I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to an “open-source character” – Colin Blaze. The Colin Blaze character and some of the others around him are designed to be used by anyone at all.
Colin Blaze is a private detective cursed by a witch to have only cases that no right-thinking person would ever believe were real. The witch hoped that Blaze would be discredited and forced to quit. Instead, he is the champion of the bizarre and marginalised oddities of London.
PREMADE CHARACTERS, The Muse of Last Resort
I created Colin Blaze with the fan-fic and amateur writing community in mind. After all – what greater gift than an OC (original character) where the legality of borrowing them for your own writing is fully established?
The first appearance of Colin Blaze (and site to point credit towards) was on The Muse of Last Resort in a series of snippets designed to get you writing. The very first prompt was titled “The Vampire, The Werewolf, and the Yeti“.
Colin Blaze is based in the UK having a home and office at the corner of Boyle Street and Savile Row in London. Due to the aforementioned curse, most people cannot even see his office. This creates all sorts of interesting problems and misunderstandings. Which include Blaze’s landlord forgetting to bill him.
Technically open-source is not quite the right term for Blaze but it is pretty close. Colin Blaze is a creative commons licensed character (CC-BY) for the use of all writers everywhere.
I hope that we can add more characters to The Muse for community use. Right now, there is Colin Blaze and his assistant Harry Smith. Others will follow. For now, at least, only Colin Blaze has his own channel on the Matrix Dreamers Discord server. I hope to begin linking stories about Blaze for readers both of The Muse of Last Resort and Matrix Dreamers.
