So this year has been a great year for stories, and recently my muse has recovered from 11 family members dying :/. And i need a bit of advice about a plot idea or maybe it would be better to call it a meta-idea that i had. I want to play with some of the concepts in Lilly the Liar, and Panda’s Ashes. See the one problem I have with both of these is it is hard to fathom the deception working for 100k words worth of plot, this isn’t a criticism of the authors as suspension of disbelief covers it, but i was thinking on how someone or a group might make something like that work long term. Obviously the fact that both main characters have physical disabilities is a major part of why that works. When i was 16 i could often be mistaken for ten or 11 because of my physical challenges. But the one time i tried deliberately to take advantage of the mistake it caused major problems when the people involved found out. It will be interesting to see how that is dealt with in the stories i mentioned. But i do not wish to deal with those aspects of the plot. And i think i have finally found a way around it.
What if the Guardian character had some kind of nomadic lifestyle say a long haul trucker, or some sort of roving technology consultant or a Skip Trace something like that. Thus any interactions with supporting cast school staff/daycare/medical would be limited in duration, and the guardian could edit the records en route to the next destination. Heck they might even have multiple “profiles” so the child could switch between being 6 or 11 as the mood suited.
That’s the thousand foot sketch of the idea, here is where i need advice. I haven’t really fleshed out what kind of occupation the Guardian would need to have in order for this to work, and having only been on five road trips in my life i have no idea what a long term nomadic lifestyle would look like, or the implications of bringing a possibly emotionally traumatized preteen character into it. Any advice in that vein would be helpful. I also want to do it in an unconventional way in terms of characters. I want the Guardian to be female but the child charterer to be male. All the examples of this approach turn into either insane!Mother or fap!Fap!Fap rather quickly so any advice on how to pull that off or pointers to stories which pull off that dynamic well would be also very much appreciated.
Alternatively if you just want to tell me to sod off and stop blasting my plot notes into the ether, i would take that as well :
Re: Advice on a plot idea
You could theoretically make this work with an overseas adoption, but it’d be much tougher any other way because of laws regarding school attendance. Unless, of course, it’s strictly a summer road trip sort of thing…
Long-haul trucking is a pretty tough lifestyle, as those folks pretty much live in their trucks, with the occasional motel room to shower up between hauls. Plus the hours are completely screwy, ten driving and eight resting, which would make daycare a non-option.
In my younger days, I worked as a mystery shopper, bopping all over the Midwest, with only occasional stays of more than a couple days. That would work well for this plot concept, as Mom would be taking at least a day off every week, and there would be an actual purpose for the daycare stays.
Re: Advice on a plot idea
I was thinking of going the home school route to get around the school attendance requirements, as long as you get the appropriate number of hours per/year in most states don’t care how you do it. Overseas adoption might work and my female character would be the type to take on something like that. But this leads to another question would a single women who lives on the road 9 months out of the year be allowed to adopt at all. I’d have to rework my notes on the child character too. I thought i had the backstory of him/her worked out
Re: Advice on a plot idea
To the best of my knowledge, the government has no involvement with overseas adoptions. It’s considered a private matter.
Re: Advice on a plot idea
Thanks I’ll think about that going that route
Re: Advice on a plot idea
People in their 20’s and 30’s have posed as high school students (one even convinced the school to let him wear a hat so no one would see his bald spot), it could be a version of that but with the ages (both real and pretend) adjusted downward.