Chloe....

There you have it.  The name of the first character I am creating.  She is complicated, and I am not through with her yet!  Since I decided to approach this as an exercise in both blogging and novel development, I must say it is a much tougher task to take on.  I could blog endlessly about the mundane happenings in my daily life (which aren't really that mundane, since I like to have a lot of humor in my life), but I get that some people don't get that or want to hear about it, which is why I chose the word mundane.

Word choice - as I am going through this character developing exercise, I see the word choice is of the utmost importance!  When other people read your words they take on whole new meanings and characterizations.  I'm always disappointed when I read a book, and I have the character all filled out in my brain, then they make a movie about the book, and the character is not the one I read about.

I think that is one reason the Harry Potter series was so successful.  The characters on the screen and the characters in the book really felt the same to me.  The Twilight Saga falls short of this.  Bella, I think, is close to what I expected from the book, but other characters, not so much.  We'll see now that she is a vampire, if the transformation is worth it, and at least the author is having a say in it.  The Vampire Diaries, well that series was written a long time ago, and the book and the show might as well be day and night, because they are different stories.  Just like True Blood & The Sookie Stackhouse novels are so different.  (It's hard to keep up when you've read the books way ahead and they are just going off into the ether with the story-line.)

I will keep these things in mind for my own stories.  I will want to make sure if my stories are good enough for the big time, that I get to exercise a level of control on what my story becomes.  I've started reading more writers' blogs and websites, which quickly educates you on how easy it is to lose your own story.  I think that is a sad situation, and one that in a digital age will be important to learn to navigate.

Well, I'm off now.  Chloe is still a work-in-progress, just like me :)