“State your name.”
“Alonia
Mathar.”
“Age
in Earth years?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Race?”
“Human,
I think.”
Inwardly,
I winced. Did I really just say that out loud?
Great.
The
secretary raised a heavily penciled eyebrow at me. “You think.
Ms. Mathar, you either are or are not a race. And what exactly you are should be obvious.” I
sighed. “Let’s try this again. Race.”
I
hesitated only slightly. “Human.”
“There
you go. Was that so hard?”
Perhaps.
---
That's an excerpt from the beginning of the novel I'm currently working on--Flying with Horus (tentative title), my first foray into science-fiction. I started writing it for the class I took from Brandon Sanderson this past Winter semester, and it's been a lot of fun.
However, Alonia came to be quite a bit before that. I joined a play-by-post campaign (where you are on an online forum, and each person posts what their character is doing. Your character can react to the other characters, and there's a Game Master (GM) to control it all) that was set in the Lovecraft Universe. Sadly, the campaign died after a while.
Alonia was a type of magic user who was able to control metal and degeneration (meaning she could make things rot and decay... a slightly odd combination, I know). She came from a planet where magic users were killed outright, so when she had her Awakening (rather explosively... she killed her ex-boyfriend in the process), she ran to preserve her life. During the campaign, she was on the search for mystical towers of knowledge where she would be able to learn to better control her magic. She's also a bit of a jerk who doesn't really like people, and her eyes change color according to her emotions.
When that campaign died, Alonia sat quietly in a corner of my mind for a long while until Sanderson's class. How the idea and her change came about was pretty funny (at least, I think so).
How Sanderson's class worked was that we split into writing groups according to the genre of what we were writing. The first group was a Science-Fiction group (the only one in the whole class), and they needed a couple more girls to join in. On a whim, I jumped up and joined, and my first thought was: What the heck am I going to write?
I came up with a plot line and I had been trying to fit in another character into that line--a technomancer that worked as an engineer on a ship was a fascinating idea to me. However, that character just didn't quite fit into the story. I thought and thought for days, trying to make it work, but it wasn't working, until I glanced through my list of characters.
Alonia fit the description perfectly. She's enough of a novice with her magic, and enough of a jerk to fit perfectly in the protagonist role. In the world(s) of Flying With Horus, she's a Hyperspace Mechanic--fitting for someone who can control metal. She's still a jerk (it just works, trust me), but she's close friends with an alien named Zuril--he's based off the character I was original going to make my protagonist. I kept her eye color changing with her emotions (it's a lot of fun to play with), but how she got her power is a different story entirely... and I'm not going to spoil anything. You'll have to read it when it comes out. :)
