Unlocking a new character for NaNoWriMo

"Another new character?" I hear you say. (Or at least I would hear that question if there were more than two people who read this blog. Since both of them know my writing plans, all I'm getting are some vague nods from their directions, lol.) I'm going to be taking a bit of a break from my year-long struggle with "In the Cards" (my epic mess) to write something else during NaNoWriMo this year and since I desperately need some time away from Seph (I love you, dude, but you're really getting on my nerves hard to write), I'm moving as far away as possible. Well, geographically speaking I'm staying in the same area for part of the story, but I'm moving back in time about 150 years.

There will be a few new characters (two? three? Who knows! NaNo is the time for crazy, anything goes chaos!) that go along with November's story, but in this case I'm just sharing the protagonist who I unlocked first (and made using this generator). Meet Adair Conroy:

If his name rings a bell and he looks a little familiar, there's a good reason for that: he's the ancestor of both Cyneric and Phillip. (Which is kind of funny because at the time of his story, he's all of about sixteen and the thought of descendents would make him flee in a panic. So shhhhh, no one tell him that he has great-great grandkids.) I'm still fumbling for the first glimmerings of plot and characterization, but he's an artist-mage tasked with facing the baddie who made an incredibly brief appearance in the prologue of The Acolyte's Map. That evil map? Yeah, you can put some of the blame on Adair, although he's claiming that he had no idea what he was doing. All he wanted was a patron to buy him some more paint and canvas. Honest! How was he to know how his drawings would be twisted?

This is pretty close to how I picture him- looking similar to his descendents, but garbed a little differently for a different time period. And splattered with paint and ink, of course. At his belt is a scrollcase where he keeps some of his precious paper and that isn't so much a sash that he's wearing as a bandolier; he stashes some of his art supplies into that, as well as his belt, to keep them near at hand. He does this not just because he's constantly sketching, but because they're keyed into his magic.

That's all the detail I'll go into right now, but I'm sure I'll ramble more as NaNo approaches, probably with even more parenthesis. And I realize that a lot of my avatars at the top of the page go to sparse bio pages. My goal between now and November is to at least finish the bios of the characters I already have.

...That and, ya know, figure out how an artist is able to stop a baddie from usurping a throne in a kingdom that's halfway across the world from his home. Technicalities, right? ;) I love the start of NaNo season! So many crazy ideas circling your head at once and none of them make any sense. Aaaahhh. *breathes in the smell of new pens, notebooks, and chaos*

~Meri