Caylie Gwynn
26. Oh gosh. Caylie is online a seemingly impossible amount, considering how much she gets done each day. She uses cgwynn@xfactor.com for work, dailycaylie@gmail.com for personal stuff, and fairyqueen@fanfiction.com for her fandom activities. Fairy Queen is her online handle for just about everything - Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, FanFiction.com, Tumblr, etc., and she has an aim account with that name - but since only Billy and Cal know this identity, she has a separate AIM account for friends and family (dailycaylie).
27. "Everything at Once" by Lenka is basically Caylie as a little girl. She wanted so much for herself, but could never really be specific. She wanted unlimited potential.
"Nothing to Prove" by The Doubleclicks is pretty much where Caylie is now. While she skews slightly more towards craft nutter than traditional geek girl, she's into a lot of different fandoms and is immensely comfortable with herself. Caylie has very deliberately crafted huge portions of her life and has done so because they make her happy, not because she's trying to fit anyone else's image of what she could or should be. (This video and song are awesome - give it a click!)
28. Caylie's life is always changing genres. The different parts of it just don't seem to cohere. But usually it's a quirky detective comedy.
29. Caylie smells sweet - literally. She has a lot of different fragrances that she wears, but they're usually mild. Vanilla is the most common scent, but she often smells like whatever she's most recently baked and/or coffee and/or tea. When she's dressing for something more formal, she might pick something fruity and floral, but for everyday use, she has a collection of The Body Bakery scents in fragrances like cinnamon bun, almond butter pound cake, and sugar cookies. She loves smelling like a bakery.
30. Caylie is a major reboot of an old character, who was a lot less quirky/spunky and way more stodgy. The main challenge I have with writing Caylie is that she doesn't lend herself well to conflict. She's so patient with the people she knows that it's hard to get under her skin (though Cal is working on it right now), and when people do burn her, she burns them back, for good. And without the right complement of people to bounce off of, it's hard for her to be witty and snarky in the way that she really needs to be. I've felt like she's been drowned in my other characters and I need to find a way to fix that. She's a larger character than I've been writing her.
BONUS! Service, quality time, words, gifts, touch.
Caylie shows people she loves them by doing things for them. Making food and cleaning up are the most common, but she does any little chore she can think of to make life easier for the people she cares about. After that, it's quality time. While Caylie's life isn't always the most exciting, it's filled with time with her and her closest people. She tells the people close to her how much they mean to her, and it's important that they say it back. But to convince Caylie that you care about her, saying it isn't enough - you have to show her, because that's what she's looking for. After that, thoughtful presents and close contact are of course all part of the package, but it'll take a long time without these things for her to feel sad as long as she's getting her primary needs met.