically for my characters >_< There's too dern many of them. Luckily I'm planning on killing some of them. Not giving any indication of which ones, though =D

Brian Gibson
The Leader-Type-Person
Brian was given up for adoption by his single mother who knew she wouldn’t be able to afford to take care of him; he doesn’t remember her and has known since he was quite young that he was adopted, as his adoptive parents chose to be honest with him about it early on. He met his real mother again before the apocalypse and kept in regular contact with her.

He dropped out of high school in his junior year and was an alcoholic through his early twenties, keeping only part time jobs and living in cheap apartments, and got his life sorted out a couple years ago, stopped drinking and got his G.E.D. He has been a smoker since his early teenage years, a habit he didn’t manage to kick and just gave up bothering with.

His personality is overall rather diplomatic; he likes to solve problems, especially if they hinder his or his group/clique/etc.’s actions. He takes life more seriously since he cleaned himself up and will do what he has to in order to survive. He’s hardly a loner, and this greatly influenced him to join the small band of survivors that Gerard Hall had started gathering, despite his initial qualms with the danger of trusting anyone in this sort of situation. Gerard’s more fun-loving and unserious nature didn’t make him an ideal leader for a survivalist group, and Brian ended up taking it upon himself to take charge of them.

Gerard Hall
The Second-In-Command-Who-Likes-Thinking-He's-In-Charge
Gerard was raised in a bad area of the city, and would have turned into a hoodlum himself if not for witnessing the death of his older brother in a petty high school gang war. He decided to apply himself after this and graduated from high school with honors, went to college for business. He became successful, married, and had a child.

Life was going well until his business partner cheated him out of a job and managed to give him a bad reputation in the process; he and his family lost their home and were stuck living on the streets as they hunted for a cheap apartment. Gerard managed to find a job at a plastic factory and things were going well again until the apocalypse hit. His wife was turned into one of them, and he was separated from his son in a chaos induced by a horde of the zombies; he’s unsure whether or not the thirteen-year-old managed to make it out.

Gerard keeps up his happy-go-lucky nature as a ruse to keep everyone else going, and it works overall. He’s good at making people laugh. He truly misses his family and would give his life to know that his son is safe. He started banding together survivors and came to a few close calls in doing so, having to “kill” a few zombies before finding a real fellow human. He stayed the leader of the group until inducting Brian, but he still likes to think of himself as in charge due to his status as the founder.

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And the next two characters! They should be coming pretty quick now that I've finished developing them in me head xD

Henry Mendel
The Idiot-With-A-Gun
Henry’s the sort of self-confident punk that tends to get on the nerves of most normal adults. Having run away from home and dropped out of high-school at sixteen, he had been rooming with the drummer of his band for a few years in the city. Their band was gaining a bit of popularity in the underground music scene before the apocalypse hit. He tried to escape the city with the drummer, but Chad didn’t make it. Without anyone to look out for, Henry was able to keep away from the zombies by just running and got lost in NYC’s Chinatown for awhile. He ended up finding a gem of a store with imported katanas and grabbed a few of them and stuffed them in his bag so he’d have a decent means of defending himself.

Henry finds the group after Brian has joined it by helping to save them from a tight spot, then nearly cutting off his own foot in an act of general clumsiness once the fight is over.

He is the type of character who invokes eyerolls from the more mature characters, but still keeps spirits high with his overly upbeat attitude. He still acts like a teenager, occasionally like a little kid, which leads him to become the reluctant best friend of six-year-old Shelly once the group finds her. The other characters have to keep him in line a lot, especially once they stumble across a gun store and he ends up wandering inside on his own and returning with a shotgun that turns out to do no good except make the zombies angry. He can take care of himself when he needs to, and even ends up developing a protective-older-brother attitude for Shelly later on that helps him grow up a little.

Shelly Flynn
The Probably-Orphaned-Kid
Shelly was out grocery shopping with her mother when the apocalypse struck, but this is as far as she’ll tell anyone. Whether her mother was turned or the two merely got separated, she hasn’t told anyone. No one knows much of anything about her background because she hasn’t said anything about it to anyone except maybe Belinda or Henry, but they’re not talking.

