Hi Jim,

I’m currently trying to create some characters for my book, but am having trouble. I just finished reading Drakin and was wondering if you could tell me who your favorite character is out of all the books you’ve ever written. It would be helpful if you could go through how you created that character. Thanks!

TLoki

Hi “Tloki”,

I think I may have covered this previously, but I can’t find the original post, so I’ll go over it again. I actually have two that I really love. So one comes in first with the other very close behind.

Let’s start off with the runner-up:

Mary Jane Kelly – Soul Siphon 

Mary Jane Kelly is actually not original, in that I didn’t create her out of thin air. Because Soul Siphon is basically a story about a group of undead warriors who do the bidding of a disgruntled angel, I wanted to have one character whose murder was fairly well known aka, someone who actually existed. I thought it would add quite a bit of color to the story.

I knew I had to be careful here. I didn’t want to be disrespectful to the dead and certainly didn’t want to offend anyone’s family.  So I went back over some of the most famous murders that people remember… The Simpson murders were too recent, the Manson Family murders still had family that would likely not be too happy about what I intended to do, plus both of those… well… I mean they kind of faded over time. I wanted something… for lack of a more appropriate term, more enduring in the murder mystery world.

Then I decided to go back to my own studies of the Jack the Ripper case in college. (Yes, I did recreational research in college.) There were five (potentially more) perfect examples of what I was looking for. All I had to do was pick one that fit the role I was looking for; Relatively young, female, unmarried. So I went through the canonical victims to see if any of them matched what I was looking for…

Mary Ann Nichols – 43 years old… too old, and based on her biography… a bit too run down for what I was looking for.

Annie Chapman – 47… again, too old. Married to a relative and had children… okay no. I know that was common back then, but… just no. Plus, she was noted as being depressed on had given up on like. I really didn’t think I could write her as the character I wanted to create.

Elizabeth Stride – 44 (yeah this was the pattern). Too tall, married… and so on.

Catherine Eddowes – I actually really wanted to go with her given the mystery surrounding her death and the ‘from Hell’ letter. However, again too old, the description of her is too vague, and I had very little else to go with in terms of her personality.

Mary Jane Kelly – At this point… admittedly I was ready to rule out the Jack the Ripper Victims. None of them fit the bill for what I was looking for. Then I re-read her bio… 25 years old, quarrelsome, known for becoming intoxicated and singing Irish songs. Possibly married, but never confirmed. Not exactly a prostitute like the others as she worked in a brothel. Yes, this I could work with.

There was just enough information on her to lay the groundwork for an interesting character. A foul-mouthed young woman, not afraid to speak her mind, and enjoyed a sip of alcohol every now and then. However, what about the rest of her personality? As a human being, there had to be more to her. Well… details on her life were extremely sketchy and most of them came from her ex-boyfriend, Joseph Barnett. So what was I going to do?

Well, Soul Siphon takes place in the modern day, so I literally had around 150 years after her death to work on character development.  Her backstory involved her being resurrected by the previously mentioned angel and imbued with immortality and powers reflecting how she died; She could shroud herself in the shadows, move silently, possessed super-human speed, and was extremely proficient with knives. She was then given leave to hunt down Jack the Ripper, whom she was actually able to identify. However, she spent a lot of her time trying to protect the other brothel workers from being roughed up in White Chapel.
When she finally located Jack the Ripper, she failed to catch him and kill him. He eluded her for years before dying in a shipwreck, fleeing the country. She then came to find out that he was responsible for even more deaths. Her failure cost even more lives.

At this point, I added a level of regret and bitterness to the character as well as personality depth. I don’t want to give too much away, but she’s actually probably the least dynamic character in the book. That being said, as you learn more about her, you realize the character she actually is very admirable.

I guess I really love this character because she was really fun to research and write. I don’t know if she’s anything like the real Mary Kelly, but I did my best to guestimate what she’d be like in that situation. I am actually thrilled with how she came out.

And with that… my favorite character of the ones I created…

General Xaphan – Damnation/Soul Siphon

So this character went through a lot of developement. After writing Divinity, I began to entertain the idea of writing a sequel but didn’t want to do a direct continuation of the original story. I needed a new story with new characters set in the same universe. So I set out trying to create the main character… and failed over and over again. I just couldn’t create the warrior angel that I truly wanted to.

