When you write a story, what is the first thing that comes to your mind as an all-powerful, God-like creator? The world on which the action will take place or the characters?

Worldbuilding is both about the macro and the micro, you know – you must pay as much attention to one single person in your story as you would of the city you are creating or borrowing details from.

As I recently wrote for the Culture Share column in Juliette Wade’s blog, I have this recent story (still unpublished) called ‘The Remaker’. It’s based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote. My novelette basically tells the story of a researcher who discovers a future writer who revels in rewriting works by famous authors of the past, and how this can be done (and why someone even would do this) in the mid-21st Century.

One of the biggest challenges I faced in this story wasn’t creating the protagonist (a 60-year old scholar who still loves paper books in an all-digital era), not even his sort-of nemesis/antagonist (the Remaker of the title), but his girlfriend, who doesn’t appear in more than half a dozen pages, if that much.

Let me tell you what little the reader knows about her right in the beginning of the story: her name is Midori, she is a scholar on Gender Studies (a PhD), she met our protagonist in a conference in Canada, and they have a steady relationship, each one living in their own apartment in São Paulo.

She is also a transsexual.
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