I spent the workday thinking about conspiracy theories and weird missing persons cases. That kind of stuff puts me in a different mindset. It makes me consider the mysterious and the wondrous and the all around appeal of strange things that suck readers (like me) into a narrative. As a result I’m thinking about the kind of characters that wind up in these situations. So, here is one.
Charles Loomy
Often people define themselves by their obsessions. Loomy started with coins. When it looked as thought the world was moving towards an obsession with digital money Loomy sold all his coins and invested in stocks. He was a big looser. He kept pumping money into the new obsession until he realized he didn’t have the talent for it. He switched to reality TV, relishing in the false lives of Kardashians and others. As a man with a wonderful memory and feel for history he was suited to track all the shows and all of the conflicts.
This life kept him at home during the hours he wasn’t working maintenance and he self-isolated in the hours that he was at work. Nobody knew Loomy and there was little to no outlet for his knowledge and the things that made him happy. So he became a homebody. He learned to use a computer and found reddit and found a community there that he could explore and be a person. As he did his outside world suffered.
People around him noticed him shrinking away from the world and his home grew less and less presentable on the exterior. He stopped caring and fell into his obsessions. On reddit he was loved. He was respected. He was an expert. Meanwhile in the real world he was the strange old man who lived in the crumbling house.