Who Will I Be Today?

Who will I be today?

Will I be deputy U.S. marshal in Arizona looking to make a fortune speculating in silver while falling in love with the corrupt sheriff's girl?

Will I be a degenerate saloon keeper scheming how to make sure I stay top dog in a gold camp in Black Hills?

Will I be a scholarly professor pulled away from my classroom to head up a top secret security team of a top secret ancient society because I'm really a lycanthrope?

Will I be an Unseelie Prince, immortal and fae, that is determined to become King of all, human and fae, Seelie and Unseelie, Dark and Light, no matter the cost as I wage a war across the planet and in and out of dimensions?

Will I be an aging pop singer, suddenly thrust into a world he doesn't understand, trying to lead a motley band of survivors against a plague that turns people into mindless zombies?

Will I be an embittered and skeptical paranormal researcher and writer who finally finds himself in the most haunted building of his life, and soon will be fighting just for his sanity.*

This is actually a short-list of my characters that I write. I picked just one from each of my collaborative stories. I often throw in a villain to play off against if I'm writing the hero and vice-versa. Playing more than one character in the same story allows me to shift point of view very naturally from post to post and move the story forward in ways that I find more dramatic. Who will I be today? The answer is often all of the above as I move a block of the action into place to surprise and hopefully delight my fellow travelers in fiction.

*I swear this only has a passing similarity to the Stephen King short story 1408 which he published in 1999 which I have not read. The 2007 movie definitely came out well after I started writing my 666 West End Avenue tales of haunting horror with my co-writers.