Jeremiah Donaldson's Blog: This and That - Posts Tagged "fantasy"

This is a second in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. The second one takes a look at one of my oldest characters.

Regis started off as a character in a series of hand written fantasy stories I wrote as a teenager between 1991 and 1996 while in high school and immediately after. Those numbered about one dozen finished and unfinished. These stories were highly influenced by Fritz Leiber's Swords Series and were a weird fusion of sword and sorcery and SF in which magic exists but something crashes from the sky that has NASA on the side of it. Regis was, and has remained in all incarnations, an ex-king's guard.

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This is a third in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at one of my newest characters.

Ott, no last name, was a character I created in 2013 in the Neverwinter MMO online game. The playable version of Ott was where his general look and style were created. The Foundry version of Ott was where his personality and character were created. These two things when combined together created 'Ott' that was used beyond the Foundries.

Ott himself is a massive and massively powerful and, mostly, fearless man. He is very tall but well proportioned at aprox 2.3 m and 150 kg. He is pale skinned, almost albino, with red eyes and a mane of red hair. He's an expert at fighting with weapons and his hands, but isn't very smart overall and somewhat naive at times. He cannot read and write. The MMO version of the character was a 'great weapons fighter' that wore red armor and clothing to match his hair and eyes. The post-apocalyptic version of him followed that trend with a massive iron and steel flail he called 'The Headsplitter' until it was lost in Crevice, but is less color coordinated in a flannel shirt, combat fatigues, and boots. He is one of my two characters with the most artistic renditions. The other being his post-apocalyptic buddy Ren (another character profile).

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This is a forth in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at one of my newest characters.

Ren, no last name, was a character I created in 2013 in the Neverwinter MMO online game. The playable version of Ren was where his general look and style were created.

Ren himself is a very small man at only 1.1 m tall and 35 kg. He is thin, wirey, bald, has black mutton chops that end in braids, and a tribal tattoo covers the left side of his face. His eyes are bright blue and he's highly intelligent, but has a mean streak. The MMO version of the character was a mage that dressed in blue to match his eyes. The post-apocalyptic version of him is a skill monkey that is an expert with pistols dressed in combat armor. He, with Ott (profile #3), are my two characters with the most artistic renditions.

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This is a 6th in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at another of my oldest characters.

Roek is a vampire main character that first publicly appeared in my short story The Pendant, published by the small print magazine Title Goes Here: in their Spring 2010 issue as the lead story. It revolved around Detective Jack Young finding Roek's pendant at a crime scene and the events that transpire. However, the story itself was not new to me. I wrote the original story, called Roek at the time, as a teenager sometime around 1993 on an old typewriter that I took as payment instead of money for cleaning out a basement for someone.

I still have the original copy of the story, as well as the very first rewrite that was done a year or so later in 1994 or 1995 on the same typewriter. Everything but the title is basically the same. It was simply rewrote one final time ~13 years after the fact in 2008 and that was the version submitted to Title Goes Here:, which is the version used now with only minor edits to fix typos.

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This is a 7th in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at another of my oldest characters.

Moss Valley is the main character from my first novel, Plague, which is my most successful release and series to date, but one that I soured on.

Plague was my first attempt at writing more than poems and essays in roughly a decade at the point that I started it in late 2004. The story was inspired by two things. 1) A dream I had in which me and another person were watching a city burn from several stories above the ground. 2) The series of 2004 hurricanes that hit Florida (where I was until I moved back to Ky in 2008) that caused mass chaos, evacuations, damage, and social unrest. I can't remember why I picked Ebola as the virus, but the story was meant to be hard SF and I needed a nasty virus. I finished the first draft by the end of 2005 in almost exactly a year, mostly between customers at an office job, and edited it in 2006 at the same job. Technically, I was paid for writing it before it was ever released. I took what I now see as some super bad advice in the final editing and cut one character, John, who was replaced in a later revision years later. From the end of 2006 to 2008 or so it was a free download from my website and print editions were on Lulu. Then I took the free download down and put it on Kindle. It got a big bump in sales during the 2013 West African Ebola epidemic and I got some credit for predicting the lackadaisical international response to Ebola during that outbreak. Two followup short stories, John's Story and Escape, finished up that storyline in two different collections (Aftermath and Ruination), but they were done years after Plague and were 3rd person instead of 1st and had stories by other people in them. The series wasn't planned out very well and was allowed to die with Escape. Every mistake that could have been made was made, although I still had some more to make and still do. Now, all three stories are in one volume called Plague: Moss and John and I'm only three years from Plague's 20th anniversary. Maybe, I'll do something special for the 20th anniversary and maybe I'll just let it lay. Not sure yet.

