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Looking back this story has been lying around since at least August 2018. "This story" meaning the basic idea that a group of frats transforms a housemate into his target of racism. Then, as often is the case, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what that looked like. Unfortunately most of the hits I found were too old, too buff, too happy, too light-skinned, too much of a pose. I felt a drunken frat caricature should at least have really dark skin, big nose, and big lips.

I mean, this guy is ticks lots of the boxes, but he is way too buff, old, and completely the wrong vibe.

This was one I considered using, but still too far off the mark

This was perhaps more in line with the vibe I was going for.

In the end I collected about 40 possible photos and then put the story on the shelf. I have too many ideas and drafts anyway, so no point in going after something that I don't feel for right at that moment. Then a year later I found this really amazing photo that captured a lot of the energy I was looking for, but it already had a pretty good story attached to it about using racial transformations to game the University admissions. Given the stories in the news it turned out to be prescient (or not, I don't have the patience to look through Tumblr's horrid system to find the original publishing date of the story). I went ahead and published my own version of that story, with that photo. It prompted me to do some more image searches, but yielded mostly the same photos again.

Then in November I found the photo I ultimately decided to go with in some stream somewhere. I don't remember where. That finally pushed me to write the first scene of the story, after some more image searches of course.

As I began writing the breakfast scene I was starting to realize I need to set up the characters more properly to keep them apart, and left the whole thing for several months again. After rereading it I decided to not be bothered too much about who said what, as in most cases it doesn't matter. My constant battle against dialogue typography. Anywhere, I ended up with a very simple character sheet that basically just said that apart from Joe and the narrator we had Steve as a jock and the one who thought it would be funny to hypnotize someone to get horny, Mateo the Latino, Sam with rich parents, and Marcus, laid back and tech-savvy.

As I wrote already in my comments for the Black Story I've tried to find ways to write about race change for a while. The big problem is I feel I know too little to do it justice. In this story however I'm just using other white people's ideas of what is black, so any ignorance I have I can transfer to the characters in the story without feeling like cheating.

I got a question from someone who often helps me dig up illustrations on what he looked like before the transformation. I told him to give me a suggestion and he came back with this, which I think could work.