The Characters Who Changed Me While I Was Writing Them
Some characters don’t stay on the page.
They press back.
And if I’m being honest, not one of them stayed quiet.
All of them did. Every personality. Every voice. Which one pressed back the most depended on the day - on what I was writing, on what I was sitting with emotionally. In that way, writing Moons and Shadows felt a lot like being a mood reader.
I know many Moonlighters read that way too, choosing stories, or characters, based on where you are in that moment. Writing this world worked the same way for me. Whoever I was spending time with on the page that day was the one who pressed back.
Runa: Beyond Words
There is so much Runa taught me that I still don’t know how to put it fully into language.
She asked for patience I didn’t always know I had. She asked me to sit with things unfinished, unnamed, unresolved - and to trust that meaning would arrive when it was ready. Writing her meant learning that not everything needs to be understood in the moment to be real.
Some truths are carried quietly.
Some healing happens without narration.
Runa lives there and she taught me how to stay.
Izayah: The Weight of Endurance
Izayah pressed back in a different way.
He embodies what happens when endurance becomes identity, when surviving for long enough starts to feel like obligation rather than choice. Writing him meant confronting the cost of carrying too much alone, and the way strength can quietly become a cage.
He didn’t teach me how to be strong.
He taught me why strength needs witnesses.
Ashla: Curiosity Turned Upside Down
If there is a personality who feels like writing from the couch, upside down, head toward the floor, feet toward the air, sipping Mama D’s famous bubbly Raz-a-Fraz—it’s Ashla.
She carries that Alice in Wonderland energy. Pineapple upside-down cake for breakfast because why not. The world is curious. The world is wonderful. The blueberries might be talking to her…or they might not. And somehow, both things are allowed to be true at the same time.
Writing Ashla felt like permission to tilt reality and see what happens. To acknowledge that whimsy doesn’t erase seriousness, it reframes it. She presses back not with answers, but with questions that smile at you while they quietly undo your certainty.
Ashla reminds me that curiosity can be grounding. That wonder can coexist with weight. And that sometimes the most honest way to face the world is to look at it just slightly sideways with a glass of something fizzy in hand.
The Ebb and Flow Between Them
What changed me just as much as the individual characters was how they responded to one another.
Layla responds differently to Rayanna.
Rayanna responds differently to Runa.
Runa responds differently to Layla.
Their banter, their tension, their softness - it all shifts depending on who is in the room and what weight they’re carrying that day. Watching those dynamics unfold felt like both a writer’s observation and a human one.
It’s stepping into other people’s shoes—over and over again.
Seeing how personality bends under stress.
How connection reshapes response.
What I Ask of You as a Reader
As I was asking these personalities to do this with one another, I realized something else - I was asking the same thing of you.
Not just to follow a plot.
But to step into different perspectives.
To sit with personalities that don’t behave consistently because people don’t behave consistently.
I don’t know if that’s common.
But it is intentional.
This story doesn’t ask you to stand outside and observe.
It asks you to enter. To adjust. To feel your footing change depending on who you’re standing beside.
I didn’t leave this story unchanged.
And I don’t think you’re meant to either.
Some characters are written.
Others are met.
Have faith, friends.
I’ll be back next week to share a bit more.