meta: the characters

Come as you are, sweetheart, come as you are
You know you've got nothing to prove
I'll put you to bed you can let it all go
You've been playing too rough lately
You burn too bright
You live too fast
This can't go on too long
You're a tragedy starting to happen
Just as you are perfect, just as you are
I'll give you the time you deserve
Don't make those promises
Don't tell me again
That dust is gonna settle your nerves

Red, Elbow

I prefer symbolic names, ever since I first learned that some names could be symbols way back in tenth grade. If I ever get seriously published, the first thing people look for when they read my books should be a dictionary of names. That said, I've finalised very few of the names in The Dead Letters. The names of the police, in particular, are simply place-holders, waiting for something symbolic and useful to turn up. But it helps not to go through the sections that have them in writing "((NAME)) and ((NAME)) went in the door first." And currently the name of the hunter, in text, is so amazingly bad that I've no wish at all to share it. But I think that Aidan and the rest of the main characters are pretty final right now. At least their first names. The ones who have first names.

Aidan Michael Carthy: Human, or at least was, at one point. Generally speaking, still human, but he's got a bit of dead archangel in him that makes him visible to creatures that normally ignore humans, like the Hunter. It's quite safe to say that he's not happy about this. He's a whore, and, later, a small time drug mule, by trade and a junkie by something resembling choice. He's very, very bright, very affectionate, very friendly, very capable of getting people to do things for him, very willing to do things for people in return, as long as that generally benefits him, doesn't have an altruistic bone in his body, loves and hates being touched, and is a complete sociopath. Other people aren't quite real to Aidan, though the threat or benefit they present might well be.

He is, ultimately, a manipulator and a user, who excels at getting people to do what he wants. That used to be, and still is in his relatively lucid periods, sex - nothing convinces him that he's real quite so much as others on his skin and in it - but heroin tends to suppress the sex drive, and by "tends" I mean "the Pacific Ocean is slightly wet". He is bisexual - probably (insofar as I've been able to get into his psyche) he prefers men but finds comfort in women, so sleeps with both. His family is a presence in his life, though not in any actual sense - he essentially left them years ago and has no contact now (or at least, not yet) with them. His father's affair and the resulting sense of betrayal that Aidan felt, that an adult could lie that easily, is nominally the reason, but it's probably more complex with that. He's a descendent of Bec mac De, the greatest Druid prophet, and has some untapped potential in that area that passed on through the blood - this might be what attracted Michael to him in the first place, when he sought a place to put his self. It's certainly what Nico thinks attracted Michael to him.

Aidan is capable of being very, very charming, and I'm having a hell of a time writing him - where other people react to that personality so very easily and so positively (he's based on two friends of mine) I can see exactly where he's coming from, and the other characters tend to react to him with the knowledge that I have. I'm also re-evaluating whether he can be a sociopath as I've written him so far, which is sort of saddening, because I like him as a sociopath, but I need to do more research into functional sociopathology (there is a greater percentage of the population that is sociopaths and psychopaths than one might suspect, if one listened only to the statistics of murderers) and I need to figure out how much he can relate to people and still be a sociopath, or if he's just extraordinarily selfish. I think that Aidan, whatever he's diagnosed with, chose to become a junkie and a whore to feel something; I think that he's nearly incapable of feeling things on his own, that he needs outside stimulus to do so, and that those two things in particular make him feel in control, oddly enough - where his father's betrayal was enough to break his interest in his family, that did not make him feel in control.

But when he chooses to shoot up (and part of the arc of his story is that his addiction is getting out of control; at one point he goes seriously into withdrawal because he's been avoiding the warning signs, and that takes him out of control) he is in control of how he feels. When he chooses to fuck someone for money, he is in control of how they feel; he's also dancing with the devil in terms of his own safety, since he's quite smart enough to realise that every single person he fucks, ever, at least for money and probably every person, represents a threat to him - and that's a feeling.

