My Favourite Character

Since I wrote my first book, I've created a lot of characters. Aside from the ensemble of a dozen or so characters in What Lurks Through the Mirror, I've had characters from a sequel, and several planned sequels, the cast of Meet Sam, of Geneticide, or Bliss, and of the Modern Irish Myth books to add to the list, with over a hundred different characters in all of that. (Caveat: Geneticide had dozens of characters in written or planned stories, to its detriment. It's part of the reason I abandoned the project after completing the first draft.)

Those are just the books I've finished. There were many started-and-failed books over the years, and some I haven't written or, as is the case of my Operation Overdrive novel, are still being written. There are too many characters to keep track of, at this point.

I like to think of my earlier writing as necessary failures. Through the first books I wrote, I was able to focus on creating many (too many) unique and entirely human characters. I didn't have the time to tell most of their stories, or the inclination, focusing too much on plot. However, there have been some favourites.

Of them all, Ogma from the Modern Irish Myth series stands out. He's a poet, from Old Gods Returned, and with planned appearances in the later books in the series, as well as being the star of a few flash stories, who guides the dead to Otherworld. He struggles with the new language of Ireland - that is, English - and with the customs of the twenty-first century, and he's every bit a hero and a warrior, despite facing anxiety and panic at every corner. Ogma is an old hero, one of the last to disappear from the world of magic, and a prophet for the people.

While Bliss has some really fun characters in it, and while I like the other characters in the Modern Irish Myth books, I think Ogma presents an exciting opportunity. He's a god, with power over the dead, and his greatest power is limited by his lack of understanding of the language he's forced to speak.

(For the record: I love the protagonist of my Operation Overdrive novel. She's sarcastic and empathetic; she has to deal with trauma and anxiety; she's uncertain, and she doesn't realise she's intelligent and beautiful, and she doesn't treat people like she's better than them. She's not unnecessarily witty, and she doesn't want anything special from life. She makes writing the book a lot of fun.)

Guest Post: A Paranormal Pit-Stop Interview with Barbara Dole Pt 1

A good friend of mine, from the magical land of Canadia, has written a book, The Watchtower. She's self-publishing this paranormal mystery, which means I won't have to wait for it to come over to this side of the lake to get my hands on it! Thankfully, I'm not Barbara Dole. In what is sure to be a fantastic book from Darke Conteur, some people aren't just people. This interview will give you a taste of that, I'm sure. Details on part two can be found below.

Story Blurb:

His first day of work wasn't what Martin Cunningham expected. A sultry boss, a classy receptionist, the drama-queen foreigner, and a painfully shy techie who prefers hiding to human interaction, was the oddest group of characters he'd ever met. When an assassination attempt is made against his new boss, Martin comes face to face with the stuff of nightmares.

Now he and his new co-workers must race to prevent another attack, but where do they start? There's very little to go on, and the only solid piece of evidence escaped through the u-bend in the toilet. By the end of the day, Martin becomes one of the privileged few who really understands what lies in the shadows, and what it means to work in THE WATCHTOWER.

Take it away...

Thanks for the intro, Paul!

Welcome Humans, to another addition of The Paranormal Pit Stop. Your one-stop E-zine on the Ethereal-net for everything in the paranormal world. This week, we're privileged to have the other woman in the line-up at Terin Global. Psychic, and personal secretary to Jezryall--Barbara Dole.

Paranormal Pit-Stop: Hello Barbara, so nice of you to join us!

Barbara: Thanks, I think.

P.P.S.: So tell our human friends a little about you?

Barbara: Well, I was born in Nice, but my parents came to Toronto shortly after I was born. We lived in Mississauga for a few years before moving into right into the city.

P.P.S.:  Living right in downtown Toronto is expensive, but you're family has money, don't they?

Barbara: My father had the money, not me. He reminded me of that every time I asked him for something. Even if it was something for school.  

P.P.S.: Is that why you ran away at eighteen?

Barbara: I didn't really run away. I was an adult. I had every right to leave home, but yeah, that was a big part of it.

P.P.S.: When did you first realize you could receive information by touching things?

Barbara: I'm not really sure. Seems like I've been able to do it all my life. I'd touch people and learn who they were, what they were like. Do that a few times and you learn how to act like them. I used to do it all the time when I was a teenager. It was fun pretending to be someone I wasn't. Then I realized I could travel through their life. See places they'd visited and things they'd done. Now that was cool.        

P.P.S.: Is that when you decided to become a criminal?

Barbara: I didn't do it on purpose. Wasn't like I made a conscience effort or anything. I kinda fell into it.

P.P.S.: You kinda fell into scamming rich, old men?

Barb: I wasn't scamming them and I didn't force them to give me anything. They're the ones who offered to give me stuff. I never asked them too.

P.P.S.: Too bad the cops didn't see it that way. What were they going to put you away for? Ten years? Good thing you were able to cut a deal as a witness in the de Jont murder trial?

Barbara: I thought it was a good idea. If I testified against Louis de Jont, they would reduce my charges to timed served and put me on parole. The cops were desperate. They needed me as much as I needed them. I tell you, I was never so scared in all my life. He kept staring at me the whole time I testified.

P.P.S.: It was your run-in with him that changed your career path?

Barbara:  Yes. He thought I was a rich debutant and was going to kill me for my money. At least I think it was for my money. When I touched him, I traveled down his time-line. All I saw was blood and death. I never felt so much anger or hatred.

  

P.P.S.: You saw the killings through his eyes. What was it like watching those people die?

Barbara: Horrifying. I can still see their faces when I close my eyes, but the worst was that I could feel what he felt too. He enjoyed killing them. Fed off the power it gave him. He knew he held their life in his hands, and he took pride in torturing them.

P.P.S.: Did you know he escaped?

Barbara: What? Are you serious? When? Why didn't you tell me sooner? I gotta get out of here…

Well, that's all the time we have for this week's interview. We would like to thank our host Paul Carroll for allow us to post this interview on the human internet.

If you'd like to learn more about Jezryall and her staff, you can find more information at the links provided below.

More Character Interviews:

http://darkeconteur.wordpress.com/paranormal-pit-stop-blog-tour/

Novel Information:

http://darkeconteur.wordpress.com/novels/

Join us next time when we invade the blog of foodie Marlene Dotterer, with the second half our two-part interview with sexy Barb Dole.  So, until next time, this is The Paranormal Pit-Stop saying; just because it's dead, doesn't mean it's not alive!

Bio:

Darke Conteur is an author at the mercy of her muse. Writing in several genres, she prefers to write in paranormal and science fiction, and has stories published in Brave Blue Mice, Bewildering Stories, and The Absent Willow Review. When not busy writing, she looks after one wannabe rock-star, one husband, two cats, and one ghost dog.