Tokyo Writers' Salon - Meet Joan

From time to time I post stuff that I've written when I go to the (monthly) Tokyo Writers' salon. The group welcomes, works with, and encourages all genres and types of writing, but personally I always choose to do non-fiction. That's what I'm most comfortable with and generally interested in producing. At last weeks' meeting, however, the organizer gave us an exercise wherein we had to create a character. We had to write a character and then we had to do something with it, so here is my attempt at fiction:

Joan, 31
brown eyes
lives alone in a 3 bedroom house
her car is not fuel efficient
she has a boyfriend of 2 years that she's hoping will become a fiancé
she's ok with having kids at a late age, say 37 or 38 cause she believes in medicine
her vacations alternate between visiting family and going somewhere warm
she prefers to relax over sightseeing
she's ok reading books about faraway places and cultures, she doesn't feel the need to go there.

The directions: imagine a coat. Imagine the pocket of the coat. Imagine what's in the pocket. (your character is being followed)

Joan has a nice coat. Stylish but not trendy. Expensive but not flashy. Boring, some might say. Classic, say others. The inside of the coast has a convenient pocket. Joan likes to put relevant pieces of paper there when she's running errands. I'm not sure what is in there right now because Joan is running many errands today. But I do know that Joan is being followed.

She doesn't notice. She's quietly chiding herself for the resurgence of one of her many imperfections. An imprefection that her boyfriend would dismiss, as would and did anybody else who knew her because she was a very capable and accomplished woman. But the imperfections bothered her, and in those moments her slight imperfections dwarfed the world.

Joan was going nowhere special. Nowhere out of the ordinary. She wasn't afraid because she was comfortable living in a city. Completely comfortable - not like those other people who tell their families elsewhere that the city is 'so safe', but then are too scared to ride the bus alone after dark. No, Joan wasn't scared today, but she should have been. And had she known she was being followed she would have been. She wasn't scared of the city or the people in it, but she was scared of one person. If she knew she was being folllowed she would have been scared, but she would also have the plan.

She has a plan. She was given a plan, because she also has secrets.