Dust to Dust

Character Profiles and Other Stuff :)

Anyone who's made it to the end, hello there! Thanks for reading all the way through, the support is very much appreciated. I'm going to go back and revise this story for a third time, because reading it over I've noticed many things I can improve on. I just finished up Chapter 12 and I'm making more progress :) I'm nowhere close to an official author, I'm still fairly young and don't read a whole lot, this idea just came to me one day, so I'm going to start putting a lot more effort and detail into my work from now on. I've heavily improved with my second novel I'm writing at the moment which should be out soon! I've finished the rough draft and I'm revising right now. Anyway, this story is very important to me, so here's a few details about some of the characters, how I got this idea, details about characters, and original ideas I had that ended up getting cut. 

I decided to write this story because I'm in a very low point right now in my personal life, probably the lowest I've ever been. I was laying in bed one night, not really able to go to sleep, and all of a sudden, a character popped into my head. I instantly knew everything about him, his past, his appearance, his personality, his motives, and how he was going to die. This character is Asher. He just entered my brain one day and I thought to myself, "I need to do something with him" so I wrote down a few story ideas, since I've been very interested in writing since the second grade. I have so many unfinished stories in notebooks, on my old computer, I never finished a single one. This was the first, and I'm very proud of that. I decided to throw Asher into a cult situation, since it really fit his whole vibe. Asher is what I'd like to call a vent character. He's extremely complex and has so much bad packed into his character that it's almost like he took all the bad thoughts I was having, and transferred it to himself. That's why he's very important to me, he almost feels like a part of me. 

I came up with a few other characters once I knew I wanted to write a book about Asher, so I made Jenny, Jasper, Eren, you know the cast. I wanted to make Asher the main character, but that would defeat his mysterious aura, so I made him the anti-hero instead. Jasper was another thought for a protagonist, but once I figured out how the ending was going to go, I decided on Jenny since y'know, she's a girl. And then I wrote out her character, I didn't make her the protag specifically because she's a female lol. Another thing, the only reason why I made Jenny and Asher do the dirty was for honest symbolism with the concept of life, because since the world came to an end, her having a baby made them both look like powerful beings, which Asher is, and she took his place as this powerful being after she killed him. Also I just wanted to make a cool twist ending, which meant Asher had to be reincarnated somehow. So that's really it on why Malcolm exists.

Alright, now I'm going to talk about the main cast. Starting with Asher, I've already discussed him, while he's majorly problematic, I'm absolutely in love with him, if I could describe how valuable he was to this story, it almost felt like he was the one moving my hands as I was typing. I just kind of knew everything that was going to happen. 

I'm slightly disappointed with Jenny to be completely honest, her character came off weaker than I anticipated, which is why I added the scene where she pointed the gun at Asher, I didn't want her to look naïve and submissive, because that's not who she is. She survived the end of the world, give her some credit.

 I haven't talked about him as much, but I love Jasper to death. I highly relate to him, and his depth almost felt like a vent for me as well. Comedic relief character gone bad, it reminds me of a lot of characters I've seen in movies. I feel awful for not even giving him an actual death scene, and for giving him such a stupid death, but that was for the purpose of showing that life really isn't fair, and that surviving the end might not have been so great. It needed to happen for Jenny to start to lose herself, which was why she agreed to Asher's plan. She lost all hope for a chance at happiness at that point, so seeing Asher get that excited kind of sparked something for her. If Asher wasn't so significant to me, Jasper would be my favorite. His energy is perfect to me, he turned out exactly as I pictured. I wanted to have a comedic relief with actual depth, which drove him to his demise. I'm proud of him :)