Rant of the day: When you write a character, do your homework first.

Do not make a character an albino just for the hell of it or because you think it looks cool. Did you know that people with the albinism (the politically correct term, by the way,) will almost certainly have vision problems due to how light their irises are, quite often to the point of being legally blind? This is especially true if their albinism is so severe as to give them white hair. Did you know that some only have it in their eyes? (No, as far as I know, it can't just be hair and skin. It doesn't work that way. Eyes first.) Did you know that they never have crimson red eyes? Did you know that most dont' have truly white hair, but some level of blonde? Did you know that some can tan? Did you know that some can't? Did you consider the implications of being out in the sun with this little pigmentation? Did you consider the fact that, though often very pretty, albinism can be a damaging disorder?

Subject change. Do not make a character a samurai just because it sounds cool and because you saw it in an anime or two. Do you have any idea how many sociopolitical implications this status has? And why the hell do I never hear anything about the other two swords he would almost certainly carry? It's not just the katana, folks. Ever consider using a sword that long in a tight, narrow hallway? Read, read, read!

Oh, and also? If you give a character a "Native American name" you found on some website, the chances aren't great that it really means what you think it does. Heck, it may not even be a word. Think about it. Why the heck can't they trace it to its tribe? Even if it were a word once, it's probably been corrupted beyond all recognition. Double-check these and search for confirmation...they're usually wrong.

On a slightly unrelated note...age. I'm sorry, ladies and gentleman, but, despite what anime tells you, age does matter, a lot, to what skills a character can and can't have a certain point in their lives. It takes a very good explanation for a character to be exceptionally good at something if they're young, and even then, they'd really have to be pretty specialized. A prodigy in fighting who's trained to fight hir whole life may very well kick ass one-on-one, but will probably be lacking many other skills because they have to have spent their time on the main one. There are only so many hours in the day, kids.

Further...why ageless? Or very old? Why make a character thousands or more years old? Do you have some reason for this? Think through the psychology of this, people. There's very little that's more annoying than some supposedly three thousand year old elf acting like a particularly whiny fifteen year old. If your character is supposed to be a member of a race that will live a very long time, but is young hirself...why? Think through this carefully and fully integrate it into their personalities and the plot. People seem to like to make their character immortal to near-immortal for absolutely no reason other than their liking the sound of it. This will affect your character's psychology, ladies and gents, and also consider that it will probably make their skill levels severely beneath those with one thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand more years of experience. They're trying to make it in a society of much more experienced people, you think that wouldn't have some effect?

Hm...now that I've scared the children, that should be enough for now. Next up: "The Chosen One: Why the Heavens Will Rain Fiery Death Upon the Heads of All Who Use This Phrase."

How much drama can be crammed into one tiny group of people? And why do I feel like this site was designed to methodically test this theory?

Alright. I guess since I'm on a roll anyway, the side border was done in the same free-writing method.

The passage on that one is as follows:

"And in the whispering of this dreadful, endless night, there comes the barest sliver of hope, a beacon, a light where I had begun to suspect that none could exist. And this beacon, so warm, so beautiful...this beacon is the very illumination, the perfect glow by which my tattered soul can see, and by which it can finally begin to mend itself."

The writing in the background of this image was just my throwing stuff on the paper to steal my own handwriting. A lot of things things were forgotten or put out of sequence as I jotted along, since I wasn't actually thinking. It reads as follows:

"And then he began to write. Except that he didn't just begin to write. He began to transcribe his soul piece by piece, facet by facet, quirk by quirk, onto the emptiness before him. As his pen flew across the paper, it took its own life. He no longer thought and wondered and planned his way down the page. He only wrote. The words, the thoughts, the inspirations that could never exist in his consious mind, took a the pen in a firm hand and guided it, unrelenting. Sometime gentle, and sometimes not, but ever unwavering. Only in this state of fantastic possession was the man whole. Only when he stopped trying to pretend that he was anything and everything that he was not could he even grasp for the barest glimpse of all that he was and wished deep within himself, in the place that propriety and methods and structure and inflexible laws of society forever chipped away at it. The place that others had driven beneath the facade long ago. So this is how it had been done. This...this unstoppable wave of words. This sculpture that built and perfected itself piece by piece. So this is how the Twains and the Hugos and the Longfellows had managed such ineffable perfection without the help of computers. Before the age of constant editing, before persistant second-guessing, before word processing made the author's life so much easier...this was inspiration. Adn here, in these few moments, the man who wanted to write could at least glimpse the illusive, obsolete beacon of raw talent."

I may have gone on, but I ran out of paper. ^^;