An extremely quiet and shy little girl when they first found her hiding in a ventilation shaft, Shelly ends up opening up and is a generally bright and happy child with the ability to make nearly anyone smile. She gets a bit down occasionally when she misses her parents, but tends to brighten back up with some encouragement from Belinda. She is the most open with Henry and Belinda but is a little shy around everyone else, and rather afraid of both Thomas and Cliff. All in all, she’s a good kid who on occasion can, as can all children, show a few bratty tendencies.

[xDawnie]

Haha! I'm going to like Henry xDDD

he ends up wandering inside on his own and returning with a shotgun that turns out to do no good except make the zombies angry

Sounds like the sort of thing I'd do when I'm hyper @.@

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Henry is awesome xD If not a little dippy. I'm going to have all kinds of fun writing him =3

Anyway, I've managed to complete some notes on my zombies and the whole soul aspect of things--basically, why they are what they are. And I shall be posting it... here.

The relationship between the soul of the living and its body could be described as a symbiotic relation between the realms of the spirit and the physical. While the soul allows our body life, it requires the life force that our body presents it to stay within that body, and only for as long as our body remains in a livable state can the soul remain there. The soul, however, eats at our lifeline; if our body could act without a soul, it would be immortal, though at the same time totally thoughtless and mindless.

Without the intrusion of any outside forces, each soul will affect each body differently—as in, how long it can live off of that body's life force. Souls will often try to find the body that it can live off of the most efficiently, but this doesn't always work, sometimes resulting in such terminal illnesses as cancer. Even so, each soul only has one body at a time with which it is truly compatible—once it enters a body, until that body’s time is up, its symbiotic relationship with that body remains until the vessel in question has run out of the life force that sustains the soul—only then may the soul return to the spirit realm and seek out a new body.

Should the body be destroyed before the soul’s time is up, it can result in different possibilities. One, the possibility of ghosts—if the soul hasn’t seen the death coming or had unfinished business in the world within that particular body, it may be forced to remain or even choose to remain on the physical plane of existence, only allowed to leave again once it is exorcised from this world. The other possibility is that the soul will return to the spiritual realm before its time with that body was up, because the body is irreparable and can no longer sustain life and the soul had nothing left that it wished to do in the physical world.

Life can be sustained only through a healthy—or even unhealthy, but not dead—body and a soul.

Should a soul be forced upon the body of a human whose soul has already passed on, then the body will reject it eventually as it would any incompatible organ, for its original soul left an imprint upon the body that would allow it only to sustain its original soul. Once the dead body manages to force out this new soul, the soul will have left another imprint on the dead body that will cause it to move again, as an immortal vessel without a soul. This new soul has left before its time within a body could be completed, and the body, which has been imprinted upon by this new soul, could not achieve its full time with the new soul due to compatibility issues, and will wonder on its own searching for another soul, effectively becoming nothing more than a temporary vessel for other souls, though immortal in and of itself.

Similarly, if one of these vessels rips the soul from the body of a living being, then this being will become a vessel themselves, for their soul has been torn forcibly from them before either could complete its time with the other. Unless it still has a small piece of its original soul left through some error, it will not be able to take the souls of fellow vessels that have only temporary souls—if a piece of the original soul was left, then it is capable of stealing back its original soul and becoming a whole human again. If the entire soul was taken, there is no chance for them to ever restore humanity; it is impossible for a pure vessel to steal a soul from another pure vessel, because the soul that any pure vessel steals is already fighting to escape the realm of the physical—in short, it is equally as painful for a human to have its soul ripped from it, as it is for the soul itself to be displaced into the wrong body.

That's what I've got. I'm glad I finally worked all of this out--or rather, that Akino did while I was asleep and decided to toss it all at me while I was working on the next chapter. I'm not complaining, I was really beginning to worry about not having the information on how the zombies themselves actually come to be. But now I do and I've got no need to worry. Wheeeee! -woot-

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Random excerpt from the chapter I'm working on. Same excerpt I have on my NaNo profile at the moment. Thanks again to Dawn for the garden shears, I really needed them in this chapter. I was running out of creative ideas for weapons xD

If you've got a weak stomach for dismemberment, then you'd probably do best not to read any excerpt I post from this story. Dismemberment followed by burning, or otherwise explosives, is the only way to destroy this class of zombie.

“We made it!”

