Chapters 2 and 3 are up (in the air)! 😉

In these chapters, we really get to meet our protagonist, Cara for the first time, and her husband Griffin, on their very first first-class flight to Los Angeles as part of their contest win package to see country music superstar River Deane in concert.

Without coming right out and saying it in the story, one of my goals was to establish that Cara and Griffin are Gen X. They remember Robin Leach and the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and their first social media was MySpace.

I'm aware that their age (mid-40s) means that as main characters they may not have the widest appeal. It definitely seems like most stories these days are about younger characters. But as a Gen Xer myself, it's what I relate to most, and it seems like an underrepresented age group as far as new stories being told (some of the greatest stories ever told are about Gen X when we were young, so I get that Gen X isn't underrepresented in media overall, I just mean... ugh, I don't know what I mean).

I guess my point is that I'm not trying to alienate younger readers, but I do want to give older readers a secret handshake, or a nod like we saw each other in public wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a Sony Walkman on it.

If you've read my About page, then you know that this story evolved from a therapeutic journaling exercise to deal with my maladaptive daydreaming. In the majority of my MDDs, I'm the MC, but an idealized version of myself who is wittier, prettier, and just all around better. The first person POV in this story comes from the way I journaled my MDD as it was really happening.

But I want to be clear: I'm not Cara, and she's not me.

Once I made the transition from "this is a daydream journal" to "this is a fiction novel", Cara became someone uniquely herself. The first person POV is all her, and this story could not be told any other way. Her internal world is so vivid that it just can't be framed externally.

I'd like to think that if Cara were to somehow jump off the pages into the real world and we met, that we'd be kindred spirits. But we are not the same. She's capable of things I could/would never do. But that's all I'm going to say for now. I'll probably do a deep dive on each character, starting with Cara, as I continue to post more chapters.