Category Archives: Characters

Senta and the Steel Dragon: Characters

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As I’ve been working on a Senta and the Steel Dragon Encyclopedia, I’ve been reexamining my characters in that book series.  There are a lot of them– literally hundred.  The important characters, by design, fit nicely into triangles– sets of three characters that work push and pull against each other.  Some triangles strengthen each corner and some (love triangles, in particular) threaten to tear apart.  Here are some of the ways the characters fit together.

Senta, Zurfina, Bessemer: Zurfina is guardian to both Senta and Bessemer, though she seems devoted more to one than the other.  Senta and Bessemer have an extremely strong bond, as they must since they are the title characters of the series.

Iolanthe, Terrence, Augustus: The three Dechantagne siblings, who each have very different feelings toward their brothers and sister.

Iolanthe, Terrence, Yuah: Iolanthe and Yuah (her dressing maid) have a very strained relationship, and Terrence is often the straining point.  He is the only man Iolanthe respects, and the one Yuah desperately loves.  He has a sort of ambivalent love for them both.

Yuah, Zeah, Egeria: Zeah and his daughter Yuah are very close, and the addition of Egeria as Zeah’s love interest puts the two very different women in a sort of admire/fear relationship.

Iolanthe, Calliere, Staff: Iolanthe and her two love interests.

Hero, Honor, Hertzel: Three siblings escaping a police state to arrive in a new and very different world.

Senta, Graham, Saba: All three of these characters grow up together and each is friends with the other two, though in different intensities.

Zurfina, Kesi, Labrith: The two wizards who both want Zurfina’s power, and whom she dismisses as not worth her interest.

Terrence, Yuah, Pantagria: Terrence and the two women he loves– one real and one not so much.

Some of these relationships fall within the confines of one book, while others continue throughout the series.  And there are about 300 more characters, so I could point out about 900 more triangles.

Update: Love and the Darkness

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Love and the DarknessI’m a little over halfway through the draft of Love and the Darkness.  That means that there are less than ten thousand words left, since it is plotted out at 20,000.  I’m finding it harder and harder to write right now, and it’s not because of this particular story.  It’s because school is getting closer and closer– two more days off as I write this.  Hopefully by the time you read this though,  I will have finished those 10K words and have it on the release schedule.

When the book is ready, there will be a release date several weeks after the announcement.  I’ll be using Smashwords’ new preorder system.  That will let me get it all arranged and yet give me time enough make sure that it is properly finished.  I was really upset with myself about His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue.  I was in such a hurry to get it out that I sent it with errors.  I’m not going to let that happen again.  Professionalism– that’s my new watchword this year for school and its going to be the same with my writing.  Readers deserve nothing less.

Unlike my other stories, Love and the Darkness has essentially one main character.  This is at the same time easier and more difficult to write.  You can stay in the mind of one character, which is nice.  But characters can get inside your head too and when that happens, it’s nice to be able to switch to a different one.  My character in Love and the Darkness is Charles Bentley Howard.  He’s sort of a wealthy, nerdy character, and so his first name is a tip of the hat to Charles Dexter Ward, the H.P. Lovecraft character, though this is not really a Lovecraftian horror story.

All the characters in Love and the Darkness either interact with Charles Bentley Howard, or they are related to him– or both.  There are several female characters, and I have had trouble with their names from the beginning.  I have already changed several of them and I don’t think I have the final versions yet.  Whatever they finally end up, watch this space for a release announcement.  As I mentioned before, Love and the Darkness will be a free ebook.

Life and Art: Knee Edition

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For those of you reading His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue (and for those who haven’t yet) a part of the plot is Mike injuring his knee and the associated doctor’s visits.  Most of that comes right from real life.  Mike is in fact, the most like me of any of my characters– we’re both schoolteachers, about the same age (he was older than me when we started, but I’m catching up), overweight (though Mike has lost his extra pounds), and generally obnoxious.  So, many little elements in all three books come from my own life.

