Meme - Day 4

Day 4 of the writing meme I'm doing, in hopes it will inspire me.

4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!

I don't remember a lot of the stories I wrote as a kid. When I was in elementary school, I wrote a fan fiction (although I didn't know of that term until I got online in the late 1990s) about The A-Team. I also wrote a handful of short stories between grades 6-8. One revolved around a girl with a lot of siblings, while the other was about gymnasts. If anyone here has read Sandy Cove, those might sound familiar.

With my early characters I almost always based them on people I knew. One of the first that I didn't was Joy Morrison.

I have no idea where I got her name. Maybe it was due to a story my grandma told me about relatives that had girls named Faith, Hope and Charity (which are the names of Joy's older, deceased, sisters). I have record of Joy in my notebooks from 1988, when I was 12 years old. I cut out pictures of people I thought looked like her - one was Heather Graham - and she was the star of tons of story ideas. About a year later, Joy got a twin sister named Liberty. I had a huge fascination with twins and multiple births, and I gave Joy this identical sister. Joy and Libby went on to star in a lot of my story ideas. They were orphans, mostly because I had no concept of writing adults, and it was easy to have missing parents (not to mention instant angst lol). I actually found a way to weave them into A-Team fandom when I saw a season 5 episode that said the A-Team's CO in Vietnam had the last name Morrison.

I think I chose the last name because it was simple. I had a list of relatively common last names I tended to use quite often, and Morrison was one.