The first Astrid Maxxim book was published in 2011.  The second followed in 2013, with two more in 2014.  I’ve long had an idea that I would eventually write a long series of Astrid Maxxim books and now I’ve got quite a list of story outlines waiting.  I definitely plan to have the next Astrid Maxxim book done before the end of the year.  If everything works out, I would like to write at least one a year and still have time to get my other books out.

With that in mind, I had Matthew Riggenbach at Shaed Studios go ahead and design covers for books six and seven.  They look awesome and have inspired me to get writing faster.  Watch for Astrid Maxxim and the Electric Racecar Challenge, coming soon.

One of the major characters of the Senta and the Steel Dragon series is Zeah Korlann. He begins as the head butler for the Dechantagne household. His daughter is Yuah and he are members of the Zaeri minority religion. I used Zeah to play out several themes in the story– the rise of a working class person to prominence, religious intolerance, etc. Originally Zeah was a rather mild mannered fellow anyway, but when I revised the story, I decided he needed a stammer. The stammer only shows itself when he is under stress– whenever he is around Iolanthe.

The idea for Eaglethorpe Buxton came from two very different places. I wanted a narrator who would try to teach the reader, much like Lemony Snicket does in A Series of Unfortunate Events. I also remember reading Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener in college and being fascinated by the idea of a narrator who was not very reliable. In the case of Eaglethorpe, the narrator became extremely unreliable.

Eaglethorpe also exists in a comic version of my old Dungeons and Dragons world, so he is the type of sage/bard/adventurer that an extremely nerdy D&D player might come up with. I’m looking forward to writing more Eaglethorpe someday. You might look for Eaglethorpe Buxton’s Fairy Tales sometime in the future.

When I originally conceived and outlined the story of Princess of Amathar, the character of Vena Remontar didn’t exist.  She came into being as I was writing, another minor character that crosses paths with our hero.  The problem came along later.  As I was writing her, I fell in love with her.  That presented me with an entirely different resolution to the story than I had originally planned, but hers remained a small part.  When I revised the book, the one part that was expanded was the central point in the city of Amathar with Alexander and Vena.  Looking back years later, I’m very glad that I was swayed from my original tale by this beautiful alien princess.

Terrence is one of my favorite characters that I’ve written.  He is also as close to an anti-hero as I’ve written.  I originally conceived of him as a kind of Indiana Jones type guy who would carry the action for most of the Senta and the Steel Dragon series.  The truth is that he was rather boring that way.  He needed something, so I gave him an addiction.  Terrence is addicted to White Opthalium, a magical drug which takes him away to another world.  Once I started writing along this path, his character became much more interesting to me.  Here was a guy who is loved and admired by almost everyone except himself.  And because he hates himself, he becomes more and more antagonistic and hateful to everyone else.  People around him see him as a hero, but he can’t see himself as anything but a failure.

In my very first pre-outline ideas about Senta and the Steel Dragon, Iolanthe Dechantagne was going to be the primary character. Senta originally was nothing but a person who would be the eyes through which we saw Iolanthe. As the outline firmed up, it became obvious that Iolanthe would be too bitchy to be around all the time. I got so tired of her that I rewrote her part in book 2 and made Yuah the main character in that book instead.
I don’t know where the idea came from for Iolanthe. In a lot of ways, she’s a much bitchier version of my mother, at least as I remember her from when I was a kid. Iolanthe has to be really tough to make it in a man’s world– especially a Victorian one. And her history explains a lot about her disposition. Her most distinctive physical feature– her aquamarine eyes, just came out of nowhere. I was looking for things to make my setting a little more other-worldly and that just popped into being. Her first name came from a baby name web site, but I made up the last name. I wanted something that could have gone from French into English aristocracy.
Because she is such a major BITCH, Iolanthe is a lot of fun to write. She can be very sympathetic and just when you think you’re going to start liking her, she does something excrutiatingly mean. Still, she is one of the heroes of the story. So what if she drives her family to distruction, basically enslaves an entire native population, and (arguably) commits several murders.

In my first draft of Princess of Amathar, Alexander Ashton was transported to a strange world and found a family of pioneer Amatharians that lived in a remote log cabin.  When I started to describe the wonderful city of Amathar, I didn’t have a reason for this family now to be away from the city unless they were some strange neo-Luddites.  So I wrote them out and created Malagor, one of the many humanoid species living in Ecos for Alexander to run into.  Looking back now, I can see I was definitely influenced by the science fantasy classics Star Trek and Star Wars in his creation.  He is still one of my favorite characters though.