About a year and a half ago, I injured my knee in a very similar way to how Mike injures his.  I went through the whole process of seeing doctor after doctor, and like Mike, was almost walking again by the time the bone guy saw me.  Unlike Mike, I had the surgery to “fix” my leg.  I came out of that almost completely unable to walk.  After physical therapy, I was better and I did continue to improve, but I had continual problems with my knee swelling and locking up.  I had injections of steroids, draining of fluids, etc, and through it all my doctor seemed to think I should just get up and dance my way out the door.

Finally I went to another doctor.  He said my knee was totally shot– bone on bone– no cartilage left.  I would probably need a knee replacement in the near future.  He gave me a series of injections that were supposed to lubricate the spaces between the bones and act like a buffer.  It took several weeks to get the injections and then there was a wait of six weeks for them to take full effect.  But they worked.  My knee wasn’t great, but it felt a whole lot better.  That lasted for six weeks.  Now it’s back to where it was before those injections.  This has been really depressing.

Well, I’m done with doctors.  I’ll be royally damned if I ever let one open up my knee again.  I’ve decided the best thing I can do is to build up my leg muscles.  Plus I really need to exercise.  I was several months into a good exercise program when I hurt my knee and haven’t done much of anything since.  So today, I ordered an exercise bike.  The bike is about the only thing I can do in which my knee doesn’t lock up.  I got one small enough to fit in my den, so I can hop on it anytime I want.  Of course I still have the main problem that I had in the first place.  Unlike Mike, I don’t have a robot to take care of me.

Senta and the God of the Sky?

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The Sorceress and her Lovers

I’ve been thinking about the next Senta book.  All right, I’ve even got a few chapters written, though I’m trying to get Patience done before I get sidetracked.  But I’ve been thinking about the series name.

As you know, if you’re reading this, Senta and the Steel Dragon is a five book series (plus a novella book 0).  It tells the story of Senta Bly, a girl who grows up to be a powerful sorceress and the steel dragon who grows up to be a powerful… you know, dragon.

I’ve plotted out a new series of five books.  I’m still playing with the individual titles, but the first will be The Sorceress and her Lovers.  This new series tells about the next phase of both Senta’s and the steel dragon’s lives.  Therefore I came up with the series title Senta and the God of the Sky.  I’ve been having second thoughts about the title though, not because it’s not a good or appropriate title, but because readers might be more likely to read the book if I just made it Senta and the Steel Dragon Book 6.

So what do you think?

Brechalon Notes

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Brechalon: Nils Chapman & Karl Drury

While I was reading through Brechalon, I began updating the (ironically incomplete) complete list of characters from Senta and the Steel Dragon.  I included every character with a name and in Brechalon, came up with 65 people.  Fifteen are only mentioned, usually because they are long-dead historical figures.

What surprised me is that only only five of the 50 appearing characters get killed in the course of this book.  Fear not.  Many others get killed in later volumes.

There are a few characters who appear only in book 0, and that seems like sort of a waste.  I think I might resurrect a few in The Sorceress and her Lovers.  I’ve already pulled several lizzies, that I had never intended to use again, from earlier books.  I like to bring characters back like that.  It seems to me to add a little realism to the story, especially when you have a relatively limited setting, like a colony across the sea from the rest of the civilized world.

So what about my characters?

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I’ve been talking about TV characters and how you have to have a character relatable to the audience.  So how does that work in my own writing and am I practicing what I preach?  Well, I try to.

In Senta and the Steel Dragon, I’ve got literally dozens of characters and quite a few from whose eyes we see the world.

Senta, Saba, Terrence, Yuah, Radley Staff, Cissy, Zeah– we see the world and the other characters form their eyes.  They all tend to be pretty normal.  Terrence is maybe the least normal of the group.  Heroic and handsome, but a drug addict.  I needed to see the world through his eyes in order to show the world on the other side of the drug, but once I did that, he became much less central to the story.

