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One of my characters – one of the ones who I’ve always thought was fantastic, but just never wanted to fit into anything – has turned out to be female. I know that sounds a little odd – you’d think the first thing you’d notice about a character would be their gender, or absence of it – but no, I’m actually quite bad with working out genders. In fact I’ve a whole list of characters who I messed up by writing first as male and then going, oh heck wait, and realising they were chicks. Or vice versa. See Regina “Harmonica” Carter, of Harmonica + Gig and Alleluia Bottle, of the Ave Pasifica/Mizzenmast stories for the most obvious examples.

I started writing Morality Jones as a room mate for Valery BW. He was a fanatical and amazingly ugly Irish Catholic boy who had visions that told him to do crazy-ass but somehow inspiring shit. Last night I realised that he was actually a fairly decent looking chick from a fictional Cape Verde, who had been cursed by five bad women. Yeah, I know, my brain is a weird place, but they are the same character. I simply got it wrong the first time.

So now I have a main character for a story. I know what the story is too – and it’s novel length. Morality has been cursed five times by five powerful women who are part of the Honorable Ladies Society. One woman is an illusionist, another a powerful sorcerer, another a warrior, another a genius and the last one leads the Ladies of Temperance. Anyway Morality has to cure her curses by killing all these women and to do this she has to find the right people who can help her.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting, I know who some of these people are already.

One is Duc Benoir Plantaganet, a French noble who ran during the French Revolution and now is a tram conductor. There are a pair of twins, illusionists, called Samantha and Sophie, who claim they are the best illusionists who’ve ever lived. There are a pair of soul-bonded guys, one a local, the other of French descent. Soul-bonding, according to my sleepy-brain of last night, is an outlawed kind of magic that lets two people join their magics to become unbelievably powerful – but in doing so they also sort of bond their personalities. So the soul-bonding was a bit of a mistake in the end, because one guy was super into taking over the world until he got soul-bonded to the other one, who was kinda lazy and hedonistic, and now all both of them do is sit about and get sucked off and eat cake.

I’m blabbing on now but I’m seriously like, oh my gosh there’s a story coming together in my head. And it’s not what I want to write or something I intended to write but it’s happening and it’s kind of exciting and I have Morality Jones to thank for it.