This post from Mad Genius Club by the ever-brilliant Sarah Hoyt kind of required a more lengthy, serious* response.

1- Nothing is ever easy, nor simple.  Say you are walking across the street to get a gallon of milk.  A rare make of car will almost run you down.  The store that sells the milk will be out of milk. You’ll have to walk across the most dangerous area of town to get to the next store.

This means someone is making you terminally interesting.

It’s not quite that bad, but my household has learned to live by this maxim: “Nothing will ever be simple, because it’s us we’re talking about, and if everything is turning out great, wonder what new unexpected disaster will spring up and hit us, and when?”

Because life likes to go ‘fuck you, that’s why.’

2- You remember more near-death experiences than a character in iZombie.

This is probably just background infodumps.  The author is trying to show how resilient you are.

Not really near death experiences, but apparently life hasn’t broken me yet and every time it fails to do so, it comes up with increasingly creative and more annoyingly timed ways to try.

 

3- All or your friends are terminally interesting and can be counted on for either an explosion or comic relief when needed.

This is good for keeping the plot moving when you’re tired/recovering/ill.

…This describes most of my friends. It’s never really boring around them. And David’s attempts to blow up FrankenPCs have consistently failed, so…

 

4- You have one or more catch phrases.

This is very useful for delineating a character when the author doesn’t have particularly good character skills.

Nine Hells, this does not bode well for me does it?

 

5- You consistently get interrupted when you try to tell people the most important part of any story.

This is an attempt to create suspense.  Not a very clever one.  BUT, you know, sooner or later your author might find a good writers’ group.

There’s kind of a reason why I prefer text-based communication.

6- You have almost lost a friendship to a huge misunderstanding which would have been cleared up if you’d just paid attention.

‘Almost’?

7- People are insanely attracted to you, despite age/body type/lack of interest.

A fortune teller told my mother once that there will be two types of people who linger in my life: People who cherish me; true companions or otherwise, or people who will despise me with every cell of their being. In fairness, I’m apparently not the only person in the house, or family, with this particular checkbox tick.

8- You have one or more unlikely abilities, which comes in handy in circumstances that should never strike.  Say you are a camel whisperer.  It will turn out the only way to escape a traffic jam is on camel back. If you’re this well foreshadowed, you might want to consider you only exist within pages of a novel.

I don’t think ‘cursed with rather extraordinary bad luck’ is a helpful ability, and since I can’t actively control or redirect it, I’d like to trade it for something more useful, like telekinesis.

9- You never cry.  You’ve tried to, but you just can’t cry.  You can REMEMBER crying, but that’s probably back history.  Main characters don’t cry, because then the reader will have to.

This doesn’t apply to me; I cry because crying has the biological function of getting stress hormones out of your system. I forget where I read that, but it works, at least in my case. Now if only I didn’t end up being unable to breathe through a clogged nose, so I could have a good proper cry, that would be rather appreciated, but see point 1.

10 – You don’t remember some of the more exciting episodes in your life, or not in detail, particularly if they involve more than three people.  This is because crowd scenes are very hard to write, but easier to summarize.

Also doesn’t apply. And, while I don’t know if this is true for other folks, bullet time is apparently a biological adaptation on perception.

BONUS: if you keep finding people who were murdered in bizarre ways, you’re not the main character of a novel.  You’re an amnesiac mass murderer.

Apparently I found a dead body floating in Manila Bay when I was three years old, and reported this to my father in the way only a three-year old addicted to watching documentaries could: in a disturbingly calm fashion, and pointing out that the guy wasn’t breathing or moving to boot. I’ve been around a few too many human dead bodies; at least for a homebound suburban housewife in Australia who hasn’t been in an active war zone.

 

That’s a rather disturbing amount of tickboxes there. Yee.

 

*No, not really serious. At times though we do wonder who the fuck is writing the plot, and how the hell do we find that person so we can introduce said being to the joys of irukanji syndrome.