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Okay really, really short post for day 12.

12. In what story did you feel you did the best job of worldbuilding? Any side-notes on it you’d like to share?

Um, well I haven’t built any from scratch, I’ve pretty much leveraged the one we live in now.  I’ve made up a few businesses, road names, that sort of thing, but that’s hardly what I’d call worldbuilding.

My urban fantasy has paranormal elements but they mostly relate to the characters and their abilities, drawing upon popular canon for most.  I switched a few things up (how succubi are made), made up stuff where there wasn’t much guidance (the creation and keeping of a phoenix), invented a few cool weapons based loosely on the rules of physics that I understand.

By definition, urban fantasy takes place in a world similar to what we all know and understand, hence the “urban” description.  I don’t see any “high” fantasy in my future, science fiction perhaps, but until then, my worldbuilding muscles will remain undeveloped.  I think I have enough other challenges to work on in the mean time.

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Day eleven.  I’m over a third done!

11. Who is your favorite character to write? Least favorite?

Gayle Lindley, heroine of my romantic suspense novel, The PURE, has been my favorite heroine to date though I’ve really enjoyed writing Dori too.  Both women are written from a first person POV, and therefore have some pretty big chunks of me in them.  It’s always easy to write about me because I’m my favorite topic.  (Ah come on, everyone is like this.)  Gayle’s got the heart of a lion in this small package.  She’s not afraid to speak her mind, though perhaps she should be as it gets her into trouble.  I give the edge to Gayle over Dori because Gayle is not nearly as naive and damaged as Dori.  Both women are self-deprecating, Gayle intentionally and Dori because that’s really how she feels about herself.

Least favorite characters to write would be any of my female villains.  I don’t know why I can’t seem to be bothered to take the time to flesh them out any better than I have.  They tend to be caricatures, real bitches.  I did try a bit harder in My Fair Vampire not to make Dori’s two “sisters” quite so one-dimensional.  Unfortunately, most of the other side of the coin that I conjured up for them lives in Dori’s blog and not yet in the novel.  Needless to say, I still have quite a bit of editing to do.

My male villain in My Fair Vampire is significantly more evolved than my female villains, though David is the number one villain of the entire novel so I’ve worked harder on him.  Like Dori’s sisters, I created a whole back story for him too, wrote it for a blog chain.  The hard part has been weaving in the pertinent bits of that back story into the novel.  My intent has been to make him yucky but perfectly understandable and even sympathetic…to an extent.  The “grey” villain, versus my “black” villainesses.

For my upcoming NaNo novel, my goal is to create a not so likable female protagonist.  I hope, however, that she wins over the reader by the end of the novel when her full story is revealed.  That’ll be a new challenge for me, writing the tragically flawed heroine but I’m truly looking forward to it.  Hopefully, the next time I’m asked about my favorite character to write, Neely will take top prize.  We’ll see in two months.