thinking about characters

I was poking around on Elizabeth Bear's journal matociquala yesterday, and reading some of her meta. It got me thinking. Not just about how cool it is that she keeps a journal, which it is, but about what she wrote about her own characters.

It occurred to me that I have four (five, if you count the PWP) different versions of a certain character in my in-progress stuff. So I started to wonder about how they're different and why they're different.

( cut for thinky stuff on my characters )