How I Turned an In-Joke into a Character

It’s hard to make a living as an indie author.

Like most indie authors, I have a day job to pay the bills.

My “other job” is in IT. I act as a helpdesk for a software company that builds software for animal shelters. The job involves troubleshooting, testing new code, and liaising with customers.

Wait! Don’t leave yet - I know. Kinda dull. But just wait for it: I promise, I’m building toward something!

I’ve been doing this job for more than a decade.

That’s long enough for me and the team I work with to have developed a number of in-jokes.

Sometimes, something goes wrong with the code. Causes an issue. And sometimes, it isn’t easy to figure out what the problem is.

(Stay with me!)

Sometimes, we have to give up for the day, sleep on it, and try again the next day.

Most of the time, that’s all there is to it.

(Wait for it…)

But sometimes…

Just sometimes…

We come in the next day to find the problem has magically fixed itself overnight. We didn’t do anything - but the problem has resolved.

It happened often enough for my team to develop a joke about it.

Whenever this happened, the first one to discover that, by some sorcery, the issue was resolved would solemnly report to the rest of the team: “The Code Pixies have blessed us.”

To which we all reply “Praise be! Thank you Code Pixies!” or “All hail the Code Pixies!”

It’s funny if you’re an IT nerd.

Anyway. Fast forward to 2023.

The idea for the Slipworld series came to me. I started building toward it: creating a world, the team, and the characters.

I had everything ready - or so I thought.

There I was, 68,292 words into my manuscript when it hit me: there was a character I hadn’t built yet.

The IT guy.

Every team has one.
I didn’t think I’d need him for the first book.

Blood in the Dust is set deep in the Outback.
If you’ve ever been in the outback, you’ll know there isn’t always internet service. Or phone service. Or… anything at all.

So I created the characters I thought I’d need and left the rest as a problem for “Later Me.”

Only, “Later Me” appeared earlier than expected.

And, because I’m a linear writer, I couldn’t continue with anything until I had this character down.

Blood in the Dust came to a screeching halt.

And good old Supernatural came to my rescue… again.

Season 7: Osric Chau joined the cast.

I saw the name pop up and thought - Osric is an awesome name.

…. A great name for an IT guy, perhaps??

Oh yes!

It was a good start.

Okay - I couldn’t think of a surname, but I could figure that out later… right?

(Spoiler: I never figured that out. It became a whole thing. In the end, Osric became Osric with no surname. Like Boudicca. Or Cher.)

Anyway. I had a name. Now what to do with the rest of him?

I stared into space for a long time. An IT guy? I knew IT guys. They weren’t rich character material (sorry, team!)

But then…

Code Pixie.

It hit me like a slap in the face.

YES!

It meant I didn't have to figure out how someone with hacker-level skills could magically navigate every system, break through every firewall, and even get into air-gapped systems.
(Not possible, but they do it all the time in movies!)

Working in IT, the ‘magical’ abilities of hackers always low-key bugged me.

But if it was actual magic… well. That changed things!

A Code Pixie goes where the code goes. It’s like a native language to him, so any system makes perfect sense and no firewall can stop him.

I could totally make that work.

But that still left me with the actual person.

What was he like?

So I did what I apparently do when creating IT characters: I made a sort of Brain Stew out of all the things I liked about IT characters I'd encountered over the years.

He'd be smart. Mildly chaotic. Quietly rebellious. Sarcastic enough to make an art form out of it. A little dramatic. Funny, sometimes deliberately and sometimes without meaning to be.

He wouldn't be obviously courageous, either. He'd be the guy who screams in terror in the face of the horrible thing, then does what he needs to do while continuing to scream.

And somewhere in that Brain Stew, there he was: Osric.

Except… what did a Code Pixie look like?

IT guys have a look. I know it well. Jeans. Ironic T-Shirts. Sneakers. It’s almost a uniform.

Or maybe that’s just the team I work with…😏😂

I imagined that on a pixie…. LOL. Perfect.

But pixies… were tiny.

Little winged beings.

How could a creature like that pass in the “normal” world? How would that work?

And down the rabbit hole I went, researching all kinds of pixie lore.

Some stories say they're small—about the size of your thumb. Others say they’re a bit bigger. Usually likened to the “size of a housecat”, but that’s fearfully imprecise, so I adapted it to “about the size of an average watering can”. Better. And a few stories said they could be human-sized, and even shapeshift.

I threw all of that into my head, shook it, stirred vigorously, allowed it to rise and…

…created a character.

One who could shapeshift into different sizes, so he was small in the Slipworld and (still small, but) human-sized in the Upworld.

Actually, he can do a bit more than that, but… that’s for “Later You” to discover. 😉