a little more juju

Character’s Accomplishments

Oooh, I have the perfect character for this one! Leah Kwasny was actually one of the first characters I developed for Paradiso – right after Fan, actually – and man, is this woman a force to be reckoned with. She knew exactly who she wanted to be when she was a child; beginning with staging elaborate newscasts for her family members, Leah’s goal was to become a telejournalist. Even in elementary school, she would go around to her classmates and interview them for her self-created news show, Leah Says, and she joined the journalism club in high school, eventually running it in Year 11. By the time she was in college studying journalism, she had already been working for one of Sydney, Australia’s news organizations for two years, starting as a filing clerk in the mail room right after graduation from high school. While in college, she also was heavily involved with the university’s student-run paper, where she covered local politics. She even won the John B. Fairfax Award for a series of stories she aired regarding immigrant experiences. This got her the opportunity to choose basically any news company she wanted. Instead of going with a safer choice, like staying on Earth, Leah decided to accept a job with Reuters covering off-planet news, which took her as far out as the colonies on the moons of Saturn. She became well-known for her tenacity in interviews and covering subjects like strikes and alternative political movements. It was her series on Martian independence that caught the eye of Paradiso News, which immediately offered her a position on the space station.

There, she was assigned primarily to sociopolitical stories, but she was constantly searching for other topics to cover, earning her a reputation of being somewhat of a rebel against the powers-that-be at the news station. That didn’t stop her from getting some of the most prominent stories of the day, although some say she might have been given special treatment …