Also early on the scene in Starling is Carly. Alex at first registers her mostly as Liam’s girlfriend who stops by the set every week or so just to say hi. Frankly, he’s a little scared of her, which is probably reasonable. After all, she lives in L.A., is consistently employed doing sound editing for commercials, and is remarkably unperturbed by kind of weird life.  Besides, Victor respects her as a peer as far as competence and relationship management go.

She’s also Paul’s best friend thanks to a shared college experience; once he and Alex start dating she quickly adopts Alex into the circle of people she would really like to stay alive, happy, and vaguely functional.  When her people are in danger of failing at that task she has a habit of pointing it out in a manner that is both uncomfortably direct and oddly blase.

We’ve talked before about how the Love in Los Angeles series touches on every letter of the LGBTQ (plus a few more) at some point. It also contains a strong M/F romance. Carly and Liam are that romance, but Carly isn’t just Liam’s girlfriend, no matter how much time she has to spend managing how they conduct their relationship in public and in private.

Carly deals with the challenges of being TV star Liam Campbell’s girlfriend by ruthlessly separating her private life from Liam’s public one. She has her own goals, group of friends, and network of relationships. She is ambitious and loves what she does, and she has no interest in any sort of in-front-of-the-public life, although she does enjoy attending events with Liam from time to time, because, as she likes to tell Paul during their shark-themed movie nights, they do look really fucking hot together.

Because of where the gravitational center of Starling rests, Carly never gets as much page time as we want to give her.  We hope that people will fall for her as hard as we have, as we definitely have a Carly-centric novella on our to-do list.