Yousef Nazari â 38 â Novelist â Owner of The Lakeside Inn
Below the cut is some quick background on Yousef. Feel free to reach out to me any time regarding potential plots and connections. I would love to write with you.Â
TW: Drowning
I. Basics
Name: Yousef Nazari Gender/Pro-Nouns: Cisgender Male (He/Him/His) Birthday & Age: July 7, 1984 Place of Birth: Middlesex, New Jersey Current residence: The Lake Houses Occupation: Novelist & Co-Owner of The Lakeside Inn Faceclaim: Keon Alexander Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Positive Traits: Sentimental, Creative, Witty, Endearing Negative Traits: Eccentric, Reclusive, Melancholic, SuperstitiousÂ
II. Stats
Height: 5âČ8âł Eyes: Brown Hair: Black MBTI: INFP Alignment: Chaotic Good
III. Background
Yousef Nazari grew up in suburban New Jersey with four older sisters. He, like the house in which he was raised, was small and unassumingâa little boy who took many years to really grow into himself. His parents worked for the same company, selling or performing maintenance on fire protection products: extinguishers, alarms, and the like. As a child, Yousef himself found this fact dreadfully dull, especially because a classmate had an uncle who appeared on a soap opera once. But while not exactly glamorous, Yousefâs own childhood was warm, marked by the occasional vacation, by regular prayer, and by enough chores to foster a sense of duty without being overwhelming.
Still, Yousef himself would find ways to shirk them. Too active, too imaginative, too prone to running away with himself, he preferred games of pretend. Brooms became swords and noxious cleaning chemicals became secret potions. He stole his siblingsâ things without really meaning to and forgot bits of himself, shoes, socks, mittens, in the park too often. He once cried upon seeing a woman roll over an ant-hill with her baby carriage.
At school, he did well but had few friends. Due to his then slight size, Yousef found himself often an easy target for bigger kids looking to test their limits. But he found a niche among likeminded students: chess club, reading club, a secret nature club that was really just about stuffing oneâs pockets with leaves and sticks. In the fifth grade, his essay on good citizenship won a regional award, which led to a photograph in the local tribune and a printer paper certificate to be forever framed in his parentsâ living room.
With his fatherâs prodding, Yousef eventually emerged into adulthood and attended community college to study computers, a topic for which he did not particularly care. Still, upon completing his two-year degree, he transferred to a nearby university to continue his studies. At some point, he took an additional concentration in accounting, another topic for which he did not really care. And on a whim, then, turning back as if he simply had to before the accountant bridge had been crossed, Yousef would drop out just a handful of credits short of graduation.
His family did not take this well, and he himself really had no plan on what to do next. Still, with an associateâs degree already under his belt, a few online certification courses got him steady work with the county governmentâs IT department, where he would work for nearly a decade fixing computers, updating databases, and telling people to reset their routers.
Despite his childhood successes with it, Yousef did not really take up writing as a hobby until this time. He penned a few columns for the paper and joined a handful of fiction workshops at local community centers. For a few years, he ran a semi-successful online blog about New Jersey wildlife that eventually became exclusively about cryptids following a more entertaining series on the Jersey Devil.Â
The next flight of fancy came six years ago, when, having been unable to finish a book up to that point, Yousef decided he really ought to write one. Ending his lease and taking a sabbatical from his job, he thus made his way to Claybourne, where he spent a winter at The Lakeside Inn and got to know some of the people around town as the funny guest who had paid to stay through much of the off-season.Â
A Boy Drowned Last Night by Y. Nazari was a surprising hit. A thick, frightening novel, the sort of thing a person buys in a grocery store or airport, it told the story of a small snow-covered town consumed by a great evil sleeping at the bottom of its frozen lake.
Something of an overnight success, then, Yousef did a few press tours and a handful of serious television appearances. When he learned through the grapevine that the inn was going to be sold, he once again, on a whim, swooped in to use his newfound fortune to buy up the property, his muse, lest some developer tear it down.
Old houses have many stories, he knows, and not just the floors. Today, he lives permanently in-town, running the hotel and working on his second book, still unfinished. He publishes the occasional short horror tale in an anthology or magazine, but seems content to live off waning royalties and what he makes from lodging visitors. His agent would like him to sell his movie rights, but he has refused, despite the financial boon doing so would prove.
