Meme: Ask me some questions; I'll tell you some ...

[nebroadwe]

I'm snagging a meme from lyricnonsense (who got it from cornerofmadness, who probably got it from someone who lived in the house that Jack built): "Ask me any question about any character you know I write, and I'll come up with an answer." As the Apostle of Backstory, I spend a lot of time considering the what the gaps between the details might add up to: what people do on their days off, who they meet when the camera isn't looking, what they trip over on their way out the door every morning. (You can find my collected works here, if you need to verify that I've actually written a particular character.)

Go on! Ask me! Ask me!

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[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Going to have to do these in installments ... work, work, work ...

From "Ubi Sunt Gaudia?": Why does Heiderich rarely share information about his immediate family?

There's something painful there: part of it is that his parents are dead and part of it seems to be that he didn't get on with them well toward the end. They loved him and were proud of how intelligent he was, but they expected him to work in the family business (whatever it was -- still mulling that over). He might have persuaded them to support him if he'd intended to be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, but he wanted to go off and build rockets, which to them seemed not only a pipe dream but an irresponsible impracticality, given the shape their world was in. And he was a dutiful son and could see they had a point, but this dream was all-in-all to him and he wouldn't give it up. So while he's grounded enough not to feel guilty that his parents' death freed him to go his own way (at least not since he's grieved for them), he still doesn't like to revisit that part of his past in detail. He'll tell people his parents are dead -- which isn't particularly unusual, given the war and the 'flu -- and leave it at that. Most people don't inquire further.

I'm still working out whether Alfons has siblings; I've got an idea for a character sketch from his POV set earlier in his relationship with Ed (also another short story from Ed's side set a few months after "Ubi Sunt Gaudia?") where these issues will have to be dealt with in more detail. It involves fisticuffs, though, which I'm almost as nervous about writing as I am romance ...