Rewriting Characters

Still working away on the rewrite of the new book.

One interesting difference between the start of this series and Alex Verus has been how I’ve handled the characters.  In the early Alex Verus books, I made up new characters all the time without thinking about it too much – often they’d be created completely off the top of my head and I’d only come up with backgrounds for them much later, if at all.  This gave the characters a lot of room to expand in unexpected directions, but it also meant that I had to do a lot of work later on figuring out quite basic things about characters that I’d introduced early on but had never really decided on the details for.

For this new series, I’m trying to work out some sort of basic biographical information for all of the really important characters right from the start, along with a general idea of where they’re going and what I’m intending to use them.  It does make this book a bit slower to write, though, since I’m taking the same sort of treatment that only Luna and Alex got back in Fated, and applying it to maybe 6 or 7 characters instead, including some who don’t have very large roles in book 1 but that I’m planning to use a lot more over the course of later books.  Let’s hope it pays off in the future!