The boy, probably in his mid teens, with neatly cut blond hair and a runner’s build, collapsed to his knees at the mouth of the tunnel, arms stretched dramatically to the sky, squinting up at the sunlight as he laughed loudly, just short of hysterically, perhaps even with some relieved sobbing mixed in. His letterman jacket was ripped, his face was a little dusty, and while he looked like a boy to whom pride had once been a great virtue, he was now reduced to tears at just the idea of being alive.

Another boy stepped out into the sunlight after him and pushed him over with the toe of his sneaker, ruining the runner’s glorious moment of aliveness.

“Cut it out, man, it’s not like they were only in Queens.”

This kid, probably closer to late teens, dark-skinned and sporting an afro that had gone out of style years ago, adjusted his black-rimmed glasses as he looked around at their new surroundings. The runner scurried to his feet and glared at his companion, looking highly annoyed. “What’s to say there are any here? Maybe it was just isolated to Queens and the Bronx, maybe—”

The black teen was pointing. The runner followed his finger with his eyes, saw the seas of stalled and abandoned cars cluttering the roads, saw the grayish-skinned beasts stumbling around these cars, saw one crawling across the road towards them and leaving a dark scarlet path on the pavement in it wake, its entrails tailing out behind it. Its bottom half was totally gone, and half of its spine protruded out from behind it, moving back and forth like a white snake as it pulled itself across the ground, a tail wagging for the fresh souls it had just found.

His stomach gave a jerk, and he ran around the side of a building to vomit, dropping a smallish chainsaw on his way. The other boy, rolling his eyes, lifted the large pair of shears in his left hand and advanced on the crawler. The blonde looked out from around the side of the building and found himself vomiting again as the shears clipped an arm from the zombie as it reached for his friend.

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Excerpt from Chapter 3, and will soon be my new story excerpt on the NaNo site. I just like how it turned out.

Running—he had to keep running, run until his legs gave or the voice chasing him stopped, one or the other. It was helpless, screaming, and his fault, entirely his fault. He could have left long before she woke up, left her behind, but he couldn’t bring himself to, he had been sure she would be a different case. Soon enough, the screams would turn into agonized groans, he could turn around and cut the creature chasing him limb from limb and burn it, never have to worry about it again never look back. Incapable of looking her in the eye and telling her what she had become, lying to her and telling her she had just taken a hit to the head and gotten knocked out for a few minutes, it had been nothing but cowardice, the unwillingness to accept the fact for himself that she was gone and she couldn’t come back.

He had been sure, positive it would be different for her, but after a little while, he had seen the beginnings of the changes, the graying of the skin, the slight glaze over the eyes, and he had run without a word as to why. Behind him, some fifty or so feet, he could hear her screaming, crying, and he was sure she knew why he was running from the despair in her own voice. She was apologizing for whatever it was she had done, begging him to stop running. The simple fact that she could keep track of him proved what she was becoming—they had a scent for the souls of the living. If not a scent, than at least a sense, so it seemed they did. The one that finally got Courtney had tracked followed them for about a mile—he had recognized it, killed it as soon as it got her, and Courtney had already gone after the other girl travelling with them. He had killed that girl, Janet or Janice or something, and waited for Courtney to wake up.

She had looked fine right then, right when she woke up, but now….

The screaming faded into a groan, a pitiful groan that was trademark of the damned things. It still moved fairly quickly if its footfalls were any sign. He tugged at the string on his chainsaw to start it, turned, and walked forward. They met each other about halfway—she was dead, no questioning it. Her eyes were glazed over, the circles beneath them dark and sunken enough that the red flesh inside her lower eyelid could be seen bright against the bruised flesh. Skin gray, the color of ash from a fireplace, lips a strange pale color somewhere between blue and their natural pinkish tone—and her hand, its slim fingers with their pretty red nails reaching for him as though in slow motion, starting to curl as they neared his collar, and he was frozen, chainsaw still running in his right hand. Her other hand touched his forehead and balled into a fist.

Clifford Sunden rolled off of a rock hard bed in a dark, grimy motel room and awoke to the sound of screaming somewhere outside the window across from his bed. Sighing in some strange mix of liberation and grief, Cliff brought his hands up to his face, at first to wipe away the sheen of cold sweat covering it, but they stopped there to rest. A hangover was pounding out a steady beat in his head and he couldn’t help but wonder how long he had slept for, nor could he help but wish he was still asleep;he would have preferred staying lost in the land of recurring nightmares to anything that reality had to offer him lately, and it took him a long moment to work up the will to pick himself up off of the floor.

