Zeke and Lisa

As some of you may know, I used to write Neighbours fanfiction. Although many characters found their way into my stories, some of them were more persistent than others, and two were by far my favourite muses: Lisa Jeffries and Zeke Kinski. These characters had very little in common, other than being about the same age, but they both spoke to something in me in some way.

Zeke did so in a way that was utterly straightforward. Academically very intelligent, but socially always a bit of an outsider (to the extent that there was widespread fan speculation that the character was intended to be on the autistic spectrum), somewhat in the shadow of his more extroverted friends... he was very similar to what I was like at his age, and my habit tended to be to cast him as a self-insert character.

Lisa is an altogether more curious case. She was a bit-part character who appeared in a handful of episodes over a couple of years, and was mostly there to be a bad influence and a nasty piece of work. The thing was, despite this, there was something oddly sympathetic about her, which compelled me to bring her into my stories and keep her there. And as I kept writing stories with her in, the characterization kept changing until although you could see how the original had inspired it, there was effectively nothing of it left. The Lisa I ended up with was bitter about the world and her place in it, deeply in the closet, and someone who would hardly open up to anyone about anything. (The one exception to this was Zeke, who she never actually met in canon.)

I suppose that means that when I wrote a fanfic consisting mainly of Zeke and Lisa having a conversation, that I was talking to myself.