I love creating characters--whether it's for a character I'm going to be playing in a role playing game or someone I see winding up in a story somewhere down the road. There are an unending line of fictional people in my head waving their backstories at me on a daily basis. Then there are the real people I know. Whether they're people I've met in the real world or people I've come to know on-line, I seem to have come across a lot of people who are so clueless about reality, or have so much going wrong with their life that they scream to be "borrowed" and thrown into a story. The problem is that some of the things going on with these people are so bizarre that, if the story ever got published, most readers would claim I was going over the top and that the character wasn't believable. Then I'd have to try and explain I really knew a person like that, they'd find out I used them as a character and I'd either get sued for defamation or they'd want a cut of the profits.
People in my life really need to have more mundane lives.
