PC vs. MC

I'm doing something terrible. Something I've warned many a writer off doing: I'm making my PC into a main character in my upcoming novel. None of you would ever have had to know that, except yesterday Phil's D&D interview series got to me and Farideh, my fey pact warlock.

"This is a bad idea," I told Phil. "People will know." He was unconvinced--except, perhaps, of the fact that I was being completely paranoid.

Okay, maybe I am, but I can't just let it go.

We get plenty of submissions to our open calls--samples of books people would really like us to publish--that are obviously someone's role-playing game transcribed to look like a novel. I say "look like" because there's usually something just a little off. If the writer is the DM, the setting might get a lot more love than it should. If the writer is the player, the main character can be too perfect. And whichever side the author is on, there are a lot of things happening that don't fit the plot in the best way possible: Maybe the characters don't really grow or change. Maybe the confrontations are more about bad guys being bad and good guys being good than anything the characters might want. Maybe there are just a lot of details about what kind of armor everybody has.

So when I was asked to do another Forgotten Realms book and started riffing on my PC's background, I got very concerned. It's the kind of thing that can go horribly wrong or fantastically right, depending on how much you're willing to accept change. What the hell was I doing?

Check out WotC Book Club to find out!