Character profiling again!

How I long for a room with a huge pin board right now. I've returned to my novel and immediately realised I'd forgotten the name of a character! Flicked through my few pages of notes on my characters to find it and wondered how I could forget such a name......it was my dad's name!

Decided some proper profiling was needed and boy have a got myself into a muddle but I'm getting there. One thing to come out of this is how certain things link together to make the story better (hopefully) and I'm finding that the characters are coming to life more and I'm beginning to understand where they are coming from. Found some good tension spots between two characters which will be useful. I've had to expand on my characters' family trees and I have been going through the first part of the story and editing a little. I need to get a feel for the story again and add more detail before I continue with it.This seems essential at this point, especially now I'm putting flesh on my characters. Of course further edits will be needed but this will be  a better draft.

Another thing that's come out of looking at the novel again is the similarities to my 'soap' style story. I realised that both are mainly set in villages (one not exclusively) and the names of the villages are similar! Not only that but two names appear in both stories. None of this was intentional and I am wondering whether I just don't have much imagination, whether it was subconscious or I like writing things based on similar ideas. Probably it's down to not profiling characters properly first! Well, Victoria Hislop writes similar things - all her books have two timelines (with back story dominating) and look how successful she is! Oh well, I think it's time for a break - my head is overloaded with dates, names and places. I'm off to wash up and then watch the footie - come on Costa Rica!