Day Two {Male Author}

Day two on Lerowen's Fifteen Day Challenge list deals with your favorite male author. I peered at the question and pondered the question and formulated tentative answers to the question without success. I might say C.S. Lewis, but Jenny already said Lewis and I hate to be redundant. I might say James Fenimore Cooper because his The Last of the Mohicans is one of my all-time favorite books, but currently that is the only book of his that I have read, so that might sound silly. I might say Charles Dickens, but one has to be in the right mood to enjoy Dickens. So the result?

I have no favorite male author. My favorite books are my comfort books, and they are all, I believe, written by female authors; most of the other books on my shelves are ones that I very much enjoy, but not ones that I would call "favorites." Or perhaps I have so many favorites that I can't dig through the heap to find one that I could call my really, really favorite. What I read depends on my mood, so I thought I would give my favorite male authors based on that.

for a cheerful, sunny day

Dickens. He isn't the sort of fellow you read on a gloomy winter day when you're in a gloomy winter mood, unless you like that feeling of depression and cheerlessness; but when I am feeling particularly "up," he is at least one of my favorite authors to read. He is quite verbose, which annoys some people, but I love his caustic wit and his sparkling casts of characters. The reader must trek through a great deal of darkness to reach the end, but I like that in most of his works, there's light when you come out of the tunnel.

what I have read

A Christmas Carol
The Pickwick Papers
Martin Chuzzlewit
Little Dorrit

for a rainy autumn day

C.S. Lewis. Despite my desire not to copy Jenny, I can't give a list of favorite authors without including Lewis. Again, I have to be in the right mood for him; I have to be able to handle the otherworldly longing, the mix of sorrow and joy, that threads through many of his works. I can't simply pick up Till We Have Faces any day of the week without feeling the need to cry because of the beauty and reality of the truths that Lewis paints. But it would not be true to say that C.S. Lewis is not still a favorite, because of more so than despite the painful loveliness in his books.

what I have read

The Chronicles of Narnia (7)
The Space Trilogy (3)
Till We Have Faces
The Screwtape Letters
The Great Divorce
Mere Christianity
An Experiment in Criticism

Day One {Favorite Character}

I am really and truly belated on Lerowen's challenge, I know, for which I have the excuse that my blog was booked for the first two weeks of August. However, I have been reading other people's replies and waiting eagerly for a chance to join in the fun, and since I have some free time, I'm now hustling to catch up with everyone else.

For those of you who are not aware of the 15 Day Challenge being hosted by Lerowen over at "Eat...Sleep...Write," the point is to post an answer to the question assigned to that day. This was supposed to begin on August 1 and go to August 15, but you could always be like me and pretend to have an excuse to join really late. So here is my answer to day one's question.

your favorite character you have written

This, like many of the others on the list, is a hard question. If asked several months ago the answer would have been simple enough: Justin King, my main character from Wordcrafter. But as I have progressed in The White Sail's Shaking I have grown more in love with the characters of that story, even Tip, who used to be so ornery that all I wanted to do was shake him and box his ears. I've fallen under the spell of my work in progress - and the spell was a long time in the making! - and so the answer is no longer cut and dry. Therefore, instead of being able to give the definitive answer that I'm sure the question is meant to have, I am forced to dawdle around and do a great deal of hemming and hahing before I come round to the point.

Justin

I love Justin. I think that despite my growing affection for Tip and Charlie and the rest of the White Sail's cast, Justin King will always be first simply because he is a dear. Oh, I certainly had some trouble with him; I couldn't even figure out his name in the first scene I wrote. But it wasn't the trouble that Tip gave me; Justin never sat in a corner and sulked. It was just that Justin wasn't like either Ethan Prince (Wordcrafter) or Charlie Bent (The White Sail's Shaking) and so he didn't come ambling into the story and ask if I had any tea to give him. Justin's shy, and so he took coaxing - but the coaxing paid off, and I now have a character who is, as perhaps only fellow writers will understand, a friend.

Tip

There could not be two characters more different than Justin King and Tip Brighton, which is probably what caused me so much trouble with Tip in the first place. Tip came to me with an occupation and a Christian name. Tip was a midshipman. Tip was a midshipman on the USS Constitution. Tip was a bully.

Tip did not want to be a bully. Tip did not want to be on the Constitution. Tip did not even want to tell me his last name. If you simply boil it down, Tip did not want to cooperate. And he continued to not want to cooperate all throughout November and NaNoWriMo, and, consequently, the first 50,000 words of my novel. I hated him with a passion; I wanted to hit him upside the head and then shake him and demand that he answer my questions and be a good, self-respecting character like Justin.

I don't really know when he started to shape up, but we sorted out our differences in the - well, the middle, not the end. He got his way on a few points: he is no longer a bully and I switched him to the Enterprize instead of the Constitution. And I managed to figure out his last name and get him to cooperate, or myself to cooperate with him. The more I write, the more attached to him I become.

So the result of the examination is that amid the large cast of characters I love, these main ones stand out as two of my favorites because of how juxtaposed they are to each other. They are different in background (Justin is an only child and now an orphan; Tip has a large family in which he feels unaccepted), temperament (Justin is shy and reclusive; Tip is volatile and intrusive), and friends (Justin's best friend is his polar opposite; Tip's is so close to him in temperament that sparks fly on a regular basis), and so I have poured energy into them both in different ways. I love 'em both, and I love Ethan and Charlie and Pierre and Jamie and Darkwood... Nearly all of my characters could have been in this post, really, but I have already stretched this question much farther than it ought to have gone, so I will save them for another time.