After several failures, I decided to go back and look at some of the other stories I’d written that could never be published. I stumbled across the first full-length novel I’d written, which was a Star Wars fanfic: The Face of Evil.

The primary character in that story was the villain, Darth Malys. A young Jedi that had turned her back on the order. She was extremely powerful but had trouble controlling her energy, or her emotions. She was a competent warrior and brilliant strategist that nearly brought the galaxy to its knees.

I remember how much I loved this character, but she’d never really see the light of day outside of my circle of friends and blog posts. It was something I really regretted. At that point, I began to try to figure out a way I could actually use her as a character in my new book. Granted, a few things would have to be changed, but I felt I could make it work.

General Xaphan was born out of that character. I borrowed her name and backstory from Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal and merged that with Darth Malys. A relatively young, but capable commander and warrior, and a brilliant strategist. Instead of a fallen Jedi, she was an angel who sided with Lucifer when he rose up against the Most High. She completely believed in Lucifer’s cause to free their angelic brothers and sisters from an eternity of servitude and commanded his forces in battle. Though absolutely ruthless in combat, she viewed the spilling of angelic blood to be a terrible waste, and when attacking non-military targets, she’d offer the civilians a warning before the attack took place.
There were no civilian casualties when the Celestial Temple burned thanks to her disobeying Lucifer’s orders and warning the inhabitants. She fought against her counterpart, St. Michael to a stalemate for eons until Lucifers forces were finally defeated. She fled and began a resistance movement in the Celestial World until she was captured and exiled to the underworld. Her time there made her angry. Eventually, Lucifer sent her to the mortal world to do some reconnaisance. To do this, she was given a human form and had her memory wiped.
During her time on Earth, she became involved with a young Florentine Soldier, whom she married and spent several years with before Lucifer came for her. After the events of Divinity, Lucifer no longer possessed the ability to remove the human memories from her and instead simply restored her original memories, hoping they would overpower the human.
The result was a fractured personality and a divided conscience that made it difficult for her to reconcile her existence. She wound up fighting with herself over whether she truly wanted to continue her role as Lucifer’s general or live out her days with the human she loved so much. That’s pretty much where the adventure begins.

I loved this character so much that I wanted to have a physical representation of her on the cover of the book, something I’d never done before. I knew I couldn’t use my concept sketches of her, but I had to figure out something…

Fortunately for me, one of my friends is a fairly brilliant photographer,  who specializes in dark and very mystical shoots. I had all but given up on my hope to create the character because I couldn’t find a model to fit the bill… that was of course until he posted one particular piece that I admittedly thought was absolutely awesome. The image is still one of the backgrounds on my computer:

The more I looked at the picture, the more I realized… wow, she actually looks a lot like what I’m going for! That face looked shockingly similar to some of the concept art I’d done. I went back and looked at the other photo he posted from that shoot…

Sold, this model looked the part. We worked the whole thing out and he returned with a great photo for me to use. Then I had the graphic designer I work with, Brett Warniers, create my character.

The results pretty much spoke for themselves.

After Publishing Damnation, I wanted to use this character again in some form, so I gave her a cameo appearance in my next book, Soul Siphon.

So there you go. Those are my favorite characters and how I came up with them. Readers, do you have a story with how you created one of your characters? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks,

Jim

Readers,

Do you have a question about writing, publishing, my stories, etc? Please feel free to post a comment or email me.

jimthewritingwizard@gmail.com

I’ll use those comments to select my next blog post.

I have been writing for several years, have 4 published works, experience with publishing and independent work, so I can hopefully be of assistance.

Please note, I only do one of these a day and will do my best to respond to everyone, but it may take some time.

Also, feel free to check out my works of Fantasy and Historical Fiction, Available on Amazon and where ever books are sold. See the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/James-Harrington/e/B00P7FBXTU

Note:
If you have read my books, PLEASE log into Amazon and post a review. I really love to hear everyone’s thoughts and constructive criticisms. Reviews help get my book attention and word of mouth is everything in this business!

Thanks friends!

Catch you on the flip side!

-Jim