I sat down to write about her with only in her first name in my head, a pen, and an empty notebook of paper. Before I knew it, I had 10 scribbled pages about a two hundred year old immortal named Charity McCullen and her pre-immortal student Gabrielle Chalmers. This vingette needed a title. After trying several on, I came up with Of Benefactors and Angels. 'Benefaction' is a synonym for 'charity' and Gabriel was the name of an angel, only my character was female, hence Gabrielle instead of Gabriel. An interesting little ditty, but nothing particularly good and nothing I wanted to share with the Internet community. So I stuck the notebook back into my bag and forgot about it.

Then final exams came around and I had to turn in a story for my fiction writing class. We weren't allowed to do science fiction, but I was hell-bent on writing it any way I could. So I got the idea to write about two girls at a science-fiction convention. Since I already had the characters, I thought it would be fun to de-sci-fi Charity and Gabrielle and use them. Charity wouldn't allow it, but Gabby didn't have any objections. I put a pair of ceramic fangs in her mouth and let her have the run of the con. Pretty soon she was being courted by her best friend Jason Rosenberg (of the Clan Rosenberg) and harassed by her seventeen-year-old sister Andrea. I called it We All Live Forever and it's yet another one I never want to look at again.

Winter break is upon us now, and I'm in Las Vegas for three days. I had just started the Tomorrow People creative list and thought it high time that I write something for it. I worked out a plan for something involving the TPs and someone who could see into the future and. . . well, I can't really remember what all I worked out since I ended up using something entirely different. In the early draft the story was called The Delphi Project later to be changed to The Atropos Project. It started out with some mysterious voices and then an introduction to a new TP named Robbie Chalmers. Ah-ha, same last name as Gabby, so they must be related. But where did Andrea fit into this whole thing? Should I even use her?

I'd like to blame this next part on being one of those "I've been awake too long" ideas, but I don't think it was. I was watching The Secret World Of Alex Mack and thought it might be neat to have sisters sharing a room, one of whom was Immortal the other a Tomorrow Person. They'd have to keep their respective secrets from each other. This is when I decided to make Andrea into a Tomorrow Person. I still can't decide if I like the idea or not. But, there's no reason not to run with it since many of my seemingly stupid ideas turn out to be swans.

School started again and I turned the first ten pages of Atropos into my new fiction class. Meanwhile, I started trying to fit Andrea into the story. This entailed me dragging Of Benefactors and Angels out of the backpack. I read it over and decided it was just the first part of a three-part work. I named the first piece Innocence and developed a rough outline of the other two parts which I called Sufferance and Deliverance. Then my class got around to critiquing Atropos. One of their biggest complaints was that by the time the story really started, Robbie was dead. They liked him too much and refused to let me kill him. I explained that his death was the motivation for his sister, who hadn't yet appeared in the story.

When I got home that night, I decided to write Andrea into the story. I started typing. One page and many hours later I realised I was writing the story, not my character. Not good. My character wasn't talking to me or maybe I wasn't listening hard enough. I took Andrea aside and tried to figure out what the problem was. First thing I discovered is that her name was Rachel, not Andrea. Second is that her last name (and that of her sibs as well) was Caplan, not Chalmers. Third is that Robbie was alive but in a coma and she really missed him. Stories work so much better when the characters tell them.

Then I'm taking a break from writing to beta-read a new story by my friend Selma McCrory. She's got this Immortal named Greer and the Tomorrow People mixed into the same story: my two favourite fandoms combined. This made me remember Charity. So I asked Selma if Greer had need of a mentor or something. We had just started making plans to write in the same universe, wouldn't it be great if our characters knew each other. Selma agreed to add a scene with Charity into her story. In my head, Charity woke up and started talking. Two new parts of OB&A were created, Remembrance and Existence. I learned a lot more about Gabby and her family, including something incredibly interesting about Rachel: she is deaf.

I don't know if we'll ever hear from Jason Rosenberg again. I wrote a dozen different drafts of Sufferance, which I foolishly thought would be about Gabrielle's side of the The Atropos Project. All of them turned out phenomonally boring. Jason appeared in some and not in others. Rachel appeared in some. I think even Andrea appeared in one. When I finally drafted Sufferance it was about Charity. Go figure. I can't stand the vingette, but I'm keeping it until I can make it better.

On my wall at home, above the computer, is a dry-erase board with three generations of Caplans charted out on it. The youngest generation is Immortal Gabrielle, comatose Robbie, and telepathic Rachel. They have a cousin named Aaron who is probably going to end up becoming a vampire if this trend keeps up. There's enough on that board in birth dates and death dates to write several novels. Only time will tell if the characters talk that much.

© March 1996