ME = MY CHARACTER

by Linda Robertson

While the fabulous Ms. Jeffe is off sharing her fabulosity at a conference, (have fun and have a safe return!!) I'm taking over the Sunday post this week, and she gets to be the Hump-day word-whore.

"MWAHAHAHAHAAHA!!!!! The power! The ultimate power of the first post!"

"ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR!"

*sees a Thin Mint cookie has been slid to me by worried friends*

"Oh look, a cookie...." (nom nom nom)

Okay. What were we talking about? This week's post. Yeah. It's about what characters are most and least like us authors that create them.

Hmmm. A lot of my characters are nothing like me, but my main character, PERSEPHONE ALCMEDI, is like me in many ways.

1.) ME-People often call me Red. But that's because my hair is red.

ALIKE-Johnny calls Seph "Red." That's because she's the Red Riding Hood to his Big Bad Wolf.

DIFFERENT-Seph's hair is dark brown. But then hers is natural, too. Ha!

2.) ME-I'm a sassy, reliable chick who may be a little naive, but is willing to take risks, and will fight hard to defend family and friends.

ALIKE-Persephone is a sassy, reliable chick who may be a little naive, but is willing to take risks, and will fight hard for her family and friends.

DIFFERENT-Seph gets to include vampires and werewolves--some of them high ranking or even royalty--in her list of friends. While I've known some bloodsuckers, some dogs and some royal bitches, in general my friends are just really cool normal folk.

3.) ME-I love John William Waterhouse art, write books and work at a factory. I have my own home and a big black dog.

ALIKE-Seph loves John William Waterhouse art, writes a newspaper column and rents out the farmland she owns for income. She has her own home and a big black dog.

DIFFERENT-Seph has several each of: dragons, unicorns, phoenixes and griffons, as well as a vampire Beholder to tend them and vampire Offerlings as her personal body guards. I have no 'nanny' and I don't need bodyguards, but I do have /nearly/ a basketball team worth of boys. And their laundry.

4.) ME-I'm pagan. It ain't always easy. People have misconceptions. I detest the fakers.

ALIKE-She's pagan. It ain't always easy. People have misconceptions. She detests the fakers.

DIFFERENT-Seph has the fictitious advantage of having the Hollywood CGI-type special effects in her spell work, as well as the immediacy of sorcery. I have reality.

OTHER CHARACTERS. I think there's pieces of me in other characters as well. I gave my fun-loving, dirty-minded guitarist self to JOHNNY NEWMAN, and I gave my ridiculous love of big, old words and my desire for control to MENESSOS. 'Desire for control' sounds ominous, but in the real world things you can't control happen all the time. With Menessos, as an author, I have the option to use him to fix things for Seph, or...I can use Seph to teach him how that control can sometimes be bigger evil.

A real life example: A simple family vacation...it includes the precarious risk of trusting the GPS and ending up, at night, on a one-lane gravel road that runs between two lakes--with a modest eighteen inches to spare on either side--only to have about a dozen folks on foot come walking down the hill on the far side with wearing miner's helmets with the lights on. If they'd had pitchforks, I might have felt it necessary to run them over for safety sake, y'know? But they didn't. They were frog-gigging.

Creepy enough? How about adding in the fact that the road that took us away from there was--I shit you not--Cemetery Road.

Had we not had that little mis-adventure amid our journey, we wouldn't have that wacky memory and all the laughs we've had about it since.

As authors we are told to write what we know, and I guess we know ourselves, and by placing little pieces of ourselves into these characters, we get to go on sweeping adventures with the mayhem plotted out and the danger pre-planned. Unlike real life. :-D

I'm so glad and grateful for the readers who've elected to go on those adventures with me.