Gayla Drummond

In an effort to get myself out of my current little funk/mild writer’s block, I thought I’d write an entry about how a couple of my characters came into being for me.

I’ve mentioned I have a couple of original fiction projects I’ve never gotten much done on, but have sort of slogged away at them over the years. One, Dark’s Bane, is around about a decade old, the other is about 4-5 years old. I slogged, wrote, stopped, tore it up, rewrote, set it aside, rinse/repeat, ad nauseum.

Then…the Xmen movies came out, I saw all of them, my old fondness for Wolverine from the comic books developed into a full blow fascination with the movie Wolverine ( You know, the whole buckets of drool thing ), and I started checking out fan fiction. After reading some, I thought I’d try my own hand at writing it. My first effort was with Morrigan, a young woman Logan meets in a bar, starts getting a little attached to during the events of the 2nd and 3rd movies. Morrigan was hiding the fact that she was a mutant, a healer like Logan. Somehow, the people attempting to revive Project X discovered her, captured her as she left work one night, and performed the procedure on her. She didn’t have claws, they gave them to her and inserted an animal consciousness into her mind. She escapes, and spends a year running from town to town, trying to deal with it, and Logan eventually tracks her down, something he hadn’t had a problem doing before. When he finds out she’s now become like him, he decides to keep her, and she eventually ends up living at the mansion.

Okay..that was a bit of a tangent from where I was going, but background, I guess, lol.

Anyway, I had another story idea pop into my head after that one, and started working on it. That one was set about 100 years in the future, and the world was a very different place. Logan was still alive, only looking about late thirties or so. My O/C for that story was a young woman who was bucking the system in place, and succeeded in her aim to become a Marine sniper. When Logan meets her, having been asked to lead her platoon on a very important mission, she is the number one rated sniper in the world, a corporal in the USMC. She’s the daughter of a ret. USMC Gunnery Sgt, who was also the number one rated sniper, in his day.

As I wrote the story, my O/C started to split into multiple personalities with my brain asking me ‘What if…’ and the beginnings of Shadow Connor and Faith Wilder were born. They eventually solidified into the characters they’ve become, whole and mostly seperate from their fanfic O/C ‘mother’.

She gave her names to them…her name is Faith Connor.

There are parallels between the three, of course. All three are pretty strong willed women, very competant. Shadow is bolder, brasher and has a tendency to bulldoze her way through obstacles. Faith Wilder is quieter, and on the shy, uncertain side. Their ‘mother’ is a self-confident woman who knows she’s the best at what she does, is very determined, but pretty calm and collected.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you just never know where inspiration for an original character might come from, or lead to. Shadow’s arrival has led to a series of stories for me to work on, other original characters to meet (Jase, Wolfe and Lucien, to name a few), and an accompanying universe to develop. Faith’s arrival hasn’t produced quite as much just yet, but the storyline’s there and waiting for me to really start working on it.

Faith Wilder, in her own turn, is the ‘mother’ of Rhianne Morgan, my character from Focus, and therefore the progenitor of the whole Focus Universe and the other characters that have come along for it.

Call it shadow spawning, lol. Rhianne is the ‘mother’ of Jazz Thomas, US Mage Corps Captain, and also of Shiankha Miller, from WIP ‘Whispers’.

Shadow is the ‘mother’ of Constance the Vampire Hunter, and at least an ‘aunt’ to Riley from Code Walker.

And each of them have spawned a ‘shadow child’ of their own, which may very well never end up seeing the light of day, except in short stories.

And it all started from deciding to try my hand at fanfic, and creating a character I became very attached to.

It’s funny how your mind works these things out.

Moral of the story: Take your inspiration from where ever you receive it from, and run like hell with it.