A to Z Challenge Day 22: Victoria MacKinnon (the Lost Princess)

Most of my characters for this month have been pretty recognizable, even if you haven’t read their respective books, watched their respective shows/movies, or played their respective games. Most of them are based in pop culture, or come from things that a lot of us grew up with, or are characters that are currently beloved by the masses. But right now you’re likely reading the title of this post and thinking to yourself, “Who the hell is Victoria MacKinnon? What is she from?”

And so we come to another confession: Victoria MacKinnon, or “Tori” for short, is not a character that you will have ever come across because her story was never published. You see, Ms Tori MacKinnon is my character.

I’ve talked before about my story tentatively known as Parallels, a story that I’ve been writing for a decade, that has changed and been rewritten numerous times, and is only now coming into its own with new plans to rewrite it as a series. Victoria MacKinnon is the main character of that story, a young woman who is transported to an alternate Universe where she discovers that she must save the world from evil in order to return home. I love her because if you go back and read through all the different iterations that her story has taken over the past decade, she shows you exactly how I’ve changed and grown as a person and a writer. Victoria began her existence as a whiny, pathetic, self-absorbed loser who had no concept of what the real important things in life are…because she was based on myself. I wrote the character for me, and her personality and background – though they made perfect sense to me at the time – really showed how ridiculous I could be at that age. I was a young adult, but I was still a kid when it came to emotions and opinions.

But as I grew, so too did Victoria. Her thoughts and opinions changed, her reason for living advanced, and her hopes and dreams mutated into something more. Most of all, as my writing ability grew and I began to be able to think more about what the reader would enjoy rather than just what I felt like writing, Victoria became a very different person. These days Victoria is nothing like me at all, really, and that’s just the way I like it, because she is not me. Victoria MacKinnon is her own person with her own troubles and her own adventure to go on, and I’m just happy to be the one who gets to tell her story for her.