Realising There's a little to much of yourself in a character.

[Toby Frost]

It's probably inevitable that you'll write about yourself when you start out and, unless your lead character is very obviously not like you, that people will assume it's you. It's an easy mental image to have.

Certainly, the first couple of things I wrote involved characters who were a lot like me, or two characters with most of my traits spread out between them. As time's gone on, I've become more subtle about putting myself into characters. Somewhere in the four lead characters in the Space Captain Smith books, there's me, although I'm more Isambard Smith than any of the others. In the current WIP, a large fantasy novel, each viewpoint character will tend to have one thought that either I've had or I've often heard from other people, but otherwise will not be like me at all.

I've had this idea for an SF novel knocking around in my mind for a year or so now. The fact that it's not gone yet probably means that I'll eventually write it. It genuinely will have a lot of me in it, but it will be about an android and a man with amnesia, and I'm neither of those. Well, I don't think I am. If only there was some kind of test I could take to find out...