You won't know who he is, unless you've read Strange, and were paying quite a lot of attention to Leyha's background. And yes, his birthday is now September 12. Of course, he's dead (he would be anyway), but it's still his birthday.
For the past few days, I've been working on figuring out details about the family structures of Strange. By that, I mean I went and used four pieces of computer paper and outlined the Menla & supporting families, the Pilo & supporting families, the random characters such as Bea, Anni, Claudi, and Garto who showed up but aren't really important to the plot or related to someone important to the plot, and finally people who are just mentioned in the story. Both the Pilo and Menla family sheets became pretty specific, at least until I got bored of them.
For example, I now know that Leyha has one aunt, on her mother's side, and a Pilo uncle. I already knew that she had an uncle on her father's side, and a cousin. But I also decided that she has four Pilo cousins; three girls and the youngest a boy. Kehdem's father's family became suddenly incredibly important to the story; Gared (Kehdem's father) is the oldest in his family, Jard (Seymod's main advisor) next, two sisters (one was Seymer's wife and the mother to his only daugher Sera, but she died), and finally one more brother. On the Pilo side, Alarsa now has a younger sister, Visa, who has the four children, and a dead brother, Rolen. Visa brings the family tie to Lilaren du'Marnai, if you know her. And with every outward-working family setup, I end up creating a whole nother family.
So I've created tons and tons of names out of nothing (such as the name Finna, which came from "fingerprints" of which there were some on my mp3-player when I was attempting to think of names), and birthdays, and I am altogether tired of that.
But I've created interesting back stories that are fun to write, if nothing else. Also, they provide an opportunity for me to never lose hold on these characters that I've come to love so much over the thirteen months that I've been working with them. Plus, Mordred, by Vivian Vande Veld (I think that's the name) brought to this brilliant idea which is sort of wierd, and which I'm sort of skirting around because I'm not quite sure how my characters would deal with it (I'm not sure how well I would take something like that from those two...), but which led me to an incredibly interesting discovery about how magic came to split out into different parts like it is (how it split, per se, isn't exactly revealed to me, but I have decided how the different types of magic were formed, anyway).
On an unconnected but not totally unrelated note, my friend let me steal her metro station CD (and fall out boy, for that matter) and put the music on my computer. And I have become quite hooked. It's kinda pathetic. "Kelsey" is by far my favorite song on the CD (which goes by the band name, like the We the Kings CD), but the whole thing's really good. And I've been bringing my expensive touch-screen mp3 player that I absolutely adore to school every day so I can listen to it at lunch.
I've also been walking home. I like about half a mile away, and I've made it down to only 20 minutes walking time. Which is pretty good, considering that it took me around 30 minutes to walk the same distance the occasional times that I did it last year.
I believe I've said everything I wanted to.
IN SHORT: I've written out information for the "backstory" sort of information for Strange. And since I've been working on it, I'm going to continue working on it, and probably not write so many fanfics at this point. Also, I've recently become hooked on Metro Station, the band, thanks to my friend.
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