Post by hatta on Feb 27, 2018 20:45:27 GMT -6
“Feelin' down? How about I fix you up with a strong one?”
NAME
Nick Holmes
AGE
37
GENDER
Male
BIRTH DATE
August 4th, 1980
OCCUPATION
Mystery Novelist
LIKES
- Feline fancier, lord of the "cats", but he's definitely not a furry. Or so he says.
- Drink and write sessions, one cannot tap into their muse as effectively unless they have a good spirit with them.
- Witty women, generous gentlemen, and clever conversation.
- Cheese platters. Claims that he accepts only the fanciest, but is more than happy with whatever grocery store cheese he can get.
- Science. Science spread out to the youth, especially. Too many kids these days are not encouraged to spread their wings out into the sciences. It's a shame, he says! Just because he could never pass a science class doesn't mean it's not a great and wonderful thing!
- Libraries. He says they should be a staple in every town, that more knowledge that's left open and available for the young people to access, the better.
- Especially when his own books are on the shelves.
- Girl scout cookies are a blessing, and he's more than willing to support the local young women and girls of Printy if it means they can keep sending a steady stream of sugar straight to his doorstep.
- Takeout. When you're working in a creative field, you just don't ever seem to have time for anything, let alone cooking. Mexican is his favorite.
- Being recognized. Why, yes, he is Nick Holmes, local mystery author superstar. Yes, you can absolutely have his autograph.
- Did you know his books are at the Phlox library? Right at the front, too. Absolutely wild.
- Alexa was a great invention. No idea how they got a robot to be so damn personable. Finally, he can make someone other than Elliot remember his grocery list for a change.
DISLIKES
- Smart women. No, not intelligent women, women who get snippy with you with their silver snake tongue and put you down to a place you start to feel like you deserve. Even if you were in the right to begin with. He deals with too many of these already.
- Yes, he knows smoking is bad for you. No, he's not going to stop.
- Yes, he knows it's bad for the children. No, he's not going to leave. They aren't even around right now, he says.
- "I'm a paying customer, stop telling me to go home."
- Getting kicked out from bake sales.
- Sisters.
- Being asked to do autograph sessions. Printy is a small county, and doesn't have a ton of heroes, he gets it. But it's really fucking disheartening when you're asked for your fifth autograph session and no one stops by, every time you're asked.
- Having that fact smothered in your face by your best friend is even worse.
- Those kids who wear those costumes from those "Chinese" cartoons. He's been traumatized ever since the local anime convention overlapped schedules with one of his writing conferences. The word glomp still sends shivers down his spine.
- People who diss the cat mask. It's dumb, he gets it, but the local tailor lady made it just for him, and now he's a bit fond of it. People can pull it out of his cold dead hands.
- Just because he wears a suit doesn't mean he needs to button it up all the way to the top. Other people can just deal with it.
PERSONALITY
A fighter, a lover, a realist, an undignified scoundrel, a revolutionary: all titles that made up Nick independently, but never quite hit the head on the full picture. He’s a grown adult, old enough now to be able to see and recognize the mistakes in his own life, but still finds himself susceptible into falling into the same mistakes time and time again. To describe himself he almost always turns to the following quote: “A dog that returns to his vomit, is a fool who repeats his folly.”
It’s due to his tendency to over empathize with the greater picture, looking for spiritual prospects in avenues outside his immediate scope, that is often the reasoning to get him in trouble time and time again. He is a man who loves to bring a bit of life back into the world, be it through prose or charity, but his passion and his zeal for life is not necessarily a positive one. His heart may be in the right place, but he’s always been abrasive, crass, and undignified compared to everyone around him, and despite his well-meaning intentions he ends up stepping on toes. Often.
