This post, yes this one, is all about my delightfully dead Tristan McCall, one of the main characters in Dead Raiser!

Tristan is an odd character, the concept of him is joined to the concept of the story itself as a whole. I wasn't particularly thinking of a character as such, just the need to write something weird, something wacky yet still in my line of expertise (Morbid and sad with lots of fighting and baddies). To tell the truth, I believe that Tristan himself had put himself together in a dark, lonely corner of my mind and was suddenly ejected from the corner to the forefront of my mind. Ever heard the term 'unless your brain is waving a brilliant idea at you'? No? Well, where have you been? My brain literally started waving poor old Tristan around my head until I paid attention and sat him down to have a nice long talk about who the heck he was and what he was doing in my head.

The conversation between my brain and the idea of Tristan was a long one, my friends at school often see me walking around the school in circles at break and lunch with a distracted look to my eyes, this is my preferred method of thinking. I like to walk. It allows my body to do stuff without thinking about it and allows my brain to wander as it pleases. This walking habit started up when I was thinking about the mushed idea that would become Dead Raiser.

It was on the way to an author's event in Chippenham when I thought up the name. Down the cobbled pavements went me and my social worker (I'm in care) and then BAM! Brain waving idea alert! What about DEAD RAISER?! The only problem was that I wasn't sure if living skeletons were copyright or not. I asked one of the author's (CJ Skuse) and she said that if you have an idea but there's already a book out there with the same sort of thing, then it's ok as long as it's different enough to show you didn't just copy the other book.

Anyway this seems to have gotten a tiny bit off topic!

Tristan is a twenty-something year old man who is neither in his early twenties, but definitely NOT in the thirties quite yet. That's his supposed age at the time of his death, though being a sorcerer his apparent age judged on his appearance wouldn't match up to his actual age. In truth he is around one hundred, twenty-something being the age he would have looked if he were not a skeleton. The reason for this age anomaly is that magic keeps the user younger for longer. Tristan dies during a war against a dark sorcerer known as the Shadow Lord. Tristan stumbled across the Shadow Lord's weakness (he has no bones or hard tissue protecting his heart) and lands a punch to the Shadow Lord's chest, crushing the unprotected heart within and causing the Shadow Lord to have some sort of fit/heart attack which causes his magic to leave him. The shadow magic leaves via exploding, the effect catching poor old Tristan full on and stripped him of flesh, blood, muscle and organs. Killing him in a split second.

Around eighty ears later his very, very, very, extremely great granddaughter revives him from the dead as she wants to know a secret that her parents would have told her in the case of their untimely demise via letter, though these letters get burned by her nasty aunt and uncle who want to protect their own daughter, Charlotte, from it. Tristan is then taken to his granddaughter's house, Ivy Martin, who suggests he wears one of her father's suits. Tristan picks out a purple one. In Going Under Tristan is told he must wear a new suit as the purple one is fraying from being in a couple of fights which aren't too friendly to unprotective clothing.  The new suit he picks is grey which causes a friend of his, Despondence Reticent (Des <--petname), to laugh quite a bit since the suit is a bit subdued for Tristan's usual tastes. Also, in Dead Raiser, Ivy buys Tristan a black fedora with a purple brim so he didn't look bald anymore.

Tristan is, personality wise, a very sarcastic if caring person. He seems to be a bit trigger happy as well which makes an interesting combination when mixed with his quick to anger temperament. Though he does make quite a few jibs and harsh words, he really does care. (Unless he's hitting you. That means you irritated him.)

This post is about the people who helped or inspired certain aspects of Dead Raiser come to life.

One of the most amazing aspects of writing is that some people end up influencing a character(s) behaviour, attitude, attire and even some of the things they say, this can be intentional or not. For instance, I got one of my friends to become a character. My friend was initially going to be only Jiid Dinok, a very geeky and intelligent Centaur who is the head of the Magic-Science department in The Temple, however when re-reading Dead Raiser before starting to write Going Under, I realised that my friend's  dry and somewhat irritating humour had weaselled it's way into Tristan's dialogue. I found myself laughing at this because the actual words Tristan says would never come from my friend's mouth, but the way it's said sounded like he was speaking them as it was the same kind of sarcasm that he uses. Tristan can, however, dry up the conversation by saying offensive things, you don't see this much in Dead Raiser, but it is already beginning to happen in Going Under. When I say he dries the conversation up, I'm not saying he makes bad jokes or that nobody wants to speak to him, it's just that he has a tendency to grind people's gears and he can be annoyingly correct a lot of the time.  This is an example of this:

“Already! Already you’ve gotten yourselves in trouble, and you haven’t even started yet!” Trinity hadn’t liked Ninrym when she’d first met him in the Temple Of Choosing, because of the weird way he dressed and his tendency to glare at Tristan, and she found she liked him less as he ranted at them from behind his desk in The Temple.

“Well,” said Tristan casually from her elbow, “it was hardly our fault.” He sounded oddly cool though they were in a precarious place.

“Not your fault?!” Ninrym boomed, heading towards hysterical. “You were supposed to watch over her and make sure she didn’t get into trouble! And what do we hear? An unexplained fire suddenly springs up in a Halloween house party and then gunshots and screaming starts up! Not to mention the normal authorities found only a spluttering smoke machine that was more than likely kicked over during the panic!”

Trinity opened her mouth to speak but decided against it, shutting her mouth with a tight snap. Tristan spoke for her anyway. “Well, it’s still not our fault. They were abducting children for God knows what reason, you’d have had a lot more to explain and cover up from the authorities if we’d fled and let them do it.”

Ninrym sighed in exasperation, knowing that Tristan's logic was undisputable.

That is an exact piece from Dead Raiser. Tristan doesn't always purposely grind people's gears, but when it comes to Elder Ninrym, he just cannot help himself. He both purposely and accidently gets in Ninrym's grille all the time and the two are continually arguing, trying to poke holes in the other's way of life, logic and they just seem to like to verbally attack each other. Tristan is that one person you know who's incredibly smart and he/she knows it, he enjoys interrupting people and interjecting conversations with his frankly ridiculous points of view and sarcastic humour.  

My friend also plays his part as Jiid Dinok very well. Jiid's geeky yet smart persona was planned and derived from Sam's like of science and Doctor Who.

Other influences from others also found their way into Dead Raiser, such as the password for the computer in the Frogmore Gaol which was 'Querty', this comes from another one of my friends who tried to get me to guess her password for her school account.
It's not just real people that can weasel their way into your work, it's also aspects of other characters, fictional people, places, times, world, that sort of thing. I found myself wondering what exactly a skeleton could wear, especially since the skeleton was that of a twenty-something year old man. My friend Zoe suggested that he wear a suit, but I said that it was too much like Skulduggery from the book Skulduggery Pleasant, written by Derek Landy, and so we decided that Tristan should wear a purple suit.

Songs I listened to