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Four days into Camp NaNo, and I finally have my basic plot. I've decided to expand upon a preexisting plotbunny that my brother, myself, and a couple friends of ours managed to cook up one day at complete random and by complete accident. The name of the story shall be 101 Ways to Kill a Vampire. Horror comedy, of course, as I've always wanted to try the genre.

Now, it's not going to be an instructional book--the story itself is going to feature an instructional book called 101 Ways to Kill a Vampire in some way, whether this book is purchased by a character or is being written by another character. I'm thinking normal high school setting, which will also be a first for me. And vampires on the whole are actually a first on my part; I've never, ever written vamps before. I'm thinking I'll do the normal, maybe slightly prettier than average variety that turn into disgusting lethal monsters when they feed. NO SPARKLES ALLOWED, unless it's a gay vampire wearing body glitter.

Now, there will be all variety of interesting vampire deaths, don't get me wrong. I'm thinking of killing one with a tanning bed--they use ultraviolet light, so it's as good as sunlight, I should think. I'll probably consult with other people on interesting vampire deaths as I'm writing it, even. I very, very highly doubt I'm going to make 50k words this month, but it'll be nice to get a start on my first dark comedy/vampire novel.

And in honor of the wonderful Blood Omen/Legacy of Kain series, I'm actually considering naming the head vampire Kain... and not killing him in the end to possibly leave room for a sequel. >_> Or just because I couldn't bring myself to kill any character based on the amazingness that is Kain. I think he and Alucard from the Hellsing series tie as my favorite vampires ever.

See, I actually love vampires. I adore them. 'Salem's Lot and all its sidestories are some of my favorites from Stephen King. Hellsing is one of the greatest mangas ever. I used to watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series with my best friend, and I still catch reruns of it occasionally because it greatly amuses me. Bram Stoker, he was a freaking genius. And don't even get me STARTED on Blood Omen and Legacy of Kain, or I'll be going for days. DAYS, I tell you.

It's just writers like Anne Rice and Laurel K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris and, God forbid, Stephenie Meyers, have turned them into something so sappy and romantic and beautiful that I can't stand modern vamps. This is actually part of why I look forward to Fright Night (aside from David Tennant...); it seems Jerry isn't going to be the typical omg-I's-in-luffles-whit-hoomans vampire. In fact, he seems like a bit of a bad ass, and I therefore approve even if he doesn't end of being of the terrifying monster variety. I guess it helps that he's played by one of Hollywood's few Irishmen >_> I'd approve more if they'd let him keep his flippin' accent...

Anyway. I'm rambling. I need to be off to start this story before I'm five days late starting, don't I? Well, ciao!

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Alrighty. Already got the story developed a little ways in, so let's get this synopsis on the road.

The story mostly centers around tenth grader Aaron Peterson (fifteen at the very start of the story as it's still the summer before the school year, and turns sixteen within the course of the story). He comes from a rather... interesting family situation, though not necessarily a bad one. Aaron himself is a good kid, more or less, but a quite a nerd and a bit socially awkward. His older brother, David, is entering his senior year in high school, is the over-rebellious sort that his parents just can't quite figure out what to do with. They have two younger siblings, almost ten years younger than Aaron, fraternal twins James and Jane (or Jamie and Janie) who have just turned six at the start of the story. Their parents, Dianne and Harold, divorced when the twins were around three; it was a very mutual thing, and a very quiet affair. They had fallen out of love and decided that it would likely be better for them to split before it could cause more problems than necessary. They lived in Manhattan, shared custody of their children, and remained good friends.

Dianne had been a fairly successful businesswoman, but was laid off of work when a ton of jobs in her company were sent overseas to save money. It was an unfortunate thing, and with the cost of living in the state of New York rising even higher than normal, they were on the verge of losing their rather nice penthouse apartment. Harold couldn't take all the kids; his primary work was in freelance journalism, publishing the occasional short story in a magazine on the side; and while he made enough money to live fairly comfortably and share custody, he didn't make nearly enough to support everyone by himself. Dianne had no luck finding work, and they were living off of a savings funds that had been meant to pay for David and Aaron's college.

