More about the Doorkeeper

Since I posted about Laura for my Character Encounter this month, I feel like talking a bit more about her and why I've not written with her despite her awesomeness.

You see, as Laura, she has only been playing with my head for a few months, but she is based on a character in the Rizkaland Legends who I had written quite a bit about, and whose name I had, at one time, intended to use as my pen name. Sandra Elizabeth N____ the Kentaladaya. (Though she would go by Sandita for the first several books) She was a four-dimensional being with the ability to condense part of herself down to three and affect the three dimensional worlds. And as much as I loved the concept of her, she eventually got too complicated and was giving me headaches, so I took her out about two years ago.

But I had built much of the plot of the Rizkaland Legends around Sandra's world-traveling ability, so I while I did appreciate not having to fit my mind around her, I did miss having someone with her abilities.

So I kept bouncing between the decision to take her out and the desire to put her back in. I had almost convinced myself that she wasn't needed, but then I started researching the sci-fi genre in preparation for my NaNo, I found out about River Song in Doctor Who, and she reminded me a lot about Sandra. And plot surrounding Sandra started swirling around in my head again.

So I decided to go back to my ORIGINAL concept for Sandra, before she became a four dimensional, and just have her be a girl who could see and manipulate the doors between worlds. I changed a few things about her origin (which had become a bit weird to say the least) and her hair (which had always been weird) and to get the complications fully out of my head, I decided to change her name. I chose Laura because I had always liked the name and had never given it to one of my characters.

So while I have done tons of writing with Sandra, this month's CE was my first real experimentation with Laura.

Since the Rizkaland Legends deals a lot with travel between worlds, someone who can control this does come in handy. And since time doesn't flow the same between worlds, it messes a lot with her aging (just as world traveling messed with the ages of the Pevensies in Narnia). While you're most likely to meet her somewhere between her early teens to late twenties, there are a few adventures where she's physically in her eighties or barely three. It messes with her physical appearance in other ways as well, particularly with the color of her eyes and hair. While their natural colors are blue-gray and light brown, she's been sighted with brown eyes and green-striped hair before. Luck of the draw you know.

Her personality depends a lot on how old she is and how many of her is in the room at a given time. She's naturally curious, which is why, whenever she sees a shiny door (and to her, doors are very shiny - she can see them, remember), she just has to walk through them and find out where they go. But on the other side of the coin, she's very timid, and doesn't actually care much for the adventures she finds herself involved in. However, as she has these adventures, she does gain confidence, and comes to enjoy them for quite some time. Older versions of her seem a bit tired of them, though it doesn't hold back her enthusiasm at all. She has a quirky sense of humor, and has a great memory and is a surprisingly good actress.

She doesn't like taking credit for anything she does, and especially doesn't like anything being written down, especially if it's a spot where it's very possible that an earlier version of her might have had the opportunity to read it. There are a few deeds that she allows, but only brief mentions so that her younger self would know to be there and have an idea of what she did. She also usually allows her seemingly darker deeds to be written down, such as when she kidnaps Amber and Granite from their real parents. This is for encouragement for her younger self. Good usually always comes from everything she does, but she really doesn't like causing pain to anyone, especially not to people close to her. Another thing she does is go by another name on her adventures so that people don't recognize her. She just informed me that the last time she was on earth, she was really old and went by the name Mrs. Macready.

In the Character Encounter, she mentioned a Lucy. Unfortunately, I can't tell you who Lucy is. She's someone very close to Laura though, since she's one of the few people she routinely mentions by name, but she never actually tells anyone how they're related. Readers will probably not find out until what is currently book 7. Which is currently the last book in the series.

Never fear folks, Rizkaland isn't the only series that Laura plagues! She's also known to show up in the Mikada Chronicles and the Flights of the Eagle. While she isn't mentioned yet to my knowledge, she's behind the scenes in Infiltration and The New Division. She might show up in Bookania ... and probably several other of my series. She's a versatile person like that.

At the moment, she's been talking about a complete spin-off series of her own, though I wouldn't begin it until after I wrote and published book 7 of Rizkaland. I haven't yet decided what the series would be called, but I do know that the books themselves would have titles such as Door to Lintooalintae, Door to Colluna, and Door to the Rowa. They would be mostly from her point of view, and would chronicle the adventures in between those in my other official series.

And for some odd reason, she has absolutely no problem with me writing about her. She claims that it's because she has told herself that she isn't allowed to read my books until she has passed the adventures they're about.

Sorry if this is dull, boring, and not what you'd like to read. I just felt like organizing some of my thoughts on this interesting person and putting them out in the open for people to comment upon.

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Also, for those of you visiting this post for the first time due to the Silm Awards - I would like to note that this was something I wrote back in the early days of Laura's redevelopment, and while she's still nowhere near as downright weird as Sandra had become, I've found some more eccentricities  in Laura's character and personhood. While nothing drastic has changed, just note that this was just an initial summary of my concept.

Some posts you can read where I shared snippets or chapters that featured Laura:
First chapter of Lady Dragon, Tela Du
Some Snippets from the Worth of a King
The Character Encounter I mentioned in this post.
Some Freewriting I did that later was rewitten to fit in LDTD.