Analysis: The Remnant Pieces — Part III
Part II covers updates 22–29. You can download this part for free or you can read it online using the table of contents.
Let’s put this out there first: Carlie Anderson is not based on a real person.
in realistic fiction, there’s a tendency to assume that characters have one-to-one real life analogs. It’s a funny notion, as even memoirs, which are allegedly the absolute truth, often contain wholly fictional characters (“composites,” as they’re known in the trade).
So I took a few steps to disassociate Carlie from anyone I’ve ever know. As with many characters, she was named by random generation, but I ended up having to discard the name that the computer gave me because it was too similar to someone from my own life. Not that this is going to help, as random people are more than happy to claim that characters in novels are based on them, but that generally only happens with popular works so I think my risk is minimal.
Carlie evolved a lot from her earliest iterations, as well. In the initial planning, she was a very unimportant character who existed only to serve a specific purpose.
Early concepts of The Remnant Pieces featured a somewhat younger Roderick who had more of a say about his own life. He was intended to spend a large part of the story carrying out correspondence…