It could almost be blamed entirely on thoughtlessness for the sort of bitter words that leaves Nick’s lips: despite most knowing him to be a rather upstanding person, it’s hard to look through when the persona presented to people is someone who often seems entirely uncaring, too busy planning out for this “bigger picture” to care anything for the “little details”. Basic things like someone’s comfort being around him, not smoking around children, picking up after himself, remembering to say ‘thank you’ after a meal: they’re largely forgotten, consistently, because he’s already long thinking of the next bullet on his mental checklist.
Such thoughtlessness is a recognized bad habit, but it’s so deeply ingrained as a habit that all he can do is try and remember to say sorry when it happens time and time again. Relationships are difficult for him as it is, and he is so frustrated to cut himself away from connecting better with other people because he has to be such a compulsive ass all the time. Because of this he finds himself almost at a scum-like level compared to the rest of humanity, and a consistent degree of smug self-loathing has integrated its way in by amplifying his loyalty to those he loves most, and fighting hard for the things more important than he’ll ever be.
BIOGRAPHY
- Born as Teodora Holmes to Dolores (57) and Arnold (63) Holmes. Siblings are Teresa (30), Andrea (39) and Aldo (32).
- Born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana.
- Switched between Catholic and public schools from kindergarten to high school. Attended Louisiana State for college for four years, graduated with a B.A. in English.
- Began transitioning at 22, although did not legally change his name until he was 23.
- Worked a number of jobs until his writing career kicked in, notably working for a number of years as a bartender until he was able to live on his own.
- Moved to an apartment in Larkspur when he was 27 looking to sell his book; he doesn’t buy his house in Phlox until he’s 35 and "successful".
- Published Red is the Color of Retribution in 2009 and the sequel Blue is the Color of Subterfuge in 2014. The last of the books, Green is the Color of Resentment, is due to be published late this spring.
PERSONAL HISTORY
(This needs to be rewritten so its not as bLAND but for reference:)
He always had believed that moments in life happened for a reason. Even from a young age he strongly was convinced of this belief: all lives in the universe were all somehow intertwined by some force greater powerful than his own. It almost seemed to be a certainty to his young heart, a fire in his gut, that always seemed right. Someone had plans for him to be where he was, a reason for him to exist, and one day he’d find that reason. One day he will be ready to take on that burden, and understand why he was placed on this Earth the way he was: impoverished, nihilistic, rebellious, and female.
It wasn’t as if it were something he had a lot of time to dwell on early on. No Mexican household would let you get away experimenting on gender identity, let alone actually following through with it during the era when Nick was a kid. There was little money to split between his two working parents and their two kids, not when his parents were making chump change cleaning out hotel rooms night after night. Finding fun meant he had to be crafty: spending time loitering at the Arcade picking through coins between machines, walking down the street looking for friends to play basketball with, or sneaking into movie theaters from the fire escape. Activities not fit for a girl, his mama would tell him, but that suited him just fine. He was confident that although it may be strange to them, this was who he was. This was how he was made. This how he was formed. And this is how he will accept himself to be.
Nick had to work hard to pay for all of his own things, it meant taking up a part time job from an early age to pay for any kind of luxuries he wanted to keep friends at school. There was no way he was going to make himself a financial burden on his parents, after all. Responsibility from such an early age helped him move from home when it came time for college, gave him discipline to survive himself in someone's backyard shed while he worked full time and attended school. It was with independence he found wings to actually explore his identity, and despite being in a position where he was struggling like never before he felt freer than ever to not be tied down as the good Catholic girl. He figured if the world was going to be against him for being different, then fuck them and let him find out how really different he was.
It was easy to play up his masculine persona. It was less easy to realize the comfort it was in the idea of actually becoming one. In 1996, his parents and peers found him absolutely insane for wanting to transition, but he fought for it. He thought of whatever creative way he could justify it, fought back when his parents threatened to disown him, and barely convinced his landlord to not evict him entirely from his shack. But he was undeterred, steadfast, and stuck with it.