On the other hand, some of the major characters in the story– notably Bessemer the Steel Dragon and the Sorceress Zurfina are so out there that it would be hard to identify with them as a reader… probably more so with Zurfina.  Bessemer is pretty normal, other than being a dragon.  But Zurfina is unique.

TV Characters Part 2

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I was talking about TV characters and how they have to be relatable for the audience.  I mentioned Seinfeld.  I think a much better 80s show was Friends.  All the characters had their own quirks, but they all had redeeming features that we could fall in love with.  Ross was a nerd, but his (mostly unrequited) devotion to Rachel made him somebody that we could root for.  Chandlers snideness, Monica’s obsessiveness, Joey’s obliviousness, Phoebe’s weirdness, and Rachel’s self-centeredness could all be looked over because we like the characters.

I also said you could take characters to the extreme, if you have at least one character the audience can view the others through.  Think back to the 60s, and the Andy Griffith show.  Most of those characters were completely wacko, but we could always enjoy them by looking through Andy’s exasperated eyes.  That’s why The Andy Griffith Show is timeless and hardly anyone remembers Mayberry RFD (the same show without Andy).  A similar methodology is the show Two and a Half Men.  Originally the audience could enjoy Charlie by viewing him through Allen’s relatively normal eyes.  Unfortunately, Allen has become such a caricature himself, that it is no longer possible.  I think the show’s producers were lucky that Charlie Sheen left when they did, so that they could bring the character of Walden in to be the “new normal.”

Tesla’s Stepdaughters Casting Call

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Speaking of casting movies from my books, I’ve always thought that if they made a Tesla’s Stepdaughters movie, they should cast some real rock stars as The Ladybugs.

I think that Lykke Li would probably make a good Ep!phanee.  First, she has a slightly pixy-ish quality that works with that character.  Second, she is Swedish, and Ep!phanee is a Swedish-American and retains a not-quite-American accent.  Finally, Ep!phanee is described as having an unusual slightly annoying speaking voice (although she has a huge vocal range when singing).  I always thought of Bjork’s voice when I was writing Ep!phanee.  If you listen to Lykke Li’s song “Let if Fall” (which I really like) you can get a sense of an unusual voice.  Also that song is a little unusual– not quite mainstream– which is just the kind of thing that Ep!phanee did in her solo albums.

His Robot Girlfriend Casting Call

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We’ve talked about casting actors to play the characters in my books before.  I’ve had all kinds of suggestions for who could play Patience, but I saw Emmy Rossum in the preview for Beautiful Creatures and knew immediately that she would be my new choice.  She looks like how I imagine Patience, and that is because she looks quite a bit like the young lady that I used as a model when I was writing His Robot Girlfriend.  When I think about Patience, I see the tall forehead, the big eyes, and the wide mouth.  That doesn’t sound all that attractive when I say it like that, but you can see that they all go together to make an altogether beautiful woman.  Imagine my surprise when after looking up her name on IMDB, I found out that she is also a singer and I had a couple of her songs in my “Current Faves” playlist the whole time.

Patience is a Virtue: Ryan

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His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue

Ryan is a new character in this book.  He becomes an unlikely companion to Mike– unlikely because the two of them are really nothing alike.  Ryan is, or rather was, an outgoing boisterous fellow, and is a car salesman.  Recently his life has been turned upside down with the discovery that his wife was cheating on him and his subsequent divorce.

I was thinking about my stories the other day, and realized that I had numerous stories going on that all had cheating wives in them.  I don’t know why that’s on my mind, as my wife is as faithful as a Barsoomian calot.  I suppose it’s something that just tends to be on a man’s mind at a certain time in his life– a sort of evolutionary imperative, if you will.  But I have a cheating wife here, one in 82 Eridani, and one in Kanana the Jungle Girl (currently in limbo).  At least two of them will see the light of publication this year.