Remember I said that not all of my posts would be inspired.  Today’s post will be one of those so I”ll keep it short.  Here’s the topic:

5. By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?

Youngest character would be Troy, the ten-year old child in my unfinished MG novel.  If you count completed novels only, it would be the youngest son of my first novel’s heroine.  If you only count main characters, the youngest would be Dori at 22/23, who is also the last main character I created.  Well her and Jude and Donovan I birthed in the same short story, so I guess that makes for a tie other than she has the first line so back to Dori by a sentence.

Oldest is a bit more interesting.  As far as humans go, the oldest award goes to first novel heroine, Chelsea, at 39 going on 40.  She would also be the first full length novel character created as well.  Quite a dubious distinction to take both oldest prizes.

If I throw in paranormals, my current WIP’s villain, David Baca, takes oldest honors though Dori’s mum, Milly, was 500 when she died.  But since we only learn about Milly posthumously, she doesn’t count.  We don’t know exactly how old David is other than he’s older than Donovan who is about 300.

Since I don’t typically write YA or MG, my characters are always going to be over twenty.  In my upcoming NaNo 2010 novel that I’ve already outlined, I’ll have a new oldest human character.  Neely (working name) will be somewhere between 40 and 50 when the novel opens but her story will be told in both current time and via flash backs to when she was only 20-something.  That should prove an interesting challenge–bouncing back and forth between the wisdom of age and experience to the recklessness of youth.  I’m looking forward to it.