Anthony Lee Collins

I got this from Maggie over a Maggie Madly Writing. I don’t usually do these (character interviews), but it appealed to me to interview the characters who appear in the final chapter of my current story.

RULES:
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1) Pick 2-5 of your original characters.
2) Don’t change the questions.
3) Let your characters answer, not you.
4) Tag 2-5 people to do the meme. (I’m not tagging anyone, so if you want to do the meme, feel free to copy and paste.)
5) Have fun!
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CHARACTERS CHOSEN:
1. Katherine diGregorio
2. Angel Valentine
3. Alexandra Ross
4. Stephanie Monroe
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QUESTIONS:

1. Welcome! Now, who are you (name, gender), how old are you, and what species are you?

Katherine: Katherine diGregorio. I’m female, forty-two years old. Human.

Angel: Angel Valentine, and let’s just say that I’m old enough.

Alex: Alexandra Ross. That’s not the last name I was born with, but I’m not going to talk about that. I’m forty-two also. I don’t know my age for a fact, but if Katherine is forty-two then so am I, because I know we’re the same age. As is Angel.

[Angel makes a face]

Stephanie: Stephanie Ann Monroe. I’m eighteen years old, and I’m a girl.

 
2. Describe how you look like now.

Katherine: [laughs] I look like someone who doesn’t give a damn what she looks like. Five-seven. Some scars. No makeup. My hair’s dirty blonde, usually in more ways than one. I hack it off whenever it starts to get in my way.

Angel: I’m around six feet tall, with pale skin and long, white hair. I never wear makeup or jewelry.

Alex: Tall, short hair, going gray. Also, “how you look like now” is awkward. It would be better to say “what you look like now” or “how you look now.” In addition, the word “now” is probably not necessary.

Stephanie: I’m pretty athletic looking, I guess. I work out a lot. My hair is blonde and short.

 
3. Good, good! Now let’s see, why do you think you were created? What do you think your creator’s inspiration was for you?

Katherine: I’m not religious.

Angel: To be magnificent.

Alex: Existence precedes essence.

Stephanie: I don’t go to church anymore. I think sometimes that I should, but then I think about the way–

[Angel clears her throat.]

Stephanie: Okay. Sorry.

 
4. Oh, I understand! So are you looking for a relationship?

Katherine: I already have one. My boyfriend, Pete, is a musician. He’s far from perfect, but he’s pretty perfect for me. I’ve heard people say that they come with a lot of baggage in a relationship, but I come with more. And he’s okay with that.

Angel: I have a fella, but it’s not like we’re about to get married or anything.

Alex: Not involved and not looking.

Stephanie: That’s me, too. Not involved and not looking.

 
5. Interesting… so what is your purpose as a character in this world?

Katherine: I try to be a better person, one day at a time, or at least not to kill anybody unnecessarily.

Alex: To mind my own business.

Stephanie: To help people. To be useful. To set a good example and treat people fairly.

 
6. Awesome! Now how would you describe yourself?

Katherine: I have impulse control issues, probably related to a…

Tammy [interrupts]: I’m an attorney, and a very successful one. In answer to your earlier question, I’m not in a relationship right now; men find me intimidating because I’m very successful in my career, and I’m fantastic in bed–

[Alex and Stephanie speak at once]
Alex: I think I may have an impulse control issue of my own in a minute.
Stephanie: I’m someone who’s trying to be useful. Also, where did Angel go, and why is Tammy here?

Katherine: I think we should all remain calm.

Angel: I’m back. Did I miss anything?

 
7. Now, how would your friends describe you?

Katherine: I really don’t know. Whatever they think, I imagine they’d be reluctant to say it to my face.

Angel: That elegant creature who lives in that shabby little house.

Alex: I guess I’m with Katherine – I have no idea.

Stephanie: Well, I only have one good friend – Priscilla – and she thinks I’m crazy. [laughs]

 
8. Do you have any abilities?

Katherine: Survival. Everything considered, being forty-two years old and not being dead – that took some skill.