Something certainly had to be done; Dianne discussed options with her ex-husband, and it was agreed that they needed to move to somewhere with a slightly more stable local economy. Having grown up in the southeastern US where taxes and other costs of living had never been very high, Dianne called her parents who were still living there. The decision didn't take long to be made; they couldn't afford living in the city any more, and the South was much cheaper, many more jobs available--not much in business, but there were certainly more opportunities. They found an affordable enough piece of property outside of a small town with a large enough house for all the kids; because he didn't want to be several states away from his kids for any amount of time, Harold went with them, stuck temporarily living under the same roof until a deal on a smaller house in town went through. Moving wasn't a problem for him; he had no locational ties to his work, as it was mostly freelance journalism done for online newsjournals and blogs. Nevertheless, it was still a bit odd living under the same roof as his ex-wife again, for everyone involved.

Despite his attempts to hide from his old stereotype, it got around fairly quick that Aaron was the nerdy sort, so he was doomed a week before school even started in the small town of Arenthia, South Carolina (I took a page out of King's book and went for fictional towns/counties because it's just easier that way); the story begins almost a week before the start of school, at around midnight of August 13. All the rest of this rambling was just background information =D I love background information.

Anyway. At this time, arrangements still haven't quite been finished for Harold to move into his house in town, but they will be within two weeks' time. At the very start of the school year, David and Aaron get into a less than brotherly rivalry over a girl in Aaron's year, Cathleen Sullivan; Aaron doesn't bother trying too hard to win her over, as she tells him fairly early on that she'd prefer staying friends. As Aaron isn't quite so blinded as his brother because he knows just how little chance he has, he steadily grows away from her, if only because the majority of her tightly knit group of friends aren't quite as sociable as her. Aaron is all but indifferent after about a month, and she and David have already started seeing each other.

A couple months pass, and it becomes evident quickly that this isn't going to be as short-lived as most of David's so-called "relationships," even seems to have improved his overall attitude and outlook. It's not a complete turnaround; he still isn't doing wonderful in school, but he is doing better, and he's still nothing short of a total smart aleck but has at least started showing his parents and other adults a bit more respect. As a result, everyone in the family absolutely loves Cathleen. Even though she's fairly quiet about her own family and friends, she seems to be exactly what the doctor (or psychologist) ordered.

Aaron is the only person suspicious of her; it's chalked up to jealousy by the rest of the family, and no one really takes his suspicion seriously. Perhaps there even is a bit of jealousy; after all his years of being a complete a--hole to every female he's ever dated, why should David get the perfect girlfriend? But all the same, there's something just a little odd about her; she seems very different when she's with her friends, never mentions a family, and just doesn't behave like the average teenage girl. Her pale skin could be chalked up to her heritage, her lower than average body temperature to her "anemia," but something about her still unsettles him; there just seems to be something missing from her eyes, something that makes him turn away when she looks at him, that makes him stare off in another direction rather than into those dead orbs when he's speaking to her. It might be his imagination, it might be his mind playing tricks on him, but he's so certain that he saw her eyes turn a sickly yellow color once, for a split second, when he got a paper cut once while they were helping each other study for a test, that he can't get it off of his mind.

He sees it again once when, one morning, he happens upon the two behind the main buildings of the school doing what most young couples tend to do behind school before hours; he catches at least a three second long glimpse of her eyes, that horrible yellow color, only barely notices just how much the rest of her facial features are actually changed, before she returns to normal in the blink of an eye. He complied when his brother chased him off, knowing that David certainly wouldn't believe what Aaron had just seen when Aaron himself barely believed it. Yet, throughout the rest of the day he remained distracted, that terrible face behind Cathleen's normal facade filling his mind despite repeated attempts to forget it.

It had certainly only been his imagination... but how could he imagine something so grotesque about this girl? For as popular and well-liked as she was, she didn't treat him like garbage like most of the popular kids, treated him as kindly as she did everyone else, considered him a friend--family, even. Aaron wanted to like her, wanted to see her as his family did, as everyone did, but simply couldn't. She was perhaps a bit too good, and that was part of his issue with her; and now, despite the fact that this new explanation made all the sense in the world, he simply couldn't accept it, even though all he saw when he looked at her now was that contorted monster behind her regularly pretty face.

