Breakfast with Amber

December 2019: Killed a Character on Christmas Day

It's hard to decide how to start this chapter considering that Christmas break of 2019 to me is a blur. I had to pull up my mom's Facebook page to find some photos of what actually happened. Apparently, this is the year where I got my "Please state the nature of the medical emergency," nightgown and played the saran wrap game with my brother, Alex, and my little cousins. Now that I think about it, there are two things I remember about Christmas break of 2019: that the saran wrap was a pain to tear through and that I excused myself that evening to do my writing for the day, killed off a major character, and signed the end of the chapter with Merry Christmas!

I know you were expecting fond Christmas memories, but instead, you're getting an in-depth analysis of my writing habits because there is a ton of method involved in my writing. I plan out what I'm going to write each day and how much up to a month in advance, and if I can't write on a certain day, I have to make it up or postpone everything. I've only recently realized that these goals are self-set, and if I can't write a certain day, I can just make the chapter shorter. In fact, I use the same system now that I did four years ago as I write this on the morning of September 10, 2023 (happy birthday, Alex). Last week, my parents were visiting for the afternoon, so I gave myself 1,000 words to write instead of 2,000 like most weekend days, and chapter 17 of The Seven Souls would be 4,000 words instead of the usual 5,000. However, I had to make an unexpected trip to the post office that morning, so I didn't have any time to write that day. I moved those last 1,000 words to Sunday so that the chapter could have a satisfying ending and chopped 500 words off of both October and November 2019 of this book.

What does this have to do with Christmas? Well, according to my schedule, Christmas day of 2019 was the day I was set to kill off Teruo Bitani, a major character in my series, SplaTOON, since the beginning of season 1.

SplaTOON is a project I've been working on since my senior year of high school. Yes, I'm still working on it. I've been patently waiting for the Side Order DLC to come out so I can adapt that next. It's a TV adaptation of the Splatoon game series and one of the first projects published to my Wattpad page. I say "adaptation" as if I haven't taken every artistic liberty possible when it comes to the overarching storyline, and one of the changes I made to the second season, SplaTOON 2, was that instead of being brainwashed into joining the Octarians, Callie joined voluntarily. I was just tired of seeing brainwashing as a plot device and wanted to see a hero who had a reason to join the villains.

Callie became the Octarian army's number one Inkling operative, Dark Squid, originally in charge of reconnaissance work, but after the Squidbeak Splatoon starts retrieving the voiceboxes from their lair, she's given a special task: killing a friend or loved one of each member of the Splatoon to demotivate them into fighting back. (Side note: Voiceboxes are the replacement for zapfish in this season. Each one contains an ink sample from a victim of the CQ Cumbers, creatures that the Octarians are raising to take electricity-conducting ink from unsuspecting Inklings while also injecting a venom that makes the victim unable to talk coherently, thus the name.)

At this point, there are six members of the Squidbeak Splatoon: Callie, Marie, Zaki, Keiso, Pearl, and Marina. (Another one of my artistic liberties: adding Off the Hook to the Squidbeak Splatoon.) Callie is Callie. Marie is out of the picture because Callie knew she'd have to kill herself. That left four. There were 28 episodes in this season. That meant there would have to be a murder once every seven episodes. In episode 7, she kills Pearl's older brother, Terese. In episode 14, she tries to kill Marina's father, Maegami, but gets their family friend, Pachayo, instead. In episode 21, she kills Zaki's mother, Miraa. That left one more death, but it had to be before episode 28 so that Callie could make her big reveal in the season finale. I thought that episode 26 because Keiso would break up with Teruo in episode 25, the season's Splatfest episode, and then she'd leave on a train for home the next day, on which Callie would ambush her and bludgeon her with her own roller.