Can an influencer be sympathetic? That’s the question I am mulling over while I outline the second draft of Serve Me Now – the horror novel I want to get finished by the first quarter of 2025. She’s an “adult” influencer and model, meaning she does a lot of skin-showing and other things for a living. For this to be a good horror novel, I need to make her sympathetic…can we feel sympathy for someone whose only job is to lopok pretty? That’s my question.

I can go the old tried-and-true route of ‘hates her job’. I feel though I come back to this well a little too often with Evan. I could make her cynical of people. After all, her job is just to look pretty. She could hate going to the gym as much as I do, but she needs to go to keep her perfect shape, which leads to the real problem when she starts down the path she does in the book.

Maybe she likes her job for the attention but hates the work. NO\o choice in going to the gym. No choice in really what she can or can’t eat. Sure – she wants that slice of cheesecake, but she knows that that isn’t cheesecake, but an additional twenty minutes on the treadmill. She would like to put on sweats and eat a bag of chips and watch Hallmark movies, but that’s not bringing eyeballs to her OnlyFans site.

I think that’s the route to take. Everyone can find something wrong with their job, right? I mean, the key to having a sympathetic character is having something that the reader can relate to in their life. I’m sure we’ve all had jobs where if it weren’t for one thing, we would actually like it.

Here’s another one for the main character – for all the attention she gets, she’s lonely. I know that the whole ‘intimidated by my beauty’ thing is a little…cliched. All the messages she gets just amount to how much that particular person wants to sleep with her, and what kind of person she is in bed. No one comments on her stance on international affairs, or asks her what her favorite book is. They just want to know if she swallows or not.

What if she were a lot smarter than people think? Not super genius mode, but certainly someone with a good head on their shoulders. What if the person that knows her the best is her boyfriend Ian? I mean – he should know her the best because they’re in a relationship. This makes his inevitable departure even that much more painful because this was her tether to a somewhat normal life. When he’s gone, all she has are the empty platitudes of her fans. Even those begin to trickle away.

Yes. I think this is the route I am going to take. I just need to keep this in mind when I work on the outline. Can I show her loving the attention? Sure. There’s a little bit of narcissism in her to lap up the looks and leers. She could suffer from low self-esteem, which would explain a lot of things with her.

Well – that wasn’t so hard.

Now, I just gotta fold this into all the other things that are going on in the book. I am hoping to get it finished in time for publication by the end of the first quarter of the New Year. I want to have my schedule cleared for all the other books that I need to write. Wish me luck!