Usually those moment of character creation happen very much on the back burner for me. Eric Courtney, from my Void City series, came from some point between High School and college when I was playing in a friend's roleplaying game. Eric's mad, murderous daughter Greta just showed up on the page as I wrote, but the protagonist of my new novella happened on a three-way call one afternoon.
I'd just heard about the death of a very cool guy in fandom. Giving his name might be a little disrespectful as I'd just met him and spoken with him for all of thirty minutes (valuable minutes I hope readers will find once they see the epic fantasy I've had lurking on my WIP list for the past several years). My friend Rob and I were talking about random stuff and my friend Richard cursed.
"What's wrong?" I asked
"I have to resurrect a database," he grumbled.
That's all it took. One nanosecond I had no idea for a character who could use the breath of life to raise the dead, imbue life into inanimate objects (aging himself in the process)... and the next second he sprang to life fully formed with not only some truly long reaching implications for the Void City gang, but a slew of novels, novellas, and short stories to adventure in all on his own, too.
What I said out loud was, "That's what we need: a resurrectionist."
But... I didn't like the sound of resurrectionist and neither did my wife. Thus Zaomancer.
I can't wait for folks to see how Richard a.k.a. Marlo Morne gets along with Greta when they eventually have their big adventure, but if you'd like to see a glimpse of him in his own little pocket of the Void City universe, just a short side trip away in Birmingham, Alabama, you can check him out in A CORPSE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY.
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