For this year’s A-to-Z April Challenge, I’m interviewing characters from my and/or my twin’s fiction. Some of them are major characters, some are supporting cast, and some have managed to avoid any page-time (so far).
Thomas: I have so many questions I could ask you, it’s hard to narrow them down to just a few. Here’s one from my readers: What other characters would you normally be compared to?
Kel: I have no idea. Not if you want specific characters instead of general tropes. I had a bit of the ‘ordinary girl finds out she’s secretly a fairytale princess’ thing, but even that’s inaccurate unless you’re really generous with what you count as ordinary. My dad was famous before I was even born: brave astronaut, captain of an ill-fated mission into unknown space, yadda yadda. [smirks] At least I got to spend all twenty-one years of my youth pretending to be normal, right?
Thomas: Yeah, about that…
Kel: Please don’t say you’re planning to change my backstory again.
Thomas: Nothing major. We’re still working out the details of the early years, y’know? You still meet that nice young man, fall in love, get married —
Kel: Have four children?
Thomas: Well, not immediately. Your firstborn will have grandchildren of his own before your youngest is born.
Kel: So I still get involved in politics because of my husband’s job, and I still become the matriarch of a clan of green-eyed redheads with an aversion to ferrous materials. Gotcha. You know, you’re not fooling anyone by using my real surname here.
Thomas: [shrugs] It’s a translation anyway. And if they do make the connection, that just helps establish that you’re a science fiction character before you appear in a novel, thus slightly reducing the number of book reviews insisting you’re a fantasy character simply because your husband’s people don’t build starships.
Kel: Yes, but they use starships. — you’ve even written stories about that already. That should be enough, shouldn’t it?
Thomas: You don’t know twenty-first-century Terrans very well. Trust me, it won’t be enough.
North of Andover 