Many thanks, Hajji Giray the First! You know, those nominations (I mean this one an the WoW a few weeks ago) have many various effects when I receive them. Firstly, they please me. Secondly, they inflate my worrying ego. Thirdly, they prove me that I have more readers than I think (which I suspected already, thanks to various comments in other threads). Fourthly, they force me to go out of my shell and read more, in order to find a successor.
The last one is tricky, because as I already mentionned, reading in English takes time and can become tiring, which is partly why I generally stick to only a couple of AARs and try to be as reactive as possible to their new posts. Now, I could follow the "Spamiard" conspiracy in the "FoW" thread and start to nominate French writers... Except that I don't read French stories over the web.
o So, time to wear my glasses and skim through the fora!
Regarding the characters, I think they are the blood of the story, where events are the vessels. You know, empty vessels can form a nice anatomic chart, but not a living and potentially desirable creature (unless you were Fragonard, of course). I love mine, even the ones I sentence to death before they first appear on paper (err... I mean on screen, HDD and USB keys
), even the ones I want to depict as despicable or evil. Some are caricatures, but I've met real life people who were too, to some extend.
What I find most fascinating is when a character that I thought I had well planned escapes from his chains and begin to live a life of his / her own. I usually don't try to enforce my authority in that case, unless it's threatening the whole story. I know others face such strange cerebral alchemy, since Director mentionned a similar evolution for van Iller in Frontier.