Trying to find my inner gold digger

Hi all:

I'm trying to get back into the Daughters Of Men work-in-progress again after a brief hiatus away from it.

I was so into thinking about the male motivation/issues in the story that I wasn't really exploring in a truly deep way the motivation of my female character.

I suspect now I have to get in touch with my inner gold-digger. It seems to me that women growing up in a bereft culture where there are men with power and men without....well, these women would see the overseers as sugar-daddies. This connects in some ways to my love of reality love-match TV shows like Flavor Flav.

I suspect that's what much of those competition shows are about. They show the need women in this culture have for good men, rich men, beautiful men, powerful men, researched men. Most of those girls were poor and in need and the show was their way of getting money...and fame...even in some small fading hip-hop hipster kind of way.

I have to decide if Ellie, main character in DOM, is needy enough to want one of these guys ...secretly. Or maybe she's a user. And even if she's not a user, she might very well be so oppressed by all the sorrows and responsibilities of life that she finds a part of herself that actually needs a relationship with a paranormal sugar daddy.

The problem is I have to decide if she is like me or not. Satha was pretty much who I would be if I were in that situation. Now I have to decide how noble a character Ellie will have to be. Or rather, how noble a character I would be if I were in Ellie's situation.

The true glory and the true blessing of Josh my main human male character is that he's human. The true horror and the true curse of Josh is that he's human.

An inhuman overseer has power, wealth (presumably), the power to heal, the power to understand everything going on inside a woman's mind. And all they want is love. A real guy can't stand up to that.

Women want real guys who happen to be super-human.

I want to find the real Ellie. Not an Ellie "feminists" or "Christians" or "blacks" or "good girls" or "bad girls" would like. I want to find the real Ellie who will make DOM work. And she probably is not a "pure" user. But an impure one. One with a mix of need and desires and insecurities.

-C