I went and took a shower; dizziness was getting the better of me... Anyway, I'll reply now.

[@Crumbs]
Sounds good to me. Welcome aboard.

[@shylarah]

[quote=shylarah]
one of the most bothersome things about a lot of rps is that people want fresh characters...and character sheets.  I'm sorry, if I just whipped up a new character I don't know them that well.  I have maybe one or two concepts for personality, a couple events in history, and probably an appearance (since that's usually straightforward).  I don't know what their weaknesses are, I'm not sure how they'd respond to various situations.  
[/quote]
I think this is one of the places where I differ significantly to most (not all) role-players. Not only because I'm a writer [i]before[/i] a role-player, but also due to how personal my main story project is to me, all of the characters I create are vastly fleshed out pretty much from the moment of their conception. Before I even begin using a character in a role-play, I usually have their entire (relevant, though sometimes more) history thought through and everything about who they are as a person worked out.

Also, my introduction to role-playing was a bit unorthodox; I'd never even used a PC before a little over ten years ago, or done any form of major storytelling through [i]text[/i] (I've done plenty verbally and using some "Tabletops" and a lot of other "games", plus I'd done a [i]very[/i] small bit of writing without prior experience, such as in one of my TAFE classes; got top of my class for that short story too) at this point, and I'd never even heard of play-by-post before. I signed up to my first role-playing forum, a Final Fantasy one, and it turned out to be a high advanced role-playing forum, so I actually was forced to put my skills to the test without any prior experience at all.

Before you could even start role-playing, you needed a character sheet consisting of several paragraphs for appearance, several paragraphs for personality, and several paragraphs for history. You also needed to provide a role-playing sample to prove you could use this character. In each case I was able to pass at the top grade (Level 10) despite being, for all intents and purposes, a complete beginner. This is another reason I always have my entire characters worked out very quickly, so I don't really learn about them through role-playing; they adapt and evolve through it as almost any person would when experiencing new things.

Due to that first role-playing forum, and also the fact that my characters in my main story project are very complex and fleshed out, especially the ones more closely rooted to myself as a person or my philosophy (or based off on me entirely in the case of one specific character, with a couple others embodying alternate routes I could've gone down in my life), I've never had to worry about not knowing my character upon creation.

This ended up serving as an "Achilles' Heel" of sorts for me too though; on every role-playing forum I ever joined afterwards, and even that old forum when I returned to it eventually, I constantly found myself having to severely water down my character sheets because they were considered "overkill", and in the few cases they weren't I even had some really flattering compliments about having the most thorough character sheets the sites had ever seen.

[quote=shylarah]
And indeed, when putting your chars in situations you design, you can sorta...tailor things so they go the way you want.  It's dealing with the unexpected that truly lets you develop or even just get to know a character.  I learn about my characters by using them, and once I know them well enough then I can modify them to fit a variety of settings, and will deploy them as needed, depending on what a situation calls for.
[/quote]
You more or less [i]have[/i] to tailor things to the way you want in order to write a novel, since the whole point is that it's your story. That being said, I don't so much learn about my characters (as I said previously) through role-play so much as I consider role-playing with them a personal challenge to [i]prove[/i] I know the ins and outs of them.

Admittedly, this is a complicated situation outside of my own setting because my characters are so intricately detailed and based around certain concepts that are entirely unique to my setting for the most part that it's extremely difficult to "modify" them to translate them into another series, and since most of them are very personal to me I don't like having to edit or change them.

[quote=shylarah]
And the fun part is that sometimes through modification, I find alternate versions of character and sometimes they become new characters.  Especially if something happens in an rp and I want to keep that as part of the permanent character, since I will often reset to a base form when I bring them in elsewhere, though there could be a few different checkpoints over the course of their life.
[/quote]
This, on the other hand, I do relate to. You'll recall I mentioned previously that before I'll involve my characters in any sort of role-play that I insist on knowing them thoroughly and having everything worked out; the exception to this rule is when I'm doing role-play within the setting of my own project. I actually use these role-plays as an experimental ground to test out all the odds and ends of my characters and finalize ideas I have, and, yes, sometimes due to the role-plays I have with Ailyn or with someone else in my circle I actually decide that I'd like to make alterations to the characters before finally putting them into the story properly; I prefer to test characters this way before bringing them into the canon.

There's another, more complicated example of this, but it's a lot more convoluted to explain so I'll save it for the time being.

[quote=shylarah]
You know, one of the best things, in my opinion, is when you have someone who you trust enough to know your characters at least a bit.  
[/quote]
This is something I actually don't relate to much, so I'm different to you and [@Gowi] in this sense. The [i]only[/i] exception to an extent is Ailyn, and in that case it's more like she knows my characters because she knows me, although she's still learning a lot of them and it's all a work in progress due to how complex my project is and how many characters it has. She wouldn't be able to write them (other than those mentioned in the paragraph below this one), but she's getting really good at understanding my vision for a lot of them and making comparisons and links to them when we have discussions. Overall, I don't think anyone knows my characters well enough to write them; I'm not saying it's impossible but considering how [i]personal[/i] most of my characters are to me in some way I think I'd probably be one of the most difficult people to satisfy in this regard (though Ailyn has done amazingly with the handful I'll refer to below).

[quote=shylarah]
And there's been instances where someone else's character plays a huge role in the life/development of my characters, and I sorta get to adopt those characters for other rps, though they eventually split from their origins over time as all things do.  And friends have requested similar permissions when my chars are inextricably linked to theirs, and I've given it.  <3
[/quote]
Yeah, you've mentioned this to me in the NaNoWriMo thread, actually. Like I mentioned back then to you, Ailyn is definitely the only person who has that sort of liberty with any of my characters; I've allowed her to "adopt" certain female characters in the project since the posts are more enjoyable and meaningful when they come from her, especially since she's essentially pouring herself into them as well, so it's more like "adapting" characters I've created more so than actually "adopting" them completely, though they haven't changed all that much since me and her just have really good symbiosis.