I have decided to make Nate a track star in the mold of a kind of amalgamation of what it is to be an American distance runner in today's world. But I am going to give this the human side and let the track stuff be kind of the back ground story. Part of this is a satirical look at the way in which we idolize sports figures for all the wrong reasons. He will be a world class athlete and there will be some mentions of fans, how he is viewed by others, how the media (big shocker here) builds him up only to try and tear him down; at first relishing in his success and later looking for all the flaws of character that is prevalent in such stories.
But, as always, it also serves a plot point regarding the primary characters. Livvy is discussed as having developed an 'ass-hole' meter which is not very sophisticated and finding out someone is not an asshole does not make him anything idealistic, only someone who can at least tolerably engage in discussion and nothing more - Nate and Jamie are her closest friends and are a part of that meter she uses to determine if someone is at least worthy whim she can share space and time.
I have introduced them earlier in the book, but not much is said about them, so in this chapter which I am calling 'The Days of Running Hills' I get a little more in-depth. Here is an example paragraph from this chapter:
It was mere coincidence that both Nate and Jamie had wandered to this end of Portland for their morning coffee during their mutual freshman years of college, Jamie chose this area as The Bluff, as it was known, where her private Catholic school was located, was not entirely a place she wanted to spend her mornings amid the rush of a private college campus located in an older residential neighborhood yet close to a busy road named after Civil Rights hero Rosa Parks. She had been to probably about two dozen coffee places before settling on JM because she was just looking for a place where she could quietly sip her soy mocha grande and browse through the news headlines on her small tablet getting ready for a day of school. It was her presence one morning during an early run which drew the attention of Nate. Not much of a man to chase women, she had a natural athletic beauty which he had never known before, and maybe it was just the way that the sun bounced off her hair as he passed by in his five-minute thirty second per mile pace for his easy morning run, or maybe it was the way she smiled at some innocuous blurb on her miniature tablet, or maybe it was that she was the prettiest woman he could recall seeing since moving to this rainy province just three weeks earlier, but something told Nate he needed to find a way to have coffee there one morning. He ran by the store every morning for two weeks seeing that pretty face and that strawberry blonde-hair every morning, parked in the same spot, reading from the same tablet. On the fifth day of the second week, Nate, a smart man who with that rare occasion that had him in pursuit of someone not on a track, decided to alter his early morning run to be complete just in time to arrive back at Java Mama for his morning cup of coffee, he liked it plain, black with just a hint of Stivia to soften the acidic reminder of its nature.
You can see that this is not like some of my earlier writing. I had mentioned that love itself is cliche and I don't want every story of infatuation, love, hate and relationships to be cliched, but there have to be some that simply are a cliche. Cliche's happen for a reason and I think it okay, in this instance, to have two people meet in a somewhat normal fashion and to have enough in common to continue dating. After all, isn't that essentially how all love begins? two people meet; somewhere; at some time; they feel that there is enough of a common mutual bond to extend their meeting into some form of dating relationship and then they progress... sometimes love dies, and sometimes it grows... plus, I spend so much time in most of the relationships I detail talking about the dysfunction of relationships (with good reason) and I just want to make at least one semi-normal. No addictions, no baggage, no hidden resentments and no misogyny; just two people that meet and go forward.
Anyway, every day something new takes over my mind. The great thing about this project is that because of the nature of the concept - many worlds - there are some things I can do that I would otherwise not be able and that is very exciting.
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