A lot of my character creation extends into the writing stage and there is an fluidity to the personalities and beings my characters are. That’s showing more with Keep Austin Safe than it has before. Holly and Lewis were born out of these things that I knew they should be and needed to be for the story to work and in a way I’m most comfortable writing them and Death.
Keep Austin Safe came from such a new place to me and it was never meant to be serious or anything more than a kind of “what if” story. And now I’m dedicating my full time to it and calling it part of the series. The characters are probably the most changed aspect of the project. When I started out it was all about the pair of girls, two hipsters. Then it was a dead girl and her friend. Then it was a dead girl and a necromancer. I added a male character to balance out the cast and finally I decided they needed a fourth, a female.
The final character went through several stages from being a clueless roommate and the last anchor to the natural world to being a talented hacker who also happens to have a secret second nature. The really hard thing for me was picking what that second nature would mean. In all honesty, succubus was the first creature that jumped out at me. But there is something there tugging against that idea and I guess it boils down to trying to be original and not tread on over used ground.
Apparently there is a lot of literature and television right now about the creatures and I don’t know if there’s anything new or interesting I could bring to the game. Of course one could say the same about vampires and I really don’t have to show you how everything vampire under the sun has been done to death (no pun intended).
I’ll be keeping that handy-dandy writer’s notebook I talked about before close in the coming days because I need to get my plans for this character sorted if I intend to meet my August fifteenth deadline!
Pulp & Fiction 