Outdated Characters

 Most of the big story ideas I have are very old - dating back to High School and college. I steadily build on them over the years until I actually get a chance to write them. 

But this has brought a strange problem along with it. Those ideas came about before my world was properly developed. What does that mean? None of those ideas were created to fit the cultures that came later. 

That's not a huge problem for the stories I haven't written yet. I just have to fix them when I start writing. It's more complicated for stories that I wrote a while ago, and plan to re-work. Even for these, I'm only planning to keep some of the plot points and characters.  Most of it will be trashed. But what really bugs me is the character designs. A huge number of my main characters I've designed and drawn before they fit into the culture. So they're not the correct race! That's how Katani ended up blonde. 

I'm going to have to completely redesign Clara (she needs a new name too) who was the main character of my wyvern story. I'm still trying to find out what to do with Arith and Ginger, since I have such a strong image of them in my head. I'll have to redesign Ginger. Since she's royalty, she really should be the race of her country. I need to reach a decision about Arith though. I may do a cheat I've used once or twice in the past, and make him mixed-race. I like doing this anyway, because my family is so mixed.

I'm leaning toward Arith's story as the next thing I write. It will have very little of the original story in left, but I have some good new ideas for it.  

I want to redo Clara's story too, but I don't think I can do it justice until I at least see Africa with my own eyes. 

 

 There's another story I've been thinking about recently. It's not the characters that have fallen behind in the world development, but the plot. I still like the characters and some of the minor story points. But I think I need a new angle on the whole story. The original idea came when we were learning about the Underground Railroad, and I really wanted to write something about that. But what I did with it back then no longer feels like it would work.

Sifaka lemurs