I realized the other day that I have a bad habit of killing off characters that I base off my friends. Well, I didn't just realize it. It's been a slow-moving epiphany that had been building up over time in the back of my mind and likes to crop up whenever I'm writing my book.
I didn't realize it because I have a bad habit of killing of characters anyway. Like, if I can't get anywhere with my novel, I'll kill someone, and that usually gets the juices flowing again. The only problem with that is that it's usually a character that I'll need to use at a later date...so I have to reevaluate where my novel is going.
It's a stressful process.
Not as stressful as creating characters. I have an issue with making all my characters alike. I'm just fine with making very diverse characters--personality-wise, visually, mentally and verbally--but I have a problem with myself and the book if I get a handful of characters that are too much alike. And then I get to the point where I don't want to make too many characters (too late for that whoops) and then things get very confusing, even for me. I balance this by killing off characters.
Wow. A vicious cycle.
Think about it for a second. The book is about werewolves. There aren't enough of them left for them to just sit around sipping tea and chatting; that's why they mate early and have pups as soon as possible. They have a genetic incentive to find their mate and breed as soon as possible. Their lifespans don't give much room for other things. They're not like fruit flies, who are born and die the same day, but they probably won't live to 110. More like 60, if they're really good. Most wolves--true, feral ones--die before they hit their thirties; they just fight too much.
And of course they want their line to continue. You know...have male or female pups to keep your name and your blood alive; also a genetic incentive.
And then there's the whole human/werewolf problem. At first I didn't want to let it happen; you'd have little mutated babies with seven tongues and extra limbs and the likes. But then I decided that lycanthropes just have a diffrent gene pool than humans do. It's like saying a black guy and an Asian woman couldn't have children. Similar genetic but still from diffrent areas with diffrent genetic codes. That was a big thing for me.
Then again, when a pup is born out of one of two parents and is lycanthropic, they're a mutt, and they're frowned upon the werewolf comminuty. They aren't clean, because humans have hunted them for hundreds of years and made up terrible tales about them and cut off their heads. Of course, werewolves have been preying upon humans and telling myths about them and eating them for hundreds of years too, so the whole 'Humans are slaughterers' isn't really a fair idea. But if you've never been around humans, or are raised hating them, a lycanthrope just hates them for a rule.
And then there's the big problem that ties this post in a circle about pups being bred. There are purebred pups, like an African male with an African female to create an African pup, and then there are the mixed breeds, which are less common, like an African male and a Portlander female having a...Africander pup. What in the...? I don't even know. But yeah, pure breads are pretty common, mostly because your pack is who you'll be spending your time with.
I don't know where that was going...
[/rant for now]
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Once you showed me that life was worth living,But you never showed me that you’re worth forgiving.
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