In between ghostwriting projects, I’ve been writing a time travel novel that has been bouncing around inside me for some time now. Whenever I’m stuck for a name, I consult my List for Writers, an app my daughter Megan told me about.
It’s got first names for men and women, A-Z, and last names, too. If I choose one of them, it may change as I start writing the book, but it gives me some place to start.
It’s summer on Tango Key, my fictional island west of Key West, and my protagonist, Lydia Fuentes, is biking to her summer classes one evening. She thinks she’s being followed by a guy on a bike, but maybe he’s just a guy out for a bike ride. So she stops at as convenience store to see what the biker does.
She interacts with the clerk, whom she knows, about the scratch-off lottery ticket she buys, and gets the key to the restroom.As she’s coming out, she’s chloroformed by the man on the bike.
One of the secondary characters In the story is Kia. I found her name in the List for Writers app.
Here’s the synchronicity. This evening, I was talking with author Ken Harris who wanted to know how he could invite a friend, Kia Scherr, to the cafe. She’s the co-founder of One Life Alliance, a charity she set up in response to the 2008 Mumbai attacks that claimed 164 lives, including those of her husband, Alan, and their 13-year-old daughter, Naomi.
First of all, I don’t understand how anyone can survive the kind of grief this woman experienced when she learned that her husband and daughter had died in this attack. I think I would just cave and surrender. At the time this happened, Kia worked with the Synchronicity Foundation in Virginia, but realized she needed to leave and go to Mumbai.
“In Mumbai I realized that my definition of spirituality had been limited. In my spiritual community we had been concentrating on the inner world, choosing to live a more simplified life. When all that got blasted away I realized there was no more inside/outside world. There was just one world,” she wrote on a site called The Forgiveness Project.
She chose to forgive the killer “because forgiveness keeps the heart open. I refuse to be held hostage by the terrorists and let my heart become full of anger, hate and revenge. Through forgiveness I’ve learnt that love doesn’t die. No AK47 can ever kill the love I feel for my family. That love still burns deep within me.”
If I were in her shoes, would I be able to do that? Probably not. You killed the people I love? Well, guess what fuckers. I’m going to find you and even the score. So I’m thinking that my protagonist needs to be Kia – sorry, Lydia.
