She is me...meet Tairneanach.

Early artwork for Guardians of Orana: Red

I am an avid reader. Well, more to the point I have the desire to be an avid reader, but I don't have as much time to read as I used to do. Often as I am reading, I wonder how much of the author is in the main character - because I cannot write without putting myself into my work. It's the best way to know that my characters are staying true to human emotions and movements and the like - even though a great many of them are not human at all.

I remember saying to one of my beta readers for the Nature Walker Trilogy that I didn't think Gin would do <something> because Gin was me, and I wouldn't do that - and he said, "Yes, I knew that because I know you." But the more I worked with Gin, the more she moved away from me. She isn't me, at least not anymore.

I am still there, though. I have been working this week on first revisions on a manuscript I wrote last year during a NaNoWriMo of one form or another. There is a plan for future books set on Orana, and this is one of them. Readers of the trilogy will remember Tairneanach, a high elf from Alynatalos who was a childhood friend of Gin's and Nelenie's younger sister. She is a magic user with a desperate need to have her own power - she does not want to depend on anyone, because the last time she did that, Ben took advantage of her and made her do horrible things. The book I am revising now is her story.

I haven't touched this manuscript since it was finished at the end of that NaNoWriMo, and I'm actually enjoying reading it. She is so familiar to me, in a way that Gin has never been. For those of you that are going of course she is, because you wrote it, this is something that I don't know if I can explain to people that aren't writers. I write all kinds of characters, some of them similar to me in thought and word and deed and some diametrically opposed to me. Tairn is more me than Gin ever was. There are times, writing Gin, that I am surprised by what happens because it is not what *I* would do, but it is what Gin would do. That hasn't happened so far in my revision with Tairn, and I'm excited for readers to learn more about her than the fact that she can turn herself into a pair of gloves to be balled up and buried in the bottom of Sath's rucksack.

So...meet Tairneanach, who carries the most of me into the story world of Orana. You will get to know her better in the upcoming standalone Guardians of Orana novel, Red.