Sometimes my characters try to talk me into some shady tings. Well. Not all of them. Just one – I bet you can even guess which one it is. I can’t say that he’s doing it out of malice. No, his intentions are good. Because of this one very loud, very insistent voice in my head, I’ve spent a whole year dispensing terrible parenting advice (that even made it into its own illustrated guide- check it out under the shop tab). Then, after that was another year of general life advice that probably shouldn’t be followed ever. This time, Azra wanted me to tackle dating and love advice. Which, at the outset, sounded hilarious. Dating advice from a deranged, perpetual bachelor angel? There was no way it wasn’t going to be comical.
The intent was to let him loose on a dating app, see what happened, and then record the events in a blog. Genius, right?
That’s what I thought too. So, I spent an entire evening creating an OKCupid account for my imaginary friend (because, really. What other dating app would an angel use?). I answered HUNDREDS of questions and made his profile as obviously fake as I could. The pictures of “Azra” that I posted were far off surfer shots and none had discernable faces. I even created an e-mail account for my angel.
With everything in place and a definitive answer for any random question that app could throw at me (and believe me, there were some REALLY random questions) I let Azra loose on OKCupid.
Well, that is, until Azra’s profile started getting a LOT of attention. Despite the fact that I made it as blatantly fake as I could, people didn’t seem to care. They wanted to get to know this angel. When I saw the numbers and got a few messages from lonely people asking to meet up with my character that has, until now, lived only in my head and in my books, I realized that I couldn’t go through with any of this.
Why, you may ask? Well, it’s simple. It’s all about the human element. It’s one thing to distribute bad advice and make a joke out of it, but it’s a completely other thing when there are real people involved who are potentially putting their hearts and minds on the line.
I simply can’t catfish someone for the sake of a humorous blog. I just won’t. It’s not right and I don’t think I want to be that kind of a person. The world is hard enough without people catching emotions for a fictional character on a dating site.
I guess Azra and I will have to come up with a different idea for his continuing blog series. If you have a suggestion, let me know in the comments.
Until next time, be more kind.
Kira + Azra