He's not too impressed with Nico - as below, they'll probably wind up becoming lovers simply as another expression of their attempts to dominate each other - and Aidan tries to fuck him over every chance he gets. He's not interested in sacrificing himself for some ideal, and Nico can guarantee precisely Sod and All in the matter of the war. He sees both Caoi (he doesn't know she's a demon) and Meabh (he does know she's a goddess of sorts) as protection - as mentioned, he seeks comfort from women. He is possibly the least-likely alpha male ever, at least on first appearances.

Nicomedes: An angel. Angels and demons both are creatures of fire (now go look up Aidan's name), as per the Qu'ran, because it's more interesting than the Bible, which I don't recall having an opinion on the makeup of angels. Nicomedes is the leader of a rebellion of unknown size; he is on a mission from himself to get the last piece (Aidan) needed for overthrowing god into place so that the war can be won. He does not have a particular view of what the relationship between angels and humans should be after god's death, but thinks that it would be best if angels left humans alone, because god has been bad enough. He's quite cynical enough to realise that he's in the minority on this. Does not seek to become god himself, nor does he seek to Fall, but he seeks justice for humans and freedom from himself. Lucifer (and the demons) are still compelled to worship god, as the angels are; Nico seeks to worship no one. A very abrasive personality, in a lot of ways, though he's got more experience being human than Caoilfhionn does, Nico usually manages to piss Aidan off, and vice versa - neither of them trusts the other, and both are manipulators - they're too much alike for a friendship. I have the feeling that, were I writing Aidan as he should be (I'm still trying to beat him into coming around on this matter) they would be lovers, though not in a nice, sappy, chocolate-boxes-and-roses way. As is Aidan, definitely an alpha male.

Caoilfhionn: Pronounced "Kee-lin", and usually called Caoi. A demon. Aidan doesn't know this for quite a long time, and assumes that she is an angel; she doesn't change his mind. She and Nico have been friends since before the Fall, and she is one of the very few that he trusts. This, it turns out, might not be as smart as it seems. She is bitter towards god, angry about the Fall and the creation of humanity that caused it, and seeks his destruction for justice for herself and the others who became demons when they fell from heaven. Not operating on Lucifer's instructions, surprisingly enough. It is not entirely true that angels do not have free will (and demons are angelic stock); they have free will in matters other than those related to their spheres of influence and their choice of worship figure. She is, interestingly enough, a peacemaker, particularly between Aidan and Nico, but sometimes between others. Has an ambiguous relationship with Rafe that might turn out to be him using her to doublecross everyone else, and might turn out to be her trying to dupe him into believing that she's on his side. At this point, I'm not clear on this yet.

Raphael (Rafe): One of two archangels involved in the story (the other is Michael, who dies quite, quite early on). Raphael is the angel of healing, and has decided that the way to heal the world is through whatever means the people involved prefer - his reasoning is that healing is to make someone feel better. This is not as namby-pamby as it sounds - Raphael is certainly duplicitous, possibly insane, and definitely not very nice. His human cover is as a drug dealer and rather-larger-than-small-scale gangster. He is extraordinarily violent and abusive - it becomes obvious quite quickly that Aidan, who generally only fears specific things like sleeping with other people (because he doesn't know who might decide to kill him) is generally afraid of Rafe; their past history, it is implied, gives him good reason to be so. Later on, Rafe nearly kills him when Aidan turns up uninvited. Though almost everyone in the story double-crosses someone at some point, Rafe is the master of it; it is reasonable to think that that's his purpose. It's unclear whether he's on Nico's side, god's side, his own side, or any side at all in the coming war, but it is clear that probably it's his side first and foremost - he seeks constant advantage. Has a (thus far) not-clearly-defined relationship with practically everyone in the story, with the exception of Meabh.

