quote:

---

An Ubermensch villain

---

A character can have inner conflicts as well as outer conflicts.

antagonist kidnaps love interest, and threatens her life if protagonist keeps fighting, all the while brainwashing the love interest...

it has merit...

I didn't say they had to be you as you are now. They can be based on extrapolations--you as you would be if thus and such had happened or if you'd made this or that choice.

So if there is part of you that could even think of scummy things, that is the part your scummy characters come from. Just as no one is perfect, no one is free from the possibility of being nasty.

quote:

---

I didn't say they had to be you as you are now. They can be based on extrapolations--you as you would be if thus and such had happened or if you'd made this or that choice.

---

This is exactly how I approach creating the majority of my main characters.

My YA MC is based on me, had I chosen to go extreme in my pursuits of my musical goals.

One of my SF MCs is based on what I might be like if my very mild case of autism was instead full blown.

And, in fitting with this topic (such as it is in a thread entitled "Random Musings"), one of my favorite characters is based on what I would be like had I ever decided to treat "The Godfather" as my Golden Rule.

Frightening, no doubt, at how scummy I could be. The cool part about all this is that, as long as I keep everything on the page, I can do anything I want to anyone I want---for whatever reason happens to make sense to me at the time---and I don't have to worry about being on the 11 O'Clock news.

S!
S!...C!

I think being a mom is awesome and a friggen powerful and important job, and that the hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world.

My first clues came from reading the correspondence of our founding fathers. Ben Franklin invented bifocals because he was annoyed by having to switch between his reading glasses and his myopic-vision correcting set. At least one anecdote I encountered in the correspondence remarked that at times Mr. Franklin looked like he had four eyes. I found no further clues on that front.

A few years back when I returned to college after a long intermission, I needed reading glasses to read textbooks. One day I was studying with a classmate. My myopic-vision correcting set was perched on my brow, and I was reading with the reading glasses set on my nose. She remarked, "When you wear your glasses like that you look like you have four eyes." Aha! wearing two sets of glasses at once, one above the other, makes a person look like they have four eyes.

I had this off duty cop come up to me one day in walmart when my kid was having a fit, and flash his ID at me and tell me that my child was being disruptive and I had to leave the store. Immediately. Sad thing was, he didn't know he was dealing with a jail cop from the neighboring county. I knew he had no authority. So I messed with him and acted all scared and got him to admit that I wasn't doing anything illegal, that, well, the kid's just making a scene and it looks really bad....at which point I told him that he should know better than to try to be badge heavy, cause the sherrif I work for doesn't tolerate that stuff. He apologized and left.

When I was about 35 I got a new pair that I just couldn't wear so I quit wearing glasses. A few years later I had 20/20 vision.

Now I'm much older and starting to think I am again going to need glasses so I can read the book less than 20 inches away.

TL

....write at work when things get slow, because with him around things are never slow.

1) I realllllllllllllllly like butter, steak, ham (including SPAM), bologna, potato chips (and corn chips), Mexican food, Italian food, Chinese food and pizza.

and

2) If I can eat it, chances are it's bland, I'm not too fond of it, it's nothing resembling snack food, it's a type of fish or fowl (not including duck) or I hate it.

Now that I'm in my late 30s (just barely though!) chocolate gives me a migraine at least half of the times I eat it. That doesn't stop me from thinking that this time it might be different.

(edited to put a halt to rampant overusage of the smilies legend.)

I believe it. I had an ecoli infection that sent me to the emergancy room, and that pain was much worse than the pains of labor.

In most situations effect is valence neutral and affect is negatively charged, except perhaps for alternative definitions, like, affect a smile, affect an air of confidence, affection for, but not affectation. Chocolate, though I love it and won't live without it, affects my health and effects my happiness.

Maybe: perhaps
May be: might be

Maybe I'll go.
I may be right.

Anymore: any longer or any further
Any more: any additional

I don't want to wait anymore.
I don't have any more.

Anyway: regardless
Any way: any manner