Story Building - character

Alas, I have absolutely no excuse for my dearth of posting lately. I have spent the free periods of my evening catching up with my reader and only remembering this blog, if at all, when I've been headed off to bed. And it's a shame, too, because I've known for several days what I want to post about next. Or I should say, whom - Illunova, whose surname I've forgotten, if I ever gave her one.

Illunova is a character without a setting. I did try to create a story around her once, one I had planned to write for NaNo, but the story never quite hung together and held my attention the way a NaNo story must. For one thing, it was sci-fi, and I always want to get too far into the scientific and technical details of a story, even when they're completely unnecessary. As a wise author once said, we don't need to know the functioning and history of the combustion engine when a character takes a ride in a car. And I was able to ignore the science for the recent short story I wrote enough to get the story itself out; that choice was not roundly approved, but it's all a lot of hand-waving anyway.

So Illunova. She's a favorite character of mine, and once upon a time I wrote a character interview with her. But it wasn't in the format of the interviews I've been posting here; I just showed up as myself in a dream of hers and started asking questions. She is by far the most intimidating character I have; if it were in any possible, I'm sure she would leap off the page and demand to know what I was planning to do with her. If she didn't like the answer, she would take drastic measures.

Illunova is a very defective human being (if fully human she is), almost completely lacking in human empathy. Part of the reason I had such a difficult time with her was that I was not sure what story I wanted to tell around her; I don't want to write a story where she finally learns to open up and make friends and fall in love. It would not be true to her. Instead, I want to write something where the story is fundamentally about her relationship with her own self and her own damaged psyche.

Illunova was raised to be a soldier - not the stereotypical "perfect soldier" because she could not carry out the subtler functions of war and international strife, but a weapon on the battlefield. She is an exceedingly efficient person, and she has very little concept of the dignity or value of human life. She is wholly loyal to her country even as she's aware of all they have done to make her life what it is. She is not an extremely intelligent person, but she's adept at finding patterns in apparent chaos and thinking quickly. She has very little ability to read people, and she's aware of this lack. This obviously cuts against her ability to see patterns in social situations - ah, now here's an idea.

She was created as part of an experiment, the details of which remain unclear to me. But I'm realizing that the experiment is continuing, and this time the big bad masters are trying to create someone who is as clever and loyal and skilled a fighter as Illunova, while also being able to read people. Illunova could never be a spy or diplomat, and there's a good possibility that she stands to be phased out. And, ah! There's another soldier created in the same experiment as she, who's turned out even worse, and he is very angry at this development. The They in charger keep him around for now because he is a true genius, but in age of the kind of tech they have, genius is over-rated. They would rather have people they can send into the field.

And so it is not the people looking to replace Nova (as I affectionately call her) who become her enemy in this still-unclear story of hers; it's this fellow who wants to wreak deranged vengeance on the powers that be. Is this perhaps her last mission? Does she think it will be? How does she come to terms with her inevitable termination? I fear this is a story too big for me to write, but better to try than not.