So today I wanted to do a little info dump about my favorite character in my WIP. I love all of my characters (most) and tend to be obsessed with all of them from one time to another, but I always come back to Moses.
Moses is 21 at the start of the story. He’s biracial and bisexual and has a boyfriend named Jackson who he met when he was 13. He is deeply obsessed with Korean culture and loves listening to Kpop and watching Kdramas. This love grew to the point that he decided to learn Korean and has been learning since he was 12. He’s fairly fluent now.
Moses grew up with a mother, a father, and a younger sister. His sister is only just over a year younger than him. Her name was Bethany. I say was because Bethany passed away about 2 years before the start of the story. Bethany grew up with a number of conditions including cystic fibrosis, a growing list of allergies, and epilepsy. Throughout their childhood, Moses and Bethany were inseparable. Moses was an extremely quiet kid and Bethany tended to speak for him. Not to be too dramatic, but they were each other’s strengths. Where one of them had a weakness, the other filled it in.
Suffice to say, losing his sibling really messed Moses up.
But he had a rough time as a kid too. A lot of his story explores what it’s like to grow up with a chronically ill sibling and what it’s like to be “the healthy one”. Moses has to grow up a little faster than his peers. He has to be a parent sometimes. And sometimes, his parents forget him. I can’t say I’ve had experience with this exact situation, but parts of Moses childhood and the ways it bleeds into his adulthood are definitely inspired by my own life. This is probably part of what makes me love him so much.
Much of Moses’ story is told through flashbacks. We explore the way he grew up and the way he saw himself and his world through all of it. We see how Sparrow (our protagonist) and her story can change the way he sees his own and vis versa. When the story starts, Moses is a grieving 21 year old alcoholic living at home and struggling to move forward. He has to come to terms with his past to find his way into the future.
A lot of what I want to say through the character of Moses revolves around mental health. Moses is not the child most people think of when they imagine the story of a sick kid. Siblings can easily get overlooked and that’s the story I want to tell. It’s not that his parents didn’t love him. It’s that they were in a tough situation too and they simply didn’t know what to do. Parenting is hard. Parenting is harder when you have a sick kid. It’s hard to imagine what you would do in that situation. How do you make sure both kids are ok when one seems so much more not ok than the other?
For my characters I tend to create Pinterest boards that encapsulate their general vibe and aesthetic. You can find Moses’ here: https://pin.it/l7t4yeg3eyx5p3
The general vibe I went for was kind of the “soft boy” aesthetic. Moses is a fairly feminine man. He likes flowers in his hair and painted nails. He doesn’t have the bleached hair look at the moment, but at the start of the story his boyfriend, Jackson, does. Moses is also severely mentally ill, which is something I tried to capture in his board. I don’t want that to be the most important thing about him, but the thing is that it does affect a lot of who he is and what he does. He’s recovering and that’s a huge part of him.
So that’s Moses in a nutshell. I just wanted to go ahead and introduce him since he’s my little baby. We torture the ones we love the most!
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