Let me tell you about Alan Charms.

He is the lead character of Black Water and the person I will be spending a significant portion of my creative life with. He is not a simple man. He was not designed to be.

Alan carries trauma. Real, specific, unresolved trauma that has shaped every decision he makes and every relationship he enters. He is talented in ways that even he does not fully understand. Capable of things that the people around him cannot see because he cannot see them himself. The trauma and the talent are not separate stories. They are the same story. The trauma is what stands between Alan and everything he is built to do.

That combination — significant gifts buried under significant wounds — is not accidental. I built him that way because I believe that is how a lot of real people move through life. Not lacking ability. Lacking access to their own ability because something happened that convinced them the gifts were not real or not theirs or not worth the risk of actually using.

Alan is also a man between worlds in the most literal sense. He has a life in the modern world with its problems and relationships and unresolved conflicts. And he has access to a spiritual realm where different rules apply and where his identity looks different than it does in the visible world. Learning to live in both simultaneously — to carry what the spiritual world reveals about him into the life he lives in the physical world — is the core of his journey across the entire series.

He is not a hero who knows he is a hero. He is a man with more potential than confidence and more gifting than clarity. That is a specific kind of character and I think it is the kind that the most people will recognize themselves in.

That recognition is the whole point.

Stephon Rudd