That wasn’t always his actual name, of course, except that
it was. When I was in college in
Scotland, I picked up my novel The Fifth Tunnel and was deeply disturbed
to find that Peter was called Jason. When
had I changed his name to Jason? I knew,
absolutely knew, his name was Peter. I
considered emailing, but I couldn’t wait.
So I called home to Montana (paying $1.50 a minute for the international
call) and had a family member search through my original handwritten notebooks
and verify what I knew for absolutely certain, that his name should have been
and originally was Peter.
It wasn’t. I
had named him Jason in the earliest drafts, and Jason his name remained.
I wrote The Fifth Tunnel when I was
seventeen. Peter appeared again in the
book I wrote at nineteen, Swallowgate, except this time he was half of Lloyd and a bit of
Greg and something of Flynn, and maybe a slice of Calder, as if I’d split one character into four in a strange
attempt to deny that he was, at heart, a Peter.
A year later, I wrote him a third time --
(except I wrote him
more times than this, in unpublished novels: a college-aged version of him is
the protagonist of the never-written The Art of Subliminal Messaging; he
appears in halfway form in the written but unpublished (and since cannibalized)
The Nightmare Children of Faerie, and in one of his truest forms (i.e.,
very similar to Jason) in partially written iterations of Protector by the Green Light)
-- But I digress. He
appeared one last final time in Logic’s Emporium of Stolen Memories, and
this time he is actually named Peter. He
is a little older than in The Fifth Tunnel and Protector
by the Green Light, but still extremely Peter-like. And something about me actually, finally calling
him Peter brought peace to me about the character, and I was able to let him
go: I have never written him since. I think.
So who is Peter?
Peter is a couple of years older than our protagonist. He is intelligent, proud, lean, and rather
tall. He can act or speak pompously, but
he is not inherently pompous. He
thinks well of himself, and likes to enforce his superior age—in part because
he has issues with jealousy and brittle self-esteem, including of the
protagonist. He wants to think himself
superior, so it is hard for him when the protagonist has importance or abilities
that he does not. He has white skin and
brown hair and a few freckles but not many, and he tends to wear glasses and
dress very properly and neatly. He
prefers to respect authority and rules but has enough determination to break
free of them and leave to go elsewhere if he feels doing so is the best decision -- though wherever he goes, he will then learn the new rules of and obey them.
I have no idea where Peter came from. I do not have brothers, and I did not know
anyone like him. More exaggerated
versions of him exist in movies and books, sure—but he is unique from all of
them. He has his own developed
character, for someone who generally has middling-to-minor roles (since I never
actually wrote The Art of Subliminal Messaging). But I could not rest until I gave him his
proper name in a book.
I wonder if he will ever return to another book of
mine. And when he does, how long it will take me to realize it's him.