The Hunter: I needed a deus ex, and this is it. The Hunter - sole member of a sort of creature capable of truly killing angels. Normally, when an angel is killed, the only thing that dies is the human body. The angels are capable of incarnating again later, though their bodies are not normally subject to aging or natural death. The Hunter can kill the angel itself, though there can be some ways around it - when the Hunter killed Michael the Archangel, he had already moved enough of his self into Aidan to make the human recognisably part angel but not enough to avoid true death. If the Hunter had not hesitated to act outside its mandate, the book would be a lot shorter. Genderless, though generally takes on a male aspect and therefore referred to as "he" by most of the characters. Is the only one of its kind, god's assassin of his only true creations. Aidan, in a rather unsurprising turn of events, befriends the Hunter and finds out how truly alone it is - it has experienced loneliness but has no concept of the term. Most of its life exists in waiting for god to need it. Can track an angel any distance at all; when trying to terrify a victim (as it did with Aidan, when Rafe convinced the Metatron to mis-relay god's orders) it will follow in the victim's footsteps - the victim knows it is coming, and that the only way to stay alive is to keep fleeing, never settling. Just because the Hunter will not take an airplane, for example, doesn't mean that he won't be there, and sooner than might be expected. Settling down for any length of time just gives him a chance to catch up. Cannot be normally seen by ordinary humans (though I have to work on this, as there are several points of the story where this makes no sense.) Maybe it can only not be seen when it's on the job.

Meabh: Interestingly, named before I thought of making her a goddess. She was originally a distraction from the main plot, a love interest of sorts, for Aidan, insofar as Aidan has a love interest. Then I was flipping through a book on Ireland and realised that Medb is pronounced Maeve, just like Meabh is. And then the idea was born of making her the representation of traditional religion. Her allegiance is to Ireland as it once was, before the conversion of the Irish to Catholicism, and particularly before the Famine caused that faith to become harsher and harder. She doesn't particularly have a bone to pick with god, per se, since his believers and hers coexisted for centuries, often in the same body, but at this point, the only options she has left, to preserve the old ways, are hard ones, and the one she prefers most is removal of god. Tends to not be an active player in the conspiracy, as, firstly, she's not an angel, and secondly, she doesn't trust Nicomedes. I also plan to do something with the fact that Medb was not (insofar as I can find, and who knows, that might change tomorrow - I've only looked in eight books!) truly a goddess - or maybe she was. She was certainly the queen of Connacht in the Tain Bo Cualnge, and probably also Queen Mab of the fairies in Shakespeare. Most of the books I've read class her as a heroine, but some seem to promote to goddess status, while others argue that she was an aspect of Macha, goddess of war. Fun fact: also had two roommates before I realised that Celtic gods and goddesses come in threes. The other two, at some point, will be made into Brigid and Macha.

Bowman and Hicks: Police officers. Bowman is the more important of the duo (as you can tell; he's named after a brand of cider, while I happened to be glancing at my Bill Hicks CD when I named the other) and is frequently to be found doing something borderline illegal. A known (by the audience anyway) associate of Nicomedes', and initially interested in Aidan because he was paid a great deal of money to be. Since then, it's become personal. Hicks is, primarily, a walking brick wall, and very much less stupid than Bowman (who isn't stupid so much as rash). What is going on in his mind is always seems to be very unpleasant indeed. To a certain extent, they're comic foils of the piece, though not truly. They also exist to further the plot in several important dimensions - when Aidan's life finally detaches from the arc of the main plot, it's because of Bowman, who has decided that it would be worth a great deal to bring him down. They're also very often the cats-paws of the various other figures in the piece.

Lucifer and God: Neither of these is on-camera at all, but it is important to realise that god knew perfectly well what Lucifer was up to when he rebelled. The angels that chose to fall rather than worship god are still compelled to worship god; Lucifer and god are not on a par in that sense, though in most others they are. God seeks the active worship of humanity, while Lucifer seeks to remove it from god. Lucifer is not Satan in the Anton LaVey sense; he is a fallen angel who opposes god in all the ways he can.

Aidan means "fiery", and Michael means "who is like God?" Told you you needed a dictionary of names to read this.