Imaginary Friends.

In my personal (unedumacated) opinion, I believe the making of a story's characters is the most difficult part of the story development. I can somewhat easily fill out a plot line--complete with structure, details, and thematic threads (of course, after I've dodged and filled in the gaping plot holes)--but one thing I find myself near incapable of doing is creating characters. Especially creating them on demand, like I need to for story plots. More specifically, like I need to do for NaNoWriMo.

It is a rare occasion indeed when I develop a character before the story timeline; more often the timeline comes first, and then after mulling over the ideas and central themes for a while, characters start popping up--both in my dreams and imaginative state, and also in the real world. I find that each of my characters is like an imaginary person whom you encounter, and either develop a friendship with, or entirely despise, etc. If I should happen to like them, I keep them as my friend and call them my own. (Hang on, you mean your self-creating, "pretend" friends don't visit you when you happen to be studying at the library? or ride a bike beside you? or converse with you on the topic of spiritual enlightenment? No? How odd.)

Anyway, getting more to the point of this ramble (for which I am guilty for not including more important information, and yet am strangely glad to have filled a post with meaningless material). I have been designing characters for my upcoming NaNo novel, Zel, and I've so far developed 9 characters. Eight of them are of my own invention (with the help of previously present fairy and folk tales which have lingered in memory for centuries) but my dear friend, Aileen, helped me develop the ninth character who simply put the icing on the cake.

Over the next week or so, I'll be working on linguistic and personality differences between the characters, so I can distinguish them automatically when I write.

In other news, the Blood Moon will be full this Friday night, and Samhain isn't even two weeks away, so I'll be quite busy preparing for that.

Despite this, I'll plod forward in my quest to--for once--be ready for NaNoWriMo this year!