Time Capsules

I have been writing about the same set of characters since I was approximately thirteen years old.  From the age when I first started reading fantasy novels and playing role playing games, I've been enthralled by the idea of detailed, deep imaginary worlds.

It is the case, unfortunately, that in recent years, I seem to have fallen off the literary wagon (if such scribblings could be considered literature), in that these people inhabiting my head have received little of my attention.

As has been noted here, I recently picked up a story that I started a number of years ago.  Perhaps 2004 or so, I can't be sure.  I don't have records of when I started it.  It might be as early as 2002, in some form or another.  Maybe I could find out when I started it if I dug through my old LiveJournal - that's a possibility.

But anyway, I picked this story up again.  It's approximately thirty to forty pages at the moment.  It currently involves, either through direct exposure in writing or implication of plot, around six or seven of these people.

Occasionally I re-read some other, unrelated snippet of story that I found on my hard drive and realize that it fits in this story somewhere.  I just did.

I was just reading through a several page description of some woman - when I started reading I didn't know who it was - sitting in a bar with her feet propped up on the table, writing out a list of pseudo-Latin sounding names: Bellarus, Pandema, Iuridicus, Rheis, Hoares.  She leaves the bar and wanders down the street to an acquaintance's, walks in past his servant, and finds him in his sitting room, entertaining some other woman.

That's all there is to it.  But until I got to the last two sentences describing the second woman, I didn't realize that they are two of the my central characters.  I didn't know who the first was until I found her in the company of the second.

Little things like that make me smile.  I wrote this years ago, and it somehow just fits, and makes me think. Why was she writing out names?  I know what one of those names means, but I hadn't considered the others in the context of my current story.  It's wonderful!  It's like I've written notes to myself, put them in a time capsule, and I'm only now piecing them all together into a coherent letter.