Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters From Liz!
Wow; one week into the Lizmas celebration! Is it just me, or is this month just flying by? I mean, the holiday season comes and goes quickly every year, but I feel like it was just Thanksgiving not too long ago! Anyway, if you’ve been a daily reader of the blog for the past year, you would know that the writing universes that live in my mind have been officially taken over my creative writing side and are now officially different series! I definitely feel like every post that publishes for a certain series, I feel like it’s an episode of that week and then you have to wait until the following week to see what happens next! It’s definitely something I truly enjoy the most on the blog, so thank you for all of the support you guys have shown to these different series and characters throughout the year!
For those who would like to start a series or two, here’s just a summary of what’s currently going on in the universes of Grace & Jamie in The Something Series, Milo & Sophie in Teenage Tell-Tale and the new series with Micah & Rosie in Happier Than Never: The Series.
The Something Series
So, in a nutshell (since this is the longest running series out of all three), this series focuses on Grace Ashmore, a young adult in her mid-20’s trying to figure out her place in life, but not always having it together. Grace once worked at a law-firm (where she met her ex-fiancee/father of her daughter, Max Harper) and took her job a little bit too seriously, which caused her to lose out on her little family with Max and their daughter, Willow. Grace tries to do good by balancing the demand of her job and her role as being a mother, but she tends to fall short when she’s constantly choosing her work over her loved ones.
Jamie Kim, an overseas lawyer visiting the U.S for a work-related case, is a young adult in his mid-to-late 20’s; his work ethic looks polished and prepared on the outside. He is an experienced and well respected lawyer under his own firm, but also fails to know when to clock out and spend his evenings with his loved ones. Being the only man in a family full of women, he is constantly pressured to keep his culture and traditions in play as a man, but finds himself wanting to live a more westernized life, a life that his mother and older sisters don’t really understand. Because of his love for his career, he has also missed out on a lot of important things in his family’s life, and even had failed relationships because of it.
The two meet in a nearby coffee shop where Grace struggles to keep her life (I mean, paperwork) together, and Jamie offers to help. When they both learn that they are lawyers, Jamie offers to help Grace with her first big girl legal case in which she wins a couple of months later. Within that time, Grace and Jamie find themselves enjoying each other’s company, and begin to develop feelings for one another… until Jamie admits his visa is about to expire before the new year, which breaks Grace’s heart. And that’s honestly the start of it all. Grace and Jamie, as stubborn as they both are and don’t admit to their wrongdoings in situations, go through the next couple of years really figuring out who they are as people, but also fall in love with each other in the process. As of right now, things between the two aren’t the greatest, but hopefully they find their way back to each other… maybe.
Teenage Tell-Tale
So, the 8th grade can either go one or two ways for teens: absolutely amazing with memories to last a lifetime, or absolutely horrific and want nothing to do with your graduating class ever. This series serves you a mixture of both. This series focus on Milo Kamalani Jr, a 14-year-old boy going through the motions the end of middle school can bring. He’s consumed in his music, in which he practices for the big audition to one of the city’s prestigious performing arts school: Waverly High School of the Performing Arts; or simply just Waverly High. He mainly hangs out with his best-friend, Mollie Sue Castro, a spunky 14-year-old girl that gets herself (and Milo) into trouble far too often, and is usually the one fighting off the bullies. He finds himself not being able to voice his opinions well to Mollie due to how she handles things (which are not well) so he tends to fall down with Mollie if they are both involved in something against school rules… like fighting in the lunchroom whenever “one of the plastics” bothers them. He means good, but doesn’t always have a mind of his own.
Sophie Lee, one of the smartest girls in the graduating class yet is “one of the plastics” for being the mean girl’s friend, is a 14-year-old girl that isn’t like your average “plastic”. For one, she’s not really a follower of the leader, Laurie Warren, but still considers her one of her good friends despite the circumstances. Sophie moved to the U.S from the U.K a year before, only having one real friend, Simon Hempstead; the guy she used to have a crush on and briefly dated before moving onto, you guessed it: Sophie’s friend, Laurie. Since then, Sophie has been having this dilemma of who her real friends are and if she is only friends with Laurie because if she wasn’t, she would be a target for bullying from Laurie and the rest of her squad. While she can’t stand the fact that she has to pretend she’s okay with the boy that broke her heart for the sake of Laurie’s feelings, she does it anyway, even if her friends wouldn’t do the same for her.
Milo and Sophie met the summer before the school year and became close; he even gave Sophie the nickname “Scout” after the main character Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird since she was always curious about things and reigns being the smartest girl in their class. While they value each other’s friendship during the summer (and potentially catch feelings for each other as well), they are forced to pretend they do not know of each other because of them being in the two friend groups that despise one another. While at first it’s easy to separate the two, their English teacher partners them up to do their exit project together; The Teenage Tell-Tale Project. Partners have to show each other their favorite places in the neighborhood and get to know each other through the places they chose. While this project gets them the excuse to spend time with one another, both Mollie and Simon start to realize that Milo and Sophie are too friendly towards each other, and ultimately bring it up to both parties. Uh-oh, drama alert!
Happier Than Never: The Series
Black sheep tend to be misunderstood, unless you’re a black sheep yourself. This series focuses on Micah Kamalani (the younger brother of Milo which by in this series, Milo is roughly 30 years old), a 20-year-old college student studying sound engineering in order to pursue his dream in producing and DJing. While his love for music definitely comes from his family, the way he wants to pursue it is definitely different than what his father did and what his older brother is doing. Micah, the middle child in the Kamalani household, wears his hair curly and out, has a septum ring, and has tattoos on his arms which of course he got despite hoe his parents felt. He definitely is different from the family, and also tends to get in trouble often with those around him. His two best friends, Daniella (Dani) and Tanner, are along his side has he tries to figure out his place as a person in their twenties, even if Dani tends to give him a lot of shit for his poor mistakes. What makes things even more weird for Micah is that he is currently dating up-and-rising movie actress, Kalia Larsen whose father is a worldwide known and famous actor. Because of his girlfriend’s rise to stardom, Micah finds himself having to act and be a certain way in public so that him and Kalia don’t end up in the tabloids on a negative note. But, Micah always finds himself doing something wrong in Kalia’s eyes.
Rosie Delgado (who was first introduced to the blog a part of a short story I wrote back in college) is a 20-year-old college student studying art, which just tends to be her passion. With big, brown curly hair with different colored streaks in her hair and tattoos of her own, people tend to keep their distance from her, immediately labeling her as a “freak” or “weirdo”. She’s kept to herself most of the time, but she definitely has her own secrets she isn’t willing to tell just anyone. Originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she resides in New York on her own and tends to work part-time to help pay off bills and necessities of living. She works at the college bookstore when she isn’t in class, to which she finds herself interacting with Micah a lot during her shifts, once he finds out she works there.
Although I’ve written about these two in the past before, I definitely wanted to write more about how they became friends and how they eventually get to where they go later in their story! Keeping to the original story on how they met, Micah and Rosie bump into each other on campus, to which Micah takes a liking into because of her style. After getting Rosie comfortable in conversation, they share a brief exchange of words before they are both taken away to their responsibilities as college students. To Rosie’s surprise, once Micah learns about her working at the bookstore, he tends to stop in the store at least once every time he is on campus. While their story hasn’t gone too much into depth yet, you’re going to want to read and learn about these two misunderstood black sheep of society.
And that’s it for now! I am excited for you guys to read all the ideas I have for these sets of characters, because they are constantly roaming through my mind. Until the next one!
Letters From Liz. 