My family had a medical crisis last night/this morning that ultimately led to me stomping around a hospital floor during the early evening today snarling out a blue fury and, ah, not being a lady. Threats of black magic might have been issued. (Look, they worked, and this isn't the first time that I've done it, either. You start muttering about chicken blood, and folks tend to give you what you want.) I had to pause and remind myself that I only write about superheroes, it's not that I actually am one. Which led to jokes about how I do get kind of shrill when I'm upset, and Naomi could definitely relate, which led to...
I don't write self-inserts. As much as my life has been crazy for the past few years, it lacks an ending as of yet, not to mention any semblance of coherent theme. (And if I were to put my aunt to fiction, I would immediately get cries that my villain was much too cartoonish and unbelievable.) However, I'm a pure damned liar if I say that I don't explore a specific aspect of myself more often than not in my heroines. Take the series that I'm brushing up and getting ready to show to the world right now:
Ophelia is my Type A side, my elder sibling side. She's also a lot of what I want to be, quietly confident and unceasingly good no matter what happens.
Bonnie is my angry teenaged self, constantly convinced that I was misunderstood and betrayed. The hell of it is that teenaged angst isn't always unjustified.
J is my redneck, hard-drinking, hard-fighting, and hard-loving side. She's gone largely into the closet as I've graduated college and grown up a bit, but J still has her secrets.
Mindy is my insecurities. She's actually probably my favorite after Ophelia because of them.
Naomi is, um...well, we both get very shrill when we're upset, to say the least. Naomi was actually the hardest of these characters for me to get to know. I placed her POV book towards the end of my schedule for a reason, and I was startled by much of what she told me when the time to outline came around.
Well, *pffft*. And here I always try to avoid talking about writing as if it's a mysterious visit from a muse with fairy-dust in hand as opposed to awesome, fulfilling, frustrating work. How about y'all? Do you see certain aspects of yourself in your characters again and again? And readers, do you navigate towards characters that remind you of aspects of yourself, whether those aspects be things that you like or things that you dislike?
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