I'm excited for this year. I will finally give Kai'Juricho the respect it deserves.

The concept itself is years old. I first started playing around with the idea in 2005. The first story I named "Kai'Juicho", after the city itself, was 29 pages of text that radiate I-do-not-know-what-I'm-doing. Thankfully it's been a few years since then. I can't count the number to revisions I've thought through—over half of them never made it to paper.

For 2007's NaNo I wrote about a Zukel's life leading up to his role in Kai'J. After that November I put his life story on the back burner and have since discovered that it was an inaccurate depiction of his youth. There are no gods in this fictional world. Any that he encountered were all in his head, an aftereffect of childhood trauma. Also, he is not some long lost prince. He is a bastard child of an indulgent king. His half-siblings acknowledge his existence and keep tabs on him but otherwise let him run free. That may have been their first mistake.

Srecko has stayed much the same since creation. The only part of him that I want to change is his name. I’m leaning toward “Sireko”. It has only a slight change in pronunciation but looks more like an actual name in Kai’J.’s society. Sear-echo instead of Sr-echo. He isn’t as exciting as the others though he compliments their rowdiness well. He’s an anchor in the storm that is my 2009 NaNo.

Caesura is an interesting guy. In the first run-through back in 2005 he was a rich nameless snob of an official. Once I started paying him more attention, however, he blossomed into a dynamic character that I can never hate. Even at his lowest I root for him. One of my what-if storylines turned him into a spineless coward. I still couldn’t hate him. I understood his fear and realized that in that timeline he had become desensitized to loss to the point that he could willingly exchange a good friend for his own safety. Glad I had a change of heart.

Bells is my newest addition. Alright. His real name is Adrian but try telling that to the Calo. He made a cameo in my 2007 NaNo. If you want to get technical that was when he was really born. The only thing that carried over to this new Adrian was his dark red hair. He quickly became a favorite. Funny that he works so well when my original characters from 2005 have all been given the ax. [I don’t mourn any of them. They were flat and rather uninteresting.]

I love Kai’J. I really, truly do. And I realize I am ranting but I cannot help it. This year my NaNo is titled “Sideswiped by Circumstance”. It makes me giddy with how well it explains the Zukel, Srecko/Sireko, Caesura and Adrian. They are my rotating narrators. And they will finally get to tell their story.