I never throw anything away, and it my characters never just feel like something that I put on paper. What kind of writer would you be if there wasn’t some love between you and your characters. I love the villains as much as I love the heroes, because a lot of the time it is just the exploration of a viewpoint and an idea from a different position.
The anti-hero, the grey hat, and all the variations on a theme, where you move away from simplistic depictions of philosophies, are for me what are really worth exploring.The Gorgon and Zark are characters that have been with from early childhood – a space knight and an evil disfigured scientist – are both pretty archetypal, and for me they had real soul; they were part of my imaginative landscape for a long time, and I have plans to place them more centrally into the mythos I am building from several worlds that I have been creating.
To be able to come back for me says something about where I am at. Sometimes you get part of an idea and it doesn’t quite reach the state of completeness that is needed to craft the story the characters demand, and so you wait, and you put it away in a file, and at some point you will catch the right note to be able to sing the whole song. At some point, all these disparate ideas will collect themselves into a story with real momentum and the story will tell itself to me.
Anyone who reads anything I write here, I hope it strikes you right, and you get how much went into the creation, and that you appreciate the execution. Whether that be the case, or not, I enjoyed doing it.