#TheFourFriday – Me as Bullseye

Every Friday, I’m posting something about how the real life “The Four” overlap with the fictional four Kota Warriors.
As some of you know, The Kota Series is based on what “The Four” (myself, my brother, and our childhood best friends Kaly and Luke) played as kids.  Each of us is represented by one of the four Kota Warriors (Bullseye, Rave, Tigris, Whitewolf).  So, I’ll be sharing personal quirks that carried over into fiction, fun/weird stories we played as kids, our childhood drawings, pictures related to The Four and The Kota, etc.
Should be fun, and it’ll give you an idea of how weird or little minds were as we created this story that, years later, turned into my book series.  🙂

This week, Me as Bullseye.
I’ve been putting this one off – not because there aren’t similarities, not because I don’t have anything to say, but mostly because this character is so, so personal to me.  In a lot of ways, writing/developing/evolving Bullseye was my life-saving form of catharsis through my late teens and into my early 20s.  I took what I was feeling and dumped it all into her (poor, fictitious soul).  Bullseye’s pain and depression and struggle for something “better” was very much my own struggle, and getting it all onto paper via my alter-ego not only made the character richer but also really helped me personally.

Here’s a sum-up.

Books 1-4 very much reflect the 4 stages of life I was in while I wrote them.  There’s something almost autobiographical about how things line up.

• Book 1 = High school, plain and simple.  The Dominion (…no way of sugar-coating this…) was my fictionalized version of my own personal hell.  Taking this out on Bullseye meant the Dominion nearly broke her.  It haunted her.  The people there left emotional wounds.  Etc. Etc.  This was all obviously amplified (ACS wasn’t so bad that it was a murderous tyranny), but my emotional upheaval during that time was very, very much fodder for Bullseye’s journey.
• Book 2 = College.  As Bullseye allows herself to start a new life on Ebon (more literally, of course), so I tried to move forward when going to college.  It was a new environment for both of us.  New people.  New ways to learn to care about the world and people around us.  New challenges that had nothing to do with the crap of the past.
  Cliqani was largely based on my freshman year roommate, who was kind and generous and for some reason put up with my withdrawn, moody, wounded-puppy self.  She helped me heal more than I think I ever told her, but I put a lot of her into Cliqani.
• Book 3 = Adventure period after college.  Once I/Bullseye stopped being such a mess, the big challenge came in restoring relationships and figuring out who to be.  It’s rough to change people’s perceptions of you once you HAVE changed.  But it leaves you with a great feeling of personal peace once you know you’ve got your shit at least semi-together.  I used this time to branch out and have fun, and I tried to let Bullseye have that breather too…for a while.
• Book 4 = Adulthood/now.  So, once all of the above was sorted for myself and my alter-ego… What did I want?  You get to a point in your late 20s/early 30s when you’re kind of supposed to have a plan.  Bullseye – it felt very naturally as I was writing – had never dared to make plans for a life of “happily ever after.”  She and I are just not wired optimistically.  But, at some point (as Rave points out to her and as my brother pointed out to me), you have to let go and find SOMETHING you want.  So, once we both figured out what we wanted… I guess we’re both in that place now.  No spoilers. 😉