It was too much of a confusion to bear entirely on his own. Living primarily with his father now, he forced himself to wait until the two of them were alone in his house in town and blurted it out to him after school one day. Somewhat bemused by his normally maturer son's rather childish suspicion, Harold decides he wants to hear this one out. Indeed, from an eleven-year-old's standpoint, it all made sense--she was pale-skinned, she was cold, she was beautiful, she was secretive, her closest friends were also perhaps a little pale and secretive, and this would have made her nothing short of a blood-sucking beast to any child.

Aaron was frantic by the time he finished explaining the face he had seen behind the face she showed people, and Harold was only more baffled--and, secretly, a bit humored. While he very carefully dismissed his son's suspicions, (Aaron hadn't been too devastated, as he had very much been expecting this) it left Harold with quite an idea for a new writing project. Even though the subject of Cathleen potentially being a vampire had been dismissed, the subject of vampires on the whole still lingered in their conversation, which made its way over into the territory of all the possible ways books and movies and television and media had come up with for weakening and killing the monsters. Thusly, the instructional, fictional novel 101 Ways To Kill A Vampire by Harold Peterson was born, and became his primary side-project to his regular journalism.

Now that the idea was hanging over his head, however, it was just a bit easier to see what Aaron was talking about with Cathleen, and gradually got even easier to see. It was hard to accept something so ludicrous as reality, but who was he to dismiss it? Harold himself loved a bit of horror. He believed in ghosts and life elsewhere in the universe, in demons and perhaps angels, in common cryptozoology like Bigfoot, that Mothman had perhaps terrorized West Virginia decades ago; if these things existed in his mind, why not vampires? Folklore and legend was often based at least partially in truth. There was so much vampire lore, so many drastically different stories, that anything could have been right or wrong. It would become hard to keep up the satirical undertone of his novel at this point as he began to accept this strange theory, as his research slowly turned into a much, much more serious matter.

This is the gist of the story. It's going to mostly be third-person omniscient, written from the viewpoints of all the characters. Some of the characters are still only partially developed, but I'm loving what they're all becoming all the same. I'll gradually post summaries of their personalities here as time goes by. For now, I need to work on my next 2.2k words.

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... procrastination time. Character summaries, anyone? We'll start with Daddy. He's probably my favorite ^^' Oddly, I've never really written a writer before, so he'll be good practice, I guess.

Harold Peterson
Harold was twenty-two when his first son was born in December '92. His birthay is March 31, so at the start of the story in July 2010, that would place him at a good solid forty years of age, his birth year being 1970. He was a teen in the 80s and still has quite a bit to show from it in movie and musical taste, though he has since cut his hair to a reasonable and socially acceptable length and no longer dresses anything lile a wannabe rockstar. He started writing when he was a young teenager and started drinking and smoking as a slightly older teenager, but has been in journalism since he graduated college and got his first job writing for a tabloid magazine. He was fired from many jobs due to his increasingly prominent issue with alcoholism; it was a sort of on and off thing most of the time, but as years passed it was on more than it was off. He managed to mostly quit by the time his second son was ten, in mid-2004, and is now rarely seen with even a beer; to compensate, he now smokes quite a lot more than he used to. These days he is a self-employed freelance journalist online, as most newspapers and magazines refuse to formally hire him on due to his abysmal history. He writes nonstop during the week and takes most weekends off, along with the occasional Friday, to spend with his kids.

He and his wife divorced in early 2008, but remained friendly and shared custody of the kids; twins Jamie and Janie alternated spending weekdays and weekends with Mom and Dad, Aaron mostly spent weekends with Dad, and David just stayed with one parent until he inevitably did something to piss them off and would then switch over to the other for a while. Harold had no problems with the arrangements, though he always wished there was something he could do for his oldest son; David seemed to have nothing but his father's bad qualities, already openly drinking and smoking and resentful of most authority. He had, at the very least, stayed in school, and there was that much to be thankful for.

Harold, personality-wise, was stuck somewhere between a nerd and a rebel for much of his life; despite his interests in writing and the arts, in horror and fantasy and science fiction, in computers and gaming in later life, interested in and usually fairly accepting of the unknown and unusual; he also loved classic cars and had worked in garages on more than one occasion when he couldn't find work in writing, had been something of a ladykiller for much of his life, and had been too rebellious to do as well as he should have in his later high school years. All he really holds of his rebellious side these days is an occasionally short temper, often triggered by David's attitude problems and resentment of any and all authority.

That'd be Harold Peterson in a nutshell. I'll either do Dianne or David next, probably.