Quite a few years ago I agreed to join some friends in an online role-playing game. Back then I hadn’t fully embraced the nerdom that comes with working in the IT field, so I was a bit hesitant. I was an adult after all and had never really done this kind of thing before. I’m very glad that I did and now I’m proud to say I’m a full-blooded geek.
It’s been a long time since our group disbanded but what I learned has stayed with me. Creating a character for the game is very similar to creating one for a book. I chose a race, what she looked like, and given some attributes and skills to start with. This completely makes sense because you don’t start off being a master swordsman, you must learn how and get better over time. And so, the essence of Lorelei was born.
Our game master had the best imagination. He came up with the setting and then place the characters into a situation for us to figure out. Even if you felt good about your solution to the issue all it took was a bad roll of the dice and it all shattered. Today I use this same basic structure to learn about my characters. I call them character shorts. I create a character, throw them into a situation and see what that character does.
I was very fortunate that our game master gave us a lot of creative freedom. Lorelei started out as an adult who had lost her memory. When she started regaining glimpses of her true self, she started to understand that she wasn’t well. She had a disease that had gone into submission with her memory loss and it was now creeping back into play. Back then we called it simply the fever and this wasn’t a standard choice to select in the game. We created it together. Winged humans were also not a standard race to choose either.
Lorelei was already an adult in the game and a darkness was growing inside of her due to the disease. She became emotionally tormented, a bit dark with some slips into violence but at the same time I saw her as an anti-hero. Desperately trying to hang on to her humanity she tried her best to help even though the way she did it appeared somewhat evil on the surface. The fever dug deep into her soul and her struggle to maintain control made her character very three dimensional to me. How many of us have struggled through something that challenges us? We all have that little devil sitting on our shoulder whispering into our ear. Are we strong enough to resist?
At this point I knew who Lorelei was, but how did she get there? This is when I decided to write Rise of the Winged Assassin. At that point I had no idea how challenging this was going to be. I had to imagine her as a young woman who had not been affected by the disease yet. I also had to create an entire world and culture. I had never taken on something that huge before. Her world was not part of the role-playing game so here I was trying to create a fresh new world. World building is challenging. Master builders such as Brandon Sanderson have my complete and total respect.
Lorelei fought with me quite a bit in the beginning phases. Anytime I tried to connect with her, she spoke to me in first person. It took me quite a while to find her voice in third person, but we came up with a compromise. I didn’t want to limit the reader from witnessing the world around her. Their wings needed to be present in the readers view and doing that in first person wasn’t going to work. The wings belong to them and they wouldn’t reference their wings anymore than you would reference the movement of your arms inside your head.
Her story in Rise of the Winged Assassin is just the beginning. There are more books coming and thanks to Page Publishing Inc I will finally get to publish the book and share it with all of you. There’s more to come on my journey to publish the book.