But this is a character profile, not a book profile, so on to Moss.

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This is 8th in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at the only alien race I've created so far rather than an individual.

The alien race in question, Those-Who-Absorb-All, only has one appearance in my fiction, The Last Stop, but they have a major role in the Disturbance Timeline overall. There's little lore on their background in The Last Stop. The scenes that feature any of them, of which the water tower operator He-Who-Pushes-Buttons-Quickly is the main character from their species, are from their POV and they're dealing with immediate events. Therefore, a lot of this profile will be information from personal notes and the Disturbance Timeline itself.

Those-Who-Absorb-All enter the Disturbance Timeline in 3633. This is ~500 years after humans have 'died off' in the Solar System due to poisoned food products as far as the 'history' is concerned (it was actually a mad scientist turned mass killer who literally kills all of humanity in the Solar System which will be detailed in a short story, eventually). It is also ~500 years before The Ship and the Protectors arrive at The Last Stop and Those-Who-Absorb-All enter the fictional narrative. See profile #5 or the timeline on my website for reference.

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This is 9th in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at one of my newest recurring villains, Leland Weathertree.

Leland Weathertree is the main antagonist in the Stopping Leland Campaign. This campaign was originally created in the Neverwinter MMO Foundry in 2013 and was redone in 2023 with Unlimited Adventures, or FRUA, a 30 year-old construction kit released by SSI that has had several hundred modules made for it over the years. The original Foundries were lost in 2019 when Cryptic shut down the Foundries for the Neverwinter and Star Trek MMOs.

Leland himself is the spoiled son of Neverwinter Councilman Angus Weathertree. He is a physically fit, well kept, blond man in his early 20's, but his age has never been explicitly stated. He is heavily based on Dr. Frankenstein and uses his father's corrupt guards to help him commit and hide crimes that range from kidnapping to murder to fuel his strange experiments. Angus successfully protects Leland from the consequences of his crimes until Leland starts to get too bold, bringing more attention his way than can be explained or bribed away.

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This is 10th in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at my very newest recurring villain, President Peter Dicks.

President Peter Dicks is one of the antagonists in Dr. Lovedeath or: How I Was Made to Roll Up My Sleeve and Love the Jab. If any of the characters can be called that or protagonists in that story, which at its root is an emotional upwelling from the abject display of mental illness that was caused by the 'pandemic' and the deaths caused by the 'cure(s)', among other things. And the censorship. You know they shadow block this shit. At any rate, the characters are very real and I try to explore every angle in this piece of satire, much like I did in The Taming of the Pansy with those themes. Therefore, they're all characters, but who is who as far as pro or antagonist would depend largely on the reader. I'm just an observer as a writer goes, and the story is my account of how the pandemic felt and looked in a story.

On that note, President Peter Dicks is a loathsome, scandal ridden, dictator of a President who is under the control of...someone...but certainly not himself or the country, and has only one goal: to profit from the horse worm pandemic that has swept the world. His background is not explored and little attention is even paid to how he looks, because his actions matter, not his looks. He openly peddles CrookPharm's stock. He can't spell 'moral', much less give a definition. His hamster Winky, however, has millions spent on it so it can live another month. Or two.

He has few, if any, redeeming qualities and purposely uses people as pawns just as he is used by an unidentified puppet master, and happily goes along with both. Some people may be tempted to associate him with some of our own bad Presidents. You should. He's all of them along with all the other bad leaders that have ever existed. He isn't an 'everyman'. Peter Dicks is an 'everybadpolitician'.

He doesn't make many appearances in Dr. Lovedeath, but he's an omnipresent force that makes the story what it is. The followup to Dr. Lovedeath, Of Course You Know This Means War, coming 'sometime', will be the President's second appearance.

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