Sometimes characters come to life in my head.

That's nothing new. You've been hearing me talk about that for years, now -- the assorted denizens of my head and their trials and tribulations. I've even, very rarely, actually just written snippets of fiction here instead of a standard journal entry, because things have refused to leave my head long enough to get my thoughts in order.

The characters typically come in three or four versions, as I revise their stories. There have been some five incarnations of Zoya. I doubt the first would would even recognize the most recent. Kevil's had a couple of versions now, and I almost had a second version of Tarri, but that story doesn't want to be told, so it's still slowly crystalizing in the back of my head. But it's there. Waiting.

I have three versions of Dawn, now. Plus a sort of stepchild version who actually lives in K.T.'s head, but that one doesn't talk to me. It's Dawn who's been living close to the surface lately, probably because I went and created a Warcraft version of Dawn to play.

It's kind of funny to push all the incarnations of a character together, to reduce them to their least common denominators and figure out what the soul of the character is. Dawn, for instance, is an exploration of desperation and self-contempt; he escaped a childhood filled with the worst sort of poverty and violence only by sheer luck, and it still haunts him, mostly because he still hasn't quite convinced himself that he deserves to have escaped.

His Warcraft incarnation has a much toned-down history, mostly because there are minors in the game and guild, but it's still pretty shockingly horrible, and I'm still frequently surprised at how often his frustration and temper -- mostly born out of self-loathing -- affect me.

Anyway, I'd written a novella, or maybe a short novel, with one incarnation of him. I finished it back in the summer. I just re-read it, last week and yesterday, making notes for myself of things that don't work and such, and it's... not remotely publishable. But most of its problems are because of the plot, because I wasn't thinking things through. And because the focus shifted halfway through and I didn't go back to fix it in the beginning.

And I had an idea for expanding the plot somewhat that might even manage to extend it to full novel length. But I was pleasantly surprised at most of the writing. There were relatively few glaringly horrible bits.

I'm feeling pretty good about that. And just for today, so is Dawn.

--Liz