Who was your first literary crush or character you wanted to be friends with? What drew you to them?
I'm not sure I've ever really had a crush on a literary character. My early exposure to vampires like Lestat certainly informed what I find attractive (without having much bearing on my real life). And I remember loving Renzo Leoni from A Thread of Grace in a way that made me wish he were real. But when I was first reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels and a friend at the time enthused about my meeting a character because he was "so hot" I was a little confused. I'm not great at visualizing book characters (or settings) unless there's a lot of detail, and there wasn't much in this case.
I guess there's a difference between thinking "I want Katniss to choose Peeta" and "I would choose Peeta". Even when I was writing fanfic, my self-insert wish fulfillment was reserved for TV characters. They loomed a bit larger in my imagination. (For me Lestat was initially an extension of Spike.)
But man did I want to be a member of the baby-sitters club. I could never fully map myself onto any single character. I had Mary-Anne's shyness, Stacey's math abilities, and Jessi's love of dance. I was an amalgam of all of them, and therefore sure that I would fit right in with them. I also loved the structure of their friendship - the frequent (though brief) meetings and the shared interest of babysitting.
My friends and I talked about starting a babysitters club of our own, but it wasn't meant to be. We couldn't meet regularly, and I could never quite figure out how to get my CPR certification that would make me hire-able to people outside my family. But I always had those books and the friends in them that I could revisit time and time again, until I finally outgrew them.
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