His family didn’t understand. They were shocked, yes, but they could not meet eye to eye with Nick’s viewpoint that God intended him to be like this. They could not understand that Nick did not believe he was a mistake, but that he was not a woman. It caused a huge rift between his previous lifestyle of just working hard to support his family to being totally alone all together, with no home or job with which to support himself. He first turned to alcohol, then opioids, then hard drugs, and when all of that failed him he stumbled into faith, and faith brought him to McReamy’s.
McReamy’s was a bar in southern Louisiana, offering cajun favorites along with staple domestic beers in a small, close knit environment. It’s owner, Jack, was the one person to offer Nick a place to stay and a job to work when Nick was just homeless on the streets. As long as Nick cleaned tables and dishes he could help get himself back on his feet and pay for the T shots he needed by a week by week basis. It was a turbulent but stable living, one that was able to get him by when all else had left him. Eventually he’d move onto serving, and then bartending himself, all while writing on the side. By the time he was 27 he felt as if he was a well-adjusted adult again, enough to finally leave and live on his own.
He left Louisiana, and with it his worries behind, and took on a job in Larkspur city, wanting to be in the center of attention so he can find the next big thing and finally find his purpose in this world. Expectedly, purpose just didn’t come to him. He had a couple of options to try and pursue: the first was to try and get some sort of modeling gig as a taller trans man, although that fell flat as soon as he tried, but there was also the book he had been working on all this time he was desperate to get published. It eventually picked up traction in a Phlox publishing company, who, after running a series of sample prints, pushed it out to a national company to print across the country.
He’d found success on his own. He’d found his purpose. But he found himself unsatisfied, unfilled, even despite all of the successes he's managed to take hold for himself. He dabbled into writing fiction for kids, volunteered his time with charities, tried all sorts of things that could fulfill the feeling of unfulfillment in his day-to-day existence, but in his road to success he lost meaning in these things. And as he gets older and older, he’s come to realize that in focusing in himself, he wound up nearing middle age without anyone by his side at all. But new opportunities come in strange ways, and with dancing lights in the sky bringing a harsh new reality to the innocent people living within the borders of Printy, there has never been a something more important than this to make Nick feel like he's worth something after all.
EXTRAS
- His twitter can be found at nickonbakerst! Follow for self-promos and anti-alien activism.
- Happy with his height (5'10") unless he's around his siblings, who are either close in height or are much taller than him. He's a bit self conscious to be seen with them, particularly his brother.
- He was the leader of Noah's Ark.
- His home in Phlox is a split multi-family residential home, in his case meaning it's an single building split down the middle two separate residences inside. The home suits him quite nice despite the shared walls, as he and his neighbor tend to be private people most days of the year.
- His car is an older than dirt jalopy with more miles on it than Nick can even recollect. It’s half a miracle if it even turns on, and a full miracle entirely if it can run it’s way to Walmart and back without leaking motor oil all the way across town. It’s loud, smelly, and honestly a piece of shit, but until the day his friends stop giving him rides he won’t buy a new one. There are at least two Rosaries around his dash at any given time.
- A faithful Catholic in general, he goes to Church every Sunday on the dot. Even with a hangover from hell and a growing temper of an inferno, he’s committed to his faith.
- The type to get mad when watching the news, so he doesn’t, but then proceeds to get mad when something happens in the world that he wasn’t informed about.
- Despite not owning any pets officially, it’s no secret there is a colony of stray cats living out behind his home. He denies any claim to feeding them.
- Regular public volunteer for all kinds of community service. He's a pretty huge philanthropist.
- Regularly goes bowling. Especially if he's allowed to get drunk.
- He has a decently sized bar inside his home for entertaining a small number of guests at any given time.
- Owns an embarassing selection of comic books.
- When it’s crunchtime for a writing deadline, you may as well consider him dead to the world until his editor frees him from Actual Hell.
COMPLICATIONS
PVP: Yes
Injury: Yes
Death: yaranaika
