Characters and Creativity

In first novel, Wind Follower, I thought of Loic as a spoiled little kid much like my older son. I liked him but found him a bit exasperating. I wasn't particularly attracted to him. I liked the female character but she was too much like me to really separate myself from her.

In Inheritance, the dark horror I'm attempting to write, I find I'm in love with Danny. IF I'm not careful I'll fantasize about sleeping with him. The female main character confuses the heck out of me. She is a lot like me but I seem to have turned her into a character who is caught in one moral issue: to sleep with main character or not. I mean... is this book about "will she roll in bed with this guy?"

In Constant Tower, a fantasy I'm working on, I find the main character Psal a bit pitiful. I feel intensely sorry for him. Same for the second main character, Cloud. Come to think of it, all the guys in this story kinda have my pity. I have two female main characters in this. A strong black woman, Ktwala, who is kinda bitter and a young black girl, Maharai, who is captured and slowly connects to her captors. I like them both and find Maharai very intriguing. She has it in her to be very cut-throat. Lord knows why I create young girls who are cut-throat. Maybe I have a little cut-throat little girl in me who never got a chance to act up when I was young.

I think I know why I'm a spec-fic writer. I lived a terrified kind of life with uncles and grandfathers telling me scary horror stories about ghosts and demons on the like. In addition, they were a cruel lot who were always ready with a belt to whip a person into submission. Belts in the black family, wow! Major child abuse issues there. Not to mention terrorism on other levels I won't speak publicly about. So something in me understood terror and horror. I also saw an angel once and a demon. And there was much Bible reading in my house. Those, I think, are the reasons I write speculative fiction. I didn't like writing mainstream because the communal world's idea of reality just was not my idea of reality.