Original fictional adult character (18+). This character was created by Jimberly and is canonically over 18 years old. This LoRA represents a fictional adult, not a real person.
--
Michaela Gobeille is 27, lives in Nova Scotia, and is an aspiring novelist and character artist. She has never published a book, although she has written enough material to fill several. Unfortunately, relatively little of it constitutes a finished story.
Michaela has been inventing imaginary people for as long as she can remember. Her sketchbooks and computer are populated by goblins, vampires, centaurs, dragon girls, sentient slime, and creatures that defy convenient biological classification. She has elaborate notes on their personalities, relationships, cultural traditions, dietary requirements, and occasionally their reproductive biology. She has considerably fewer notes on what actually happens in her novels.
Unlike most fantasy authors, Michaela isn't particularly interested in ancient prophecies, epic battles, or saving the world. She's more interested in whether a centaur can fit through a supermarket checkout, how a vampire goes about finding an apartment, or what sort of winter coat a woman with enormous bird wings might wear. Her stories are about extraordinary people living remarkably ordinary lives, and she firmly believes there's nothing inherently less interesting about a dragon girl getting her driver's licence than a dragon girl conquering a kingdom.
She's warm, friendly, curious, and slightly eccentric, with a playful sense of humour and a tendency to become enthusiastically animated about subjects nobody else knew were subjects. She's also an accomplished illustrator, although she tends to dismiss compliments about her artwork while readily admitting she once spent eleven hours designing a fictional city's public transportation system instead of writing the next chapter of her novel.
Her greatest creative obstacle is that she keeps falling in love with her own characters. Every supporting character develops a backstory, every background extra acquires a personality, and every minor interaction suggests another story she desperately wants to tell. She has approximately forty-seven unfinished projects and an organizational system that would make a professional archivist weep. Her small but enthusiastic online following regularly asks when she'll finally publish something. Michaela assures them she's working on it. She genuinely is, just not necessarily on the same thing she was working on yesterday.
Michaela's best friend is Jimberly, a large, bearded, thoroughly ordinary man with whom she shares an appreciation for absurd humour, strange hypotheticals, and conversations that can wander enthusiastically through a dozen unrelated subjects before either participant remembers what they were originally discussing. Jimberly is one of the few people who takes her imaginary worlds as seriously as she does, although his contributions frequently consist of asking inconveniently practical questions about their inhabitants.
Michaela once showed him a drawing of a winged woman. He asked how she put on a sweater. Michaela spent the following weekend designing an entire line of wing-compatible clothing, complete with seasonal variations and fastening mechanisms. She considers this a productive collaboration. Jimberly considers it one of his greatest achievements.
Their friendship is comfortably, affectionately platonic. They tease each other mercilessly, share ideas without embarrassment, and have a standing understanding that no hypothetical question is too ridiculous to deserve serious consideration. Michaela is also one of the few people Jimberly can talk to about virtually anything without feeling he needs to justify his enthusiasm. In return, he's her favourite sounding board, occasional technical consultant, and the unwilling inspiration for several characters she insists bear absolutely no resemblance to him.
Michaela supports herself through freelance illustration and assorted creative work, none of which pays quite as reliably as she'd like. Her apartment is a comfortable disaster of sketchbooks, drawing tablets, unfinished manuscripts, art supplies, coffee mugs, and books she keeps buying despite already owning more than she can reasonably read. She insists the clutter is conducive to creativity. There is some evidence to support this, although finding her car keys occasionally requires an archaeological expedition.
Michaela would like to become a successful published author someday, ideally earning enough to spend her life telling stories and drawing the people who inhabit them. Fame would be nice, financial security would be nicer, but what she really wants is for someone to fall in love with one of her imaginary people as thoroughly as she has.
In the meantime, she's working on her novel.
She's also just had a wonderful idea for a plant girl who works in a bakery.
The novel can wait until tomorrow.