2015 Nanowrimo challenge, Day 3

So I missed yesterday’s prompt for the @snarktheater Nano challenge because bad wifi and losing my posts make me want to go to bed earlier than usual. But I’m back today with two prompt posts, starting with this one!

Introduce your protagonist (or one of your protagonists) to us.

Who are they? What is their role in/why are they a part of the story? What are their relationships with other main characters and the antagonists? What are their motivations, conflicts, character arc?

I’ve kept Clary as a protagonist because there was no reason to get rid of her and several reasons not to pick the others. Besides, I’ve always thought her reasoning for doing things recklessly in canon was overlooked so I wanted to see what happened with her in a setting where people communicate with her instead of treating her like a baby.

She’s a passionate person, who gets emotionally involved in projects easily and can be very dedicated, but also reckless and unthinking at time. At the start of the story, she’s working a summer job at her mother’s workplace (a tattoo shop) to prepare for the start of her internship once she finishes high school.

Clary and Jo’s relationship in this story is mostly good, and they communicate fairly well, except for everything that predates Clary’s birth, which is an explicite no-go zone (also inforced by Luke, who is Jo’s companion but, to Clary’s everlasting puzzlement, doesn’t live with Clary and Jo). All Clary knows about her mother’s past is that she lived in Europe (because of the accent) did some violent stuff (because of the scars) and there was once money in her family (because of the genuine, a century-or-two old sterling silver family ring).
She kind of thinks Luke and Jo were in a mafia, but that’s really not something she can talk about with anyone at all.

Going from there, it follows that Clary has some questions about where she comes from and what her heritage is like, which is going to be a major point of this book, both in terms of discovering the shadow world and in terms of learning more about her family history. (If I do the next two books, Book 2 will be for her claiming the Shadowhunter identity for herself, and Book #3 will be about her kind of standing on her own two feet and coming at odds with the Clave’s traditions)
And of course, there’s the part where she learns that her not-dead-after-all Dad is a genocidal racist bent on destroying the underworld (or is he? Dun dun DUN!)

On a smaller scale, one of Clary’s developments is that she figures/confirms that she is, indeed, a lesbian, in part because it turns out she finds ripped girls who kill demons with a magic whip extremely sexy. (Incidentally, Isabelle also ends up deciding to act on her latent bisexuality. Happy happenstance.)

So yeah, what I kind of want to play with is Clary’s self-discovery journey in this book, and how she deals with the newfound knowledge and surprises it comes with :)