Met My Male Main Character!

Finally! Vampire Baron is in the house! Literally. He just showed up. He wasn't supposed to be here for a day or so, at dinner. Instead, he decided he would stand in my female main character's open doorway as she read off some prose ... dramatically. She might even have said something about bosoms. They had a laugh. Sparks flew. Witticisms were bouncing off the stone walls. It was great. He just appeared like that, and he was fully formed. I didn't know he would be so funny.

This feels like a break, in a way, because I was sweating my heroine. I wasn't sure if I had a fully fledged character or something in a dress that just reacted to what happened. Then I looked at one line on her character card and I knew where to go with her. It said "She's the girl who goes to find the source of a noise!" That says a lot about her. You must understand. To quote Scream, she's not "some big-breasted girl ... running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door." The reason that big breasted girl goes up the stairs is because if she doesn't, you don't have a horror movie. I mean, are those big breasted girls ever very brave? No. Not until they get half their clothes off and hear a noise. All of a sudden, they're Lara Croft.

The reason my girl goes to find that noise is because she's not superstitious. She doesn't believe in the ghost. She knows that darn maid has it in for her. In other words, she has many reasons to inspect that sound or that white cloth that flipped around the corner, or to approach the window that sounds like it's being scratched. That white thing out there could be many things besides a ghost and she wants to know, she wants to stop the superstitious tittle tattle. It makes her smart and brave. And smart, brave people are always interesting.