Astrid Maxxim is a 14 year old girl inventor a the beginning of the series.  As the stories continue, she ages.  She is 15 by books 3-4.  She is super smart and has been inventing since before she was 6. She lives with her father Dr. Roger Maxxim and her mother Kate Maxxim, the former a scientist and inventor and the latter the President and CEO of Maxxim Industries. They live in Maxxim City just outside the bounderies of the Maxxim Industries Campus.

Astrid owes a lot to Tom Swift Jr.  I really wanted to recreate the feeling I had when I read those books in my youth.  Still I wanted a bit of an edge too, so Astrid has a story arc that sees her grow and change.  As she grows up, she is less inclined to put up with annoying and stupid people, but she’s still at heart, a good kid.

Omega Woman (Omega Girl until her recent 21st birthday) is one of the most powerful and popular superheroes in the world.  This is particularly annoying since she is now dating Perihelion, All American Girl’s ex.  Omega Woman has flawless silver skin and golden hair that reaches almost to the floor.  She is hauty and disdainful of everyone she thinks is below her… which is everyone.

Omega Woman has super-strength, invulnerability, flight, and can shoot Omega Rays from her fingertips.

In Women of Power, Perihelion is the ex-boyfriend of All American Girl. Though we are not privy to why they split up, they did so about six months before the story started. I have a feeling that the breakup was either Stella’s idea or her fault, and now she regrets it. Within a few months of their split, Perihelion began dating Omega Girl.

Perihelion is extremely good looking and is the spokesmodel for a line of sharp Italian suits. He has the super strength and invulnerability, but his great ability is flight. He is the fastest flyer of all the supers.

There are several mythological characters named Melanippe, but Stella’s (All American Girl in Women of Power) mother is the sister of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. She has an on-again/off-again relationship with Theseus (Yes, that Theseus) and has setteled into a life of hedonism on Mount Olympus, much to Stella’s shame. “And my mother is an Amazon, which I used to think meant she was a warrior woman, but apparently just means she’s some kind of immortal hoe-bag.” Of course this means that if you were to mix the continuity of my little story with that of DC Comics, then Stella and Wonder Woman would be cousins, which is cool, because Wonder Woman has always been one of my personal faves.

In Women of Power, I wanted real mythological figures for Stella’s parents, but I didn’t want them to be major mythological figures that everyone knows. Her father is the demigod Hipparion, who is mentioned once or twice in the mythology texts but has no surviving stories about him. His name means “pony” in greek, so he must have had something to do with the being a lord of horses or something.

I had fun playing with the idea that nobody on Earth remembers him, even though he thinks he is a major figure in history. Like most mythological fathers, Hipparion has only a passing interest in his offspring, and expects to be called on for magical armor or weapons, but not emotional support.

Linda Ford, also known as Skygirl, is the second character (title character if you will) of Women of Power. She is the daughter of Earth’s greatest hero, Skyman, who was killed defending the Earth from an alien invasion. Her mother was the evil Madame Mesmer, who seduced Skyman, but Linda was raised by her step-mother Doris Drake-Ford. She has all the powers of her father (though perhaps not as strong as him in any area). She has super strength, invulnerability, supersonic flight, super breath, x-ray vision, heat vision, and several other kinds of super vision. She is vulnerable to disease and poison and to Polarite, the fragmented remains of her father’s home planet.

Linda lives her life seemingly unaware that the world knows who she is. She wears a brown wig and sensible clothes as a disguise, even though anyone can find her name at the top of the Skygirl Wikipedia page. She tends to be naive and silly, much to the annoyance of All American Girl.

Linda was a very fun character to write. She makes a great foil for Stella (AG). She is of course a parody and tribute to super characters like Supergirl, though personality wise, she’s more Mary Marvel. My favorite little detail was that when Skygirl and All American Girl play rock, paper, scissors, All American Girl always wins. She knows that Skygirl will always pick rock, because anyone who has to worry about a rock that can kill them all the time will always pick rock.

Stella O’Clare AKA All American Girl, is the main character of my book Women of Power. Stella is the daughter of an immortal Amazon and a Greek demigod. As a child, she was exiled from Mount Olympus for being unable to get along with the other children, landing on Earth in Chicago’s O’Clare Blvd. She’s intelligent, sarcastic, and quick to anger.

All American Girl has super strength, invulnerability, and the ability to fly. She is immune to poison, disease, and any form of magic. Like all superheroes, she wants to help mankind, but being a hero is also a business. She wants to be the star of her own superhero magazine and to reach the top ten of the New York Times Superhero list.

As the story begins, Stella is having a particularly rough time as she has recently broken up with her boyfriend, the super superhero Perihelion. To make matters worse, while Stella has been moping around after the breakup, Perry has immediately taken up with Omega Girl.

I loved writing All American Girl. She is both a parody and an homage to my favorite heroes from the comics.

Novelyne Cavendish is a two hundred year old vampire who works as a secretary in Sin City Detective Agency. I really didn’t want this book to have a “good” vampire. The whole basis of the book is that vampires are bad. However, Novelyne is at least trying to be good– to go “vegetarian.”

Novelyne’s last name is Cavendish because I wanted her to be distantly related to Xochitl, so an Irish surname seemed the best way to express that. Her first name I have been saving for a long time to use on a character. I originally heard the name as the friend of Conan creator Robert E. Howard– Novalyne Price Ellis. I changed the spelling as an in-joke… because she’s a character in a novel.

Novelyne is short and blond, both because I wanted to play against the usual vampire type, but also because I was thinking about how people two hundred years ago were for the most part smaller. I also gave her a little catch phrase of her own– “He’s really, really nice. I really, really like him.”