The Evolution of a Character (or a career)
I’ve lived my entire life with characters and stories in my head. Some were as original as anything can be while others were fan-fictions that never escaped my maze of a mind long enough to be put on paper.
After watching Xena: Warrior Princess, I’d run around the house with music blasting. The living room would fade as I retreated into my head where I reimagined the episode with myself, or a character based off of myself, involved in some major way. If no one interrupted me, I’d plot out the next episode and the next. Each would steer further from the plot, featuring more of me and my made up characters and less Xena and Gabrielle.
TV shows and movies never failed to rev up my imagination, but they were not my only source of stories. Songs, fears, news, and my contorted perception of reality were compost to my imagination’s produce.
For all the stories I dreamed while running and dancing, I wrote sporadically, scribbling ideas in journals and penning poems for school assignments. As much as I loved making stories, the creative part of my brain rarely worked unless my body was moving.
So the characters stayed inside me. To an extent, they grew with me.
They evolved.
Terrifying magical adventures involving waterfalls, brain-altering head injuries, supernatural relatives, and a fair amount of time travel shaped them into distinct people that had less and less in common with me as time went on.
An aesthetic I made for Mel (Amelia)
They reproduced like cells.
As the adventures piled up an they grew more and more complex, sometimes, they split into two or three different characters.
Yes, some of them had things in common with me, but none of them were me. I no longer had a version of myself that popped into tv shows and fan fiction. I had a cast of distinct , developed characters trying to claw their way out of my head.
Ari. Amelia. Elle. Erin. Lucy. Michael. Sam.
There are more, but some of their names have faded from memory even if their personalities haven’t.
I started writing. I had to. My brain would’ve exploded. Reality would’ve shattered. Something bad would’ve happened.
At first, writing came in short bursts. Stories would fill a notebook on rainy summer days or cold winter nights. Senior year of high school, I wrote and illustrated the first twenty or so pages of a centaur portal fantasy. Freshmen year of college, I wrote the first act of a screen play. I started a novel. I wrote a short story. Started another novel.
Each time I wrote, the characters that grew up with me appeared in the story along side new faces. My burst of writing grew longer each time they happened.
When I was 26, on a cold October night when I couldn’t sleep, I started the longest writing spurt I’d ever had, meaning it hasn’t ended. In one for or another, I have written every day since then.
Power Surge aesthetic
Characters and pieces of stories coalesced into novels.
The characters continued to grow through the whole process.
Now, I’m proud to say that the world gets to meet two characters that have lived in my head under one name or another for most of my life.
Erin and Mel (Amelia) debuted in notebook pages. They solidified in a screenplay. Bloomed in a mess of a half of a book I started in college. They slept for decades, through short stories and a paranormal suspense.
They slept but the they never left. Their identities evolved with mine.
Erin’s mental health deteriorated with mine. When I discovered the words and concepts that I could use to finally explain how I felt about my gender, Erin used those words too
I could tell you what Mel or Erin had for breakfast on any given day. I could tell you about their first kisses, their greatest fears, most embarrassing moments, successes and failures. The last mountain they skied. The last trail they hiked
People always ask me how I keep it all in my head, if I had spreadsheets and pages of notes.
Cover Art by Natasha Snow
When it comes to the Evanstars? I didn’t need those things. I internalized world and most of it’s inhabitants long before I started writing. I have drafts and short stories and micro stories and poems.
I have dreams.
These characters own a piece of me.
They are pieces of me.
Their stories will always live in my soul, but if I have readers willing to read, then I will write and write in this universe as long as I can.
I just hope that when readers meet them on October 1st, they love them as much as I do.