Characters

A delightful aspect of creative writing in fiction is the ability to develop characters -- those I love and even those I don't, though, granted I don't do a lot of backstory on my villains. I write women's fiction these days, and, to be honest, the evil forces I'm most interested in are those in our own minds.

While my protagonist and her friends are modern young women (the story takes place within the last decade), I go several generations in their backstories and the history of the town. Several of the characters are elder women (the middle generation), and it is this interweaving of her-story that emerges.

The origin of people and place is at the old turn of the century, from the 19th to the 20th centuries. Here are images of three of those ancestral characters, although, as with other images, my characters are not identical to these -- the images have simply provided inspiration and a visual touchstone.

Vianne

Bertha Rose

Kisaiya

Another fun feature of creating extensive backstory is that I already have the bones of at least six more stories I could easily conjure to take place across the past hundred years!