My Ideas: My Muse

I actually planned this entry before I even started this blog, and in fact I partially arranged my schedule explicitly so I would have the "My Ideas" section on Fridays for said entry. Why? Well, today's entry is about one of my oldest ongoing characters. And today is, well, her birthday.

That's right, I do occasionally figure out the birthdays for my characters. And it's a good thing that I started the blog this year, or I won't be able to use this schtick until 2012.

I'm actually breaking one of my rules a bit here. The character in question definitely surpasses the "100 pages" rule I elaborated on in my first entry. Over the 16 or so years since I made this character, I never wrote up a design document about a video game involving her. I have, however, planned one television series, came up with a quick episode guide for the first few seasons, elaborated on the years of her life after the television series (which I might remind you does not yet exist) ends, including several adventures taking up dozens of pages. I then started an episode guide for a second television series, and this time I included not only an episode guide but also a detailed description of the episodes themselves. All 100 of them. In the meantime, I wrote several novels in the 50-60K word range, including one starring her, and at least two that directly or indirectly reference her.

So I passed up the "investment" level by 500 pages or so. But I'll get around it by not giving any details. Frankly, she's too important for me to ignore.

The character's name, at least, I think I can give out. She's named Dot Fox because, well, she's a fox. That is, she's a literal fox, a talking cartoon fox. I originally made the character as a character for the role-playing game called Toon, where you roleplay a cartoon character. At the time, she wasn't much more than an experiment in the rules. While the game is all about having fun and enjoying the triumph of defeat and the agony of victory, it's still far too easy to make a character with a decent fight skill and just beat your way to totally pointless victory. I wanted to make a character with an awful fighting skill but a number of other, far more creative skills to make up for it.

Dot was the result. After noticing that the rules for disarming traps also let you built things, I wanted to play a mad scientist. So Dot became a super-genius because of a rules glitch. She became a ten year old girl because anachronisms are inherently funny. And she became a talking fox because it was a game called Toon. How boring is playing a human in that situation?

Dot's original gimmick, using elaborate, Rube-Goldberg style traps, lasted about halfway through the first adventure. At that point, I got annoyed with the adventure at hand (I usually run these things for a reason,) said "Screw it," and had Dot transform all of her equipment into one giant war machine of death. This became Dot's main modus operandi from hereon. Of course, this is Toon, where failure was both an option and highly encouraged, and things tended to go very wrong when they did. Thus, her machinery often went wrong, attacked the wrong things, fell apart in an instant, or exploded. This also became part of Dot's main modus operandi.

But her career as a Toon character was short, because I usually was stuck running those things instead, and my friends all lost interest eventually anyway. But as you might have noticed, I hate giving up on a character, and Dot quickly immigrated, along with some of my other characters from the game. Initially, she was supposed to be a sidekick to another character, an even younger child who just happened to be a robotic instrument of destruction himself. This relationship persisted as I created an actual back story for Dot, along with an entire setting to put her and her friends into.

It's here that the description must get vaguer, so I'll let up on the details. Here is a basic summary of the original television show, should it ever exist, and Dot's back story. Dot is still a ten year old talking fox, a super-genius, and a brilliant inventor with an unfortunate tendency to make dangerous experiments. She lived on a planet entirely inhabited by other talking animals and faerie creatures, though most of them were more harmless and traditional. Dot's actions eventually caused her to get banished from her home planet, and after months of wandering her universe, she ended up getting a job on a planet of robots, where she canonically met her sidekick. Yes, I switched that around by this point. Most of the story involved her getting used to a new place to live, a surrogate family, and actual school. It was a classic story of alienation in a school environment, plus robots and mad scientists.

It was around here that Dot started to connect to me as more than a character. Part of it was that I HATED elementary school. I went to this well at least one more time in my designs, but that examples even more in the investment category, so we'll ignore it for now. Anyway, eventually, I moved Dot out of school, and soon out of that environment entirely. I'm not sure why I did so, save for my general desire to advance the plots of my stories instead of getting settled into an unending rut. I put Dot aside for a while, figuring that I would come back to her in a few years.

But she wouldn't go away.

I made a new plot about her, a few years older and in a crisis of identity. That ended without any satisfaction for me or her. So I made another story. This lasted for years, and at this point my plans to age the characters actually put the character at the age of eighteen, and fairly consistently in a human form for reasons I won't elaborate on now. So I thought it would be amusing to put her in college. Then I put her aside again, content to summarize her college adventures again.

Four years later, I finished writing 100 episodes about her college adventures. Mercifully, after that was resolved, I avoided the itch to write another ongoing story about her, but it has only been about two years since I finished them. And Dot's life has continued in my mind, it just hasn't gotten that extensive. What I know about this character disturbs even me. I know about her allergies, her paranoias, her goals, and her paranoias about her goals. But I'm still learning about her. I never even had to write in her voice until about a year ago, for example.

In short, Dot's become a permanent fixture in my brain. I can use her personality to bounce ideas off of. I can hear her criticizing me or offering suggestions when I make a mistake. In short, I can sum up her position in one word: Muse.

Or possibly early onset dissociative identity disorder. It's probably the former, though.

It still boggles me that the character reached this point; I'm still not entirely certain why it's her. She's a role model in many ways, of course. She's incredibly smart, unbelievably talented, cleverly sarcastic, all the things I'd love to be. But she's also like me in some of the less admirable ways. I was briefly worried she was becoming a Mary Sue character, in fact, when I realized no Mary Sue is this neurotic. She's the opposite of me in terms of ambition. I know exactly what I want out of life; I just haven't figured out how to get it. She, on the other hand, is a ball of chaos, constantly questioning her identity. She's ideal in a crisis, but whenever things quiet down, she panics. Notice that pattern even in her back story. I think the personalities work well together; she gives me another viewpoint for my weaknesses, and she provides the motivation for my own storytelling, which obviously helps her, since she can't "live" without them. It's a bizarre mentality, but it's helped more than it hurt, I think.

Plus, I always wanted to write a pilot or a screenplay, just in case the video game thing didn't work. I've got about two decades worth of ideas now. I'd rather work with video games, but I can't stagnate. After all, Dot was willing to traverse universes to find herself, and if I can't be inspired by my muse, who can I be inspired by.

Happy birthday, Dot. Many happy returns, especially since otherwise would technically mean I was dead.