It's a very strange thing, creating characters. Once they've started creeping into your head, you start seeing them in the outside world, too...

I'm on my laptop, so my music is handled by Songbird. (Which, btw, is AWESOME. Does pretty much everything I normally need iTunes to do, only, runs on Linux as well.) I was poking at the bottom frame, where there's the usual artist info...but there's also a running photo stream. Entertaining. I was listening to a j-rock band, Buck-Tick, who have this song "ROMANCE -Incubo-" that I totally love (especially when I'm writing Phistos). I watched the photo stream for a minute.

And then---

I saw Luce.



I have a good bit of trouble cementing my characters enough to draw them, though the image is clearer all the time. Luce took me a bit, but I've leaned toward giving him a Japanese look. Meres is the easiest to draw, Mephisto is (no surprise) also easy. Veri is *insanely* clear in my head, yet very, very difficult to get right on paper. Luce... I can see his silhouette much more clearly than his features, most days. But this... this is pretty darn close.

A bit annoying to see him, actually, I'm currently avoiding him. I have a scene that should be from his point of view, but he's very intimidating for me to write, so I keep dodging it. ^^;


I have wiped out a character in the novel - Carey is no more! Carey and Adir/Adrian were pretty much the same person anyway, the only reason they both existed was so that they could argue with each other. So, now Adir argues with Nila, and took on Carey's relationships. Which culls a good bit of extra fluff out of the story. It has - finally - hit me that having eight main characters whose points of view I'm alternating between is a bit much. That's not even touching the periphery characters... who you don't really need to keep track of, anytime you see Claude someone mentions his paintings, anytime you see Mark it's pretty damn clear he's a priest, etc. So, Carey is totally gone, and I'm definitely not writing Nila's point of view, which I'd always neglected anyway because I didn't have anything interesting to say from his perspective.

I sat down and tried mapping out the relationships between my characters, and discovered I have, in fact, written a soap opera. I've moved large chunks of the story around in my binder like twice in the past twenty-four hours. And I found a new bonus to the Harper's Bazaar subscription my mom got me - fashionable foreign terminology!!! Azal is a language person, I realized he needs to throw random bits of other languages into his speech, like, obsessively. I took Spanish. Spanish is not a very Phisto language. So, in flipping through maybe two issues of an artsy fashion magazine - poof! A whole page of foreign phrases! Most of them French, and a few of which I still have to look up myself. (As Tom suggested, though, I really need some more obscure things, too. Old languages, Latin and Hebrew and things, I'd already planned on, but he pointed out that obscure things like, oh, Somalian, would be great.) Anyone has anything to throw at me, I'd appreciate it!

...I'm actually dodging Azal at the moment, too, I'm having trouble sorting out his particular voice. Meres, I've got, he's very artsy and a lot like me. (Apart from, y'know, the murdering people thing. His temper's a bit worse than mine.) Mephisto, I've got, obviously, I've been writing him for years. Veri is whiny. Adir is a scheming little aristocratic playboy, probably the most human. Luce gets very philosophical, he's full of lofty one-liners and abstracted psychology. Azal, I understand his motivations and his thought processes, but he sounds too much like Meres in places, and like Mephisto and Luce in others. Part of me wonders if I shouldn't cull him out as well, applying bits of his persona to others... but I think he's staying. Part of what makes him Azal, I could see Meres being, but... I think Meres' core is his love for Veri, I'd rather focus on that with him. Azal gets to be obsessive over the past they can't entirely remember. <3


In other news... next week is my vacation, YAY!!! Saturday after work, Tom and I are driving to Long Island. We'll stay with his dad a day or so there, then the three of us are heading to DC/Maryland, for a few days of museum-ing and coastal seafood. From there, swinging by North Carolina to stay with Tom's grandmother for a few days. Then... actually I think it's back to Long Island, since we're taking Tom's dad's car most of the trip, then back home again. Lots of driving, but that's no problem, I enjoy long spurts of gazing out the window, and Tom and his dad enjoy the prolonged conversation time, as well as listening to books and music and whatever. (That, and maybe I can make some progress on the gazillions of half-finished crochet projects I have laying around here...)

For something different, I bought a bottle of lime-flavored vodka. I think it is delicious. Tom thinks I'm insane. (Yes I am drinking it in SMALL quantities! I bought us some shot glasses at work a few weeks ago, so as to avoid the rum-mistake again.)

I have finally talked Tom into writing a novel, bwahahahahahaha. Of course, his approach to writing and mine couldn't be more different, but that just makes it interesting. He wants to have his whole thing plotted out before he starts in, whereas once I've got a character and/or a scene in my head, I plunge right in and see what happens. I really love the plot that developed out of Amaranthus, and I'm having ridiculous amounts of fun now in fleshing it out and making it all fit together snugly. Tom has a main character that I can tell already he really loves, and a general idea for a setting (that I'm not sure how much he's attached to), but he hasn't sorted out the plotline yet. A rougish gambler who probably has some spying in his past, and a world owned by corporations. Very manly, ne?

And then there's me, writing about fallen angels and social intrigues and the occult in Oscar Wilde's London. With copious amounts of pretty boys.