Windshifter, the character, has been around in some incarnation or another for, well... half my life, now. He was invented not long after I invented Pikestaff, my longstanding "alter-ego", and his original purpose was to troll Redwall roleplaying message boards.
See, "Redwall" is a book series about anthropomorphic animals that live in a fantasyish sword & sorcery setting. I was a big fan at the time and various roleplaying boards set in their universe abounded in the late 90s, and naturally, I inhabited a few of them. Many of the members of these boards were "purists", in that they only accepted characters whose species were those that existed in the books. Mice, squirrels, hedgehogs, otters, hares, and a few others. If you tried to roleplay a chipmunk or raccoon, for example, they'd get all worked up over it because those animals did not exist in Redwall canon.
So I thought, wouldn't it be funny if I showed up as something outlandish and tried to roleplay as it? The most outlandish animal I could think of was a dragon, and thus Lyte Windshifter was born, named (the last name, anyway,) by one of my friends as we went Trick-or-treating on a crisp Halloween night.
I have zero recollection of how I introduced Windshifter onto the Redwall roleplaying boards or what sort of reaction he got, so it must not have been particularly important. I do remember that I promptly decided that I liked the character too much for him to simply be a throwaway trolling character, and I started to morph him into something different. Now I was 13/14 years old at the time, (so you really can't expect anything too exciting), and as such my first idea was to make him an absent-minded comedic character. The funniest juxtaposition I could think of was that he should be a psychologist with ADD. So that's what he became. I drew a lot of pictures of this anthropomorphic dragon kneeling on the floor, scribbling on a piece of paper with a look of glee on his face. That was Windshifter, in a nutshell. Brilliant but goofy.
He was also naked, Bugs Bunny style, except for a tie. (I guess the thought that he didn't actually possess fur and probably couldn't get away with being pantsless hadn't occurred to me yet.)
At some point around here I put him into this plotline that was developing in my head. The plotline and its evolution deserves its own post (and will get one, eventually), but in short, it went something like this: Windshifter is a klutz and a bit of an outcast who lives in a fictional world that is very equivalent to our modern one. As it turns out, though, he is a sort of "chosen one" (I'm super original, no?) and he winds up traveling across a cursed sea and winding up in a fantasy world filled with bizarre creatures that looked like rabbits or that had springs on the tops of their heads. It was at this point that the story turned into a cross between "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and more traditional fantasy fare.
The story went through several (mostly small) evolutions between that point and, well, this last October, but that's all subject matter for another post.
Windshifter, himself, went from being a psychologist to being an office peon (because I decided there was no way his character could have ever graduated from med school) and then, in his final incarnation before being revamped, turned into a twenty-something college kid. The comic-relief aspect of his personality was toned down a bit with each redo in an attempt to make him a more sympathetic character, but he was always, at his core, a clumsy fellow with a woefully short attention span and shoes that were perpetually untied.
When I decided a few months ago that I was going to redo the book, I was faced with the decision of keeping that aspect of Windshifter's personality intact or scrapping it. I decided to mostly scrap it, but keep some of the awkwardness and baggage that came along with being a little "off-kilter".
And so it was that he was transformed into the main character of my recent novel.
As I was writing the book, I had this fear in the back of my head the whole time that his personality wasn't strong enough. That he was so much of an everyman that he lacked his own real individuality. This sort of confused me initially, since I've written "everyman" characters before that were rather strong, but Windshifter wasn't giving me quite the same vibes.
So here I am, writing "Who is Windshifter?" in an attempt to see if I can find that personality or if it's something I still need to work on.
Windshifter runs on a motor of profound curiosity. He
must know how things work. He learned early on in his life that asking didn't get him very far, so instead he took things apart to answer this constant question. The big question nagging him, of course, is
where did he come from? His watch is his only link to his past, and as such it's become a soul of sorts: if something ever happened to it, it might just break him.
He isn't entirely happy unless he's among clockwork or machinery of some kind. He feels a connection to it that he can't quite explain. Machines don't judge him, and if they act up, it's something he can fix. His approach is frequently intuitive: for example, he would tell you that a machine is "on its way out" or "dying" although it acts, looks and sounds perfectly fine to the layman, but then two days later it would fall apart... just as Windshifter had predicted it would.
Because of the close ties that he feels to technology and machines, he sees them as almost possessing a personhood of some sort, and to mistreat a machine would be near unthinkable. He's the type of guy who wouldn't push a car faster or harder than it would go. Others may view him as overly cautious, but to Windshifter he'd just be treating his "friends" well.
He embraces technology while viewing mass production of technology to be somewhat profane. In the book, he is horrified to find out that clocks are no longer being produced with artistry and one-on-one attention, but unthinkingly in an assembly line by people who don't really care. This, to him, would be akin to an art connoisseur discovering black and white photocopies of the Mona Lisa in a gallery, or perhaps something even more morally perverse.
As far as personality goes he is a friendly person overall, if rather shy... he doesn't start conversations with people he doesn't know, although he starts to come out of his shell a little throughout the course of the book. With those he does know well he is fairly laidback and easy-going. He has a tendency to hyperfocus on projects that he is working on and will block out most of the rest of the world when he is really concentrating on something. When he feels strongly about something, he isn't afraid to come out and say so, although his moral outbursts possibly surprise him more than anyone.
He is an optimistic soul overall who is troubled by violence but understands that it's probably necessary sometimes. If he could, he'd live in a world where information is free, curiosity reigns surpreme, and mankind, nature and his beautiful machines live in harmony with each other.
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