My favourite character and why, eh? Well, that's both an easy one and a more difficult pick. Ask anyone who knows me and they'd say, "Oh, that's easy. Mischa is crazy about Ashmael." And they'd be right. I do love Ash and I'll explain why in a second, but to start with I think I'd best explain something else.

See, I wasn't always faithful to my Ash. When I read my first Wraeththu book, waaaaay back in the dark ages of the 1980s, my favourite character was Cal, easy. I thought Pellaz was a sanctimonious, self-absorbed little prat who deserved to be put over my knee and spanked, should I ever be so fortunate as to come across him.

But Cal, now Cal was a bad boy and I have a huge soft spot for bad boys. I liked his irreverence, his sarcasm, even his self-hatred. I loved the way he took nothing seriously, not even his own emergencies. He possessed the kind of attitude toward life that I wished I had -- with some reservations, of course, e.g., I had no desire to hang my buddies by their entrails, nor the need to self-destruct.

My major hassle at that time was one of unavailability. This is actually where my hatred of reading unfinished works originated. My local library introduced me to The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit and I was quickly and fatally hooked. I ordered the other two books, using the now antiquated method of going up to the desk and speaking to a real, human person and asking them to get them for me from other libraries in my state.

Simple? Not so. Fulfilments arrived and was subsequently devoured by moi, but no Bewitchments! Oh alas and alack -- the bastards had misplaced it! No, it had been destroyed! No, stolen! WHATEVER! It was gone. I was so pissed off that I almost had a tantrum right there on the sacred broadloom of the local state library.

The years roll by and 1998 rears its head. Voila! The Internet. More voila! Amazon.com. YAY! With the Omnibus edition Mischa gets three for the price of one and finally, finally gets to read Bewitchments. Which also makes Mischa love Cal even more.

But the Internet has a more sinister role to play in my abandonment of Calanthe. With the Internet came the discovery of fan fiction. Woo-hoo! Suddenly I can read 'till my head spins, beginning with the Vampire Chronicles, dabbling in more esoteric fan fictions like Star Trek (Ha ha. Kirk and SPOCK?), etc, etc.

One day, in a fit of boredom, type into a search engine the name of Storm Constantine. Whoa! She has an official site. That's interesting, 'cause, you see, one day, in a fit of boredom, I'd made a little Constantine site of my own, Forever, just a tribute site, full of my ideas about the Wraeththu and information for the fledgling reader.

Alas there was no fan fiction on the net that I could find, or at least I couldn't locate it, still being a search engine doofus at this stage. Since it just so happened that I had recently discovered that I too could string words together, mainly in the Vampire Chronicles fandom, I decided to have a go at Wraeththu. I posted "Human Remains" and the rest, as the old chestnut goes, is a history that I will not bore the initiated with.

What, you say, tapping the computer desk with your forefinger, does this have to do with Ashmael? Well, I'm getting to that! See, when I write fan fiction, I like something to work with. Something... unfinished, unsaid, unexplained, with which I can dabble.

When I first wrote fan fics (VC) I began with well-rounded, almost complete characters such as Louis and Lestat, my training wheels. Now I like a bit more of a challenge and Calanthe, while by no means complete as a character (no character, in my opinion is EVER completed) had had most of his story told by the Lady. So I turned my attentions to more minor characters and... there he was: My Ashmael. My own, "personal" ratbag.

He's polished, sophisticated, knows how to play the game and play it hard. But he has edges, jagged, tough little edges that just beg to be fiddled with. Why the overlay of shiny veneer on a har so obviously a warrior? How did he acquire it? Where did he come from originally and why does he behave the way he does?

See, Ashmael is my favourite character, not because I know him, but because I don't.