Changes

# Principal characters (usually the principals but not always) that emerge with the central idea for a story at the outset. These characters, e.g. Johnny Debrett, come into focus pretty much complete in their general personality and appearance. Johnny is the good-hearted, well intentioned, refined, arty, cosmopolitan Upper Class individual (his father was a German aristocrat, an academic that had to get out of Germany before the Second World War, his mother was a Yorkshire born opera singer) but by no means snobbish, that will constantly tell friends and colleagues that Arthur Moreau is a perfectly innocent 'Antiquarian Book Dealer' until, with horror and revulsion, he - Johnny - discovers that Moreau is a monster. It may be interesting to know that Johnny has a 'root' character that stems from a living person (this is rare with me, normally I like to 'create' my characters from my imagination): the root for Johnny Debrett is based upon a performance of an English actor portraying the principal character of a novel by an English author, as that novel was adapted as a movie by an English film director. Note, I say, the performance, not the actor himself. I leave you to guess what the root of Johnny Debrett is, though Johnny was moulded by events in the story and has a unique personality.

# Characters that the storyline demands, as I write. The Kadets are the best example for ''The Arthur Moreau Story''. When I began the story with its working title, The Glass Casket, I had absolutely no idea, not even the faintest notion of an artificial race, of the Friedemann Five Year Progenic Cycle, or of Friedemann, though Von Stotz had been created along with Nina and Jeff Burdet (see point 4 below.) The storyline began to sag and I realised that a glass casket in an ancient cliff-top church on the coast of Normandy (the church is just down from Dieppe: worth a visit) was not going to blow my readers' minds! The idea simply didn't carry enough 'power of fascination'. The big, ugly, eerie basilica of La Roche-sur-Yon got my imagination going. OK, change the location to the west of France, make La Roche-sur-Yon Yonroche and locate the funeral in the ugly basilica. Fine! but who would Johnny find in that basilica? It would be packed with identical people ... nearly all men, all young, all 'film-star' handsome, all identical, and the few women amongst these young men would be blokes in drag. And the casket would be out of this world, and the priests would be Drag Queens, and ... Johnny starts thinking, ''What the heck's going-on!'' ... <u>Exactly what I was thinking</u>. So I stopped the story, sat down, and invented the Friedemann Five Year Progenic Cycle, designed the Kadet Precincts, dreamt-up the Château of St. Christophe, and got back to the keyboard. By now, I could sense that the story had the potential to be allegorical: the kadets are a Society that has been leeched of all individuality, controlled by governments and the ubiquitous Personal Computer, to conform unquestioningly to a Politically Correct lifestyle, and nobody can see any of this going-on: we cannot see the tyrannous pyramids of State Control right in our midst: the Kadet Precincts are vast systems of State run hypocrisy warping the minds and souls of billions. ''Guy!'' people often exclaim, ''What an imagination you have!'' ... I reply, ''Look out of the window!''.

# Characters that 'walk into the room' as I write. When the storyline is powered-up at full steam, my mind works on two or three levels at once. Situations will demand characters 'on tap'. Jock, the steward on the Eocratic is a good example (the ship is based upon the White Star liner Britannic of the 1930s, interiors of the Grand Saloon are inspired by Cunard's Campania, launched in 1892, and interiors of an 18th Century French palace). Johnny meets Jock in the First Class Main Entrance of the Eocratic (based upon the Aquitania, gobbed with crippling kitsch by Moreau's interior designers). Jock is typical of old time stewards that I remember on trains and ships up until the late 1960s. Jock could appear in more stories. Stanley Casper is another character that literally walks into Jo Debrett's library to meet Johnny. I needed three heroes because Johnny and Thomas as a duo began to put limitations on the action. Like Batman and Robin, you cannot have them separated. With a third hero you can chuck one of the trio into a dungeon, leaving the other two to sort it all out. Dumas was no fool with ''The Three Musketeers''. Stanley also gives me a chance to inject another decent, good-hearted, healthy-minded personality into a story seething with sick, warped villains. Stanley's triplet daughters get to marry Thomas, Panno and Kyla, and they all appear in the sequel with bairns. There is one problem with characters that walk into the room as you write; the story can get too crowded. A crowded story is unmanageable.

# Characters closely based or wholly modelled upon actual people, living or dead. Rare with me, but Nina and Jeff Burdet are two friends alive today in Minneapolis. I know Minneapolis-St. Paul and have set Gracewood in this beautiful city. You need to be very careful when basing characters on real people, alive or dead (the dead can have legal Estates): libel. Even with the usual legal disclaimer on the verso of a Title page, blatantly derogatory descriptions must not apply to living person, or to a deceased person that enjoyed a benign public reputation. If a person should recognise the description as applying to him/her, or the descendents of a person no longer living should recognise their ancestor, you could find yourself in court. However: if what you say can be demonstrated as the truth, this is not libel.