I Was Obsessed with Peter

 

 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(except I wrote him more times than this, in unpublished novels: a college-aged version of him is the protagonist of the never-written The Art of Subliminal Messaging; he appears in halfway form in the written but unpublished (and since cannibalized) The Nightmare Children of Faerie, and in one of his truest forms (i.e., very similar to Jason) in partially written iterations of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.