Apparently She Needs a Website

Yesterday I decided Lore Lassen needed files.

Today I realized she also needed somewhere to leave them.

Not just somewhere to store them. Somewhere to hide things. Somewhere readers could eventually find things she left behind.

This is becoming a recurring problem with her.

I'm currently building my own author website. My actual one. The one for the actual author who is actually writing all of these manuscripts and trying to figure out how twenty books, two author brands, a publishing house, and whatever else I've gotten myself into are supposed to fit together.

And somewhere in the middle of building my Library, I had to figure out where Vorlass belongs on the shelf.

Technically, it's my book.

Except it isn't.

It's Lore's.

So Lore can exist inside my Library, published through NBodied Writing House, but if I'm eventually going to hand readers her Vorlass, her encrypted notebook, her files, and everything else she left behind, she needs somewhere for all of that to live.

And Nachlass needs somewhere to happen afterward.

Which means Lore Lassen needs a website.

Of course she does.

She's a bestselling author.

She has books. Readers. Interviews. Events. Photographs. A social media presence. An author bio. A career that existed long before anybody had a reason to start digging through what she left behind.

One of her books was even adapted into a movie.

Apparently.

I know this because she told me.

Which is another way of saying I made it up today.

So while I am currently building my own author presence from scratch, I am also building the established author presence of a woman who does not exist.

Completely reasonable use of my time.

Lore is becoming an extremely demanding character.

Most of my characters are perfectly content to live inside their manuscripts.

A few have demanded photographs or a title change.

Lore kicked down the door^NB and announced that she needs a publishing history, a literary estate, a fandom, encrypted files, an author bio, social media, professional photographs, bestselling novels, a movie adaptation, and apparently her own fucking website.

And, well...

Lore.

Lore has lore.

Obviously.

She has been here for approximately three days.

The woman wants what she wants.

And the problem is, I keep giving it to her.

Because every time I add another piece, she becomes a little less like someone I'm inventing and a little more like someone I'm trying to keep up with.

So, fine.

Lore gets a website.

But I don't want Lore's website to look like part of a fictional mystery.

I want it to look like famous author Lore Lassen's professional website.

And I don't want it to look anything like mine.

That's important.

Lore isn't Nikki Bodie with a different name at the top of the page.

She needs her own visual language. Her own photographs. Her own books. Her own voice. Her own way of presenting herself to the world.

A completely different brand identity for a completely different woman.

Which is an interesting thing to say about someone who is going to borrow my likeness, my brain, and my hand.

But she isn't me.

I'm writing her.

I'm building her.

But somewhere between my hand and the page, she has to become someone else.

Otherwise, what's the point of giving her all of this?

Her website should be beautiful. Professional. Completely ordinary.

Nothing screaming CLUE.

Nothing conveniently creepy.

Nothing that exists solely because someday somebody might need to investigate her.

Because the interesting part isn't making suspicious things.

It's making ordinary things become suspicious later.

A photograph is just a photograph until somebody disappears.

Then people start enlarging the background.

A casual post becomes a timestamp.

An old event becomes part of a timeline.

A reflection becomes something people argue about.

A photograph she hated becomes one of the last photographs anyone has.

Nothing about the object changed.

Only what people started looking for.

So Lore needs a past.

And apparently I have to build that too.

I need to figure out what books she wrote before Vorlass. Which ones were bestsellers. What kind of writer she was. Where she traveled. What she photographed. What she talked about in interviews. What readers thought they knew about her.

I need photographs that were taken for completely different reasons.

Professional author portraits. Book signings. Libraries. Airports. Hotels. Bad candid photographs. The occasional photograph she probably wishes nobody had taken.

Maybe something blurry in the background of somebody else's picture that becomes interesting only later.

I need enough ordinary Lore that nobody realizes they're looking at evidence until somebody tells them she is gone.

And because I apparently don't understand the difference between fiction and administrative overhead, I went and bought her a domain.

A real one.

For the fictional author.

So now I'm building an author website inside my author website that will send you to another author website for an author I invented, whose books are actually my books, published by my publishing company, while I am still building the website for the person actually doing all of this.

I need a diagram.

Or an exorcism.

Possibly both.

And there's another strange little symmetry here.

I'm building my own website with doors you may not find. Things tucked into margins. Trails that don't announce where they lead. Correspondence clues.

And now I'm building Lore's world around exactly the same idea:

You only find certain things if you think to look.

Maybe that's becoming a theme.

Anyway.

I bought the domain.

I know where Vorlass will live.

I know where Nachlass can eventually grow around it.

Lore has a publisher.

She has an estate.

She has a career.

She has an online presence.

I made a woman out of infrastructure.

Which leaves one fairly important problem.

I have absolutely no idea what she looks like.

Tomorrow's problem.