#Val's 'naming agony' mostly comes from how I can't decide whether I'm sticking with 'Val' or 'Valen' as his in-text name

[thegoddesswater]

Tell me about Val and Rui! They have fun names :)

Thanks Lano! Interesting choices! And interesting reason for picking them, since both of them have caused me some form of 'naming agony' ANYWAY

Val Quirke When writing Val (or Valen - I flip flop on whether I want to stick with the short form or not), one of the biggest things that I try to keep in mind is that Val Knows Things and is constantly trying to course correct when his plans are knocked askew by other characters exerting their free will and derailing things they don't know about.

Val thinks that he's objective about any situation, even though he isn't, which can lead to the justification of actions that can definitely be read as very petty on his part. He's got his own agenda that neither quite adheres to the plot of Miadhachain Legacy nor necessarily makes sense to other characters. Despite the way that I keep saying that Val has plans and his own agenda he is not 'cold and calculated' in his actions (I mean, calculated? Yes. Sort of.); choices he makes hurt him, they hurt the people he cares about and he hates it. But he's also very much 'the ends justify the means' because this poor guy is a side character playing a seven dimensional cosmic game of Go against the universe, all while trying to maintain the facade that he is a Normal Human Being and not a godly consciousness trapped in human form.

Not that I really plan to give Val a POV chapter, but if he ever gets one, I definitely want to try to make it feel off in a hard to pin down way.

Desai, Rui I feel like I talk about Rui a lot. ...Maybe I just think about him a lot.

Rui is a middle child and first-generation immigrant; he's used to being overlooked and under estimated; he's used to having to do more just to be considered equal to others. He's also hyper-aware of the way that people perceive him and will use this to his advantage to keep them off balance.

When I write Rui's dialogue, his phrasing and formality indicates his state of mind - if he's stopped using contractions, it's a bad sign: he's uncomfortable, he's mad, he's upset etc. and is hiding it all behind a veneer of Proper Language.

Word count challenge: 215 words for Run, Runaway Challenge words to date: 1,241