INVENTING CHARACTERS by Peggy Hanson
Some days I feel almost like God, the Creator. Or Shiva, the Destroyer/Creator. Well, not exactly, of course. I can’t make plants (I am not into sci-fi) and my “creations” must be based on the reality actually created by a Higher Power: humans, to be precise. I have quite a lot of experience with humans. The protagonist in my new series* is my Great Aunt Mary, an unsung Victorian feminist missionary heroine of the Balkans from 1888-1920. I have hundreds of pages of diary entries from her for all those years, so when I envisioned the Mary Matthews Missionary Sleuth series I thought how easy it would be: take the characters and incidents she outlines in the diaries and letters, tweak the incidents just a bit (believe me, they don’t need much!), and swoosh, Aunt Mary solves the crime. It is clear from actual records that she was a problem-solver. But to start a series, one needs to go to the beginning: to the ...