I admit that the title of this post is a bit like clickbait, because the answer is: I don’t feel like I “craft” my characters at all.

For the most part, they just come to me as who they are–what they look like, their backgrounds, their way of talking, their temperaments and personalities. All of it.

Some characters I struggle to name. Others I name intentionally based upon some meaning of the root word (like Kora, for “heart.”) Other characters, I just know what their name is. Zalski was one of those. And Laskenay.

My protagonist in book one (Kora) took me YEARS to envision, but once I did, I had her instantly, as well as her brother Zac. What held me up?

I don’t know what made me think for a while that my Herezoth books should be a portal fantasy. It didn’t work as a portal fantasy. It couldn’t work. No one from our world belongs in Herezoth–not as a character interacting with other characters.

The protagonist of book one needed to come FROM Herezoth, to have everything personally at stake in the civil war, and the chaos, and the evil threatening the kingdom. Everything.

Kora’s story became more and more powerful as I developed it while writing. The ending, which is something of a twist, took even ME out of left field. I didn’t see it coming until just a scene or two in advance of writing it.

I think I subconsciously understood what the stakes needed to be, which is why after writing just a couple of scenes in 2004, I stopped, wrote a different novel entirely, then realized who Kora was in 2006 and took Herezoth back up.

When I got to book two, I again knew who Vane and August were instantly–the principal couple of that story. I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen, or how I would get them from point A to point B, but I knew who they were.

I also knew who the villains were: Ursa with her fisherman’s accent, Darryn as kind of the opposite of Zacry, and Arbora as a flipped around version of Kora (more on them to come!)

I had fun with them all–though the role of the villains in book two is rather different than in book one. Book two is more of a love story (a clean one) than an action/adventure, though there is plenty of action too.

My fiction is definitely character-driven, more and more so as I write more books. I’m happy with that. I like it. It works for me, the stories I’m telling, and the themes I want to explore.

Which makes it all the more interesting that I don’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out who my characters are. I just know them . . . from the get go. Kind of like old friends.