Angel: No abilities that would be appropriate to discuss in a family publication. [winks]

Alex: The question is asinine. Everybody has abilities.

Stephanie: I’m trained in hand-to-hand combat, open-hand and closed-fist, and I’m a good shot with a pistol or a rifle.

 
9. OK, so do you hate anyone or a certain thing?

Katherine: No, no one and nothing.

Angel: There are various things that annoy me (quite a few, now that I think about it), but nothing I hate.

Alex: No, nothing. I hated my ex-husband once, but that didn’t accomplish anything positive.

Stephanie: Hate? No, nothing.

 
10. Enough of hate, how about love? Do you love anyone or something?

Katherine: I love my boyfriend, Pete. [shrugs] We’re not all mushy or anything – we almost never talk about love. But when you have it, you don’t have to talk about it every five minutes. And I guess I love my dog.

Angel: My daughters, I suppose.

Alex: Quiet. Solitude. Time to think.

Stephanie: Angel, “daughters”? Plural?

Angel: Never mind, child. Forget I even said it.

Most characters get their own character pages, but there is no way to talk about Craig, Will, and Sharon Golden separately.

They go to the same school as Ron, who says that she likes Will and finds the other two "stuck up." This makes her about the only person who can tell the three siblings apart. If they are siblings.

Little is known about the Golden. They are called that because they use the surname, but also because their skin is a strange golden color. It goes well with their blond hair and gray eyes, but the overall effect is rather unnatural.

Comic books teach us that those who are peculiar looking and mysterious also have special powers, but there is no evidence that this is true of the Golden. Their main goal seems to be to blend in with the other teenagers around them, to be normal, but they're not very good at it.

The Golden first appeared in "The Golden Mystery," appropriately enough. They are also in the stories, "The Mystery of the Quiet People" and "Michael."

Also a word on names, especially since Sonje over at sonjejones.com was just talking about naming characters in this post.

The Golden are somewhat inspired by three characters called The Golden from the late, lamented comic book The Establishment. Those characters are quite different, since the comic-book Golden were very powerful superheroes, quite a bit older than our characters, and they looked similar to each other but not identical.

The comic-book Golden were named Alex, Stuart, and Will, after the actors in the British television show The Champions (who the comic-book characters were somewhat based on). In that show, Alexandra Bastedo, Stuart Damon, and William Gaunt played Sharron Macready, Craig Sterling, and Richard Barrett, so I called my characters Sharon, Craig, and Will (for symmetry it should have been Richard or Rick or Dick, but those didn't seem right so I went with Will).

To go further into pop culture history, the look of The Golden (both groups) were inspired by the children in Village of the Damned, a movie which was based in turn on the book The Midwich Cuckoos, which also influenced the characters The Stepford Cuckoos in the X-Men comics, sisters (originally five, now down to three) who share telepathic powers and, to some extent, a common mind.

However, as I say, all of the characters named above are very powerful, which is apparently not true of The Golden.

Ron is the adopted daughter of Jan Sleet and Marshall. She is around twelve years old.

For a long time, they just thought of her as "that loud, obnoxious girl who delivers our mail." Beyond that, nobody knew much about the rest of Ron's life. Did she have family in the area, did she ever go to school, where did she sleep, and how did she eat? Nobody knew. And, it must be said, nobody thought about it very much.

Her first appearance in the mystery stories was in the vampire case, where she made a brief appearance, delivering a very important piece of mail.

But then, during the college case, Ron got into some serious trouble, and Jan Sleet managed to get her out of it. In the course of that case, Jan Sleet revealed that she had investigated Ron. She knew that Ron had run away from her parents and they had reported her missing, but that they had apparently made no other effort to find her or get her back. When Jan Sleet had called them, they had apparently been completely willing to let their 12-year-old daughter live with complete strangers, at least as long as they could tell themselves that she was in good hands.

Then, at the end of the college case, she had started to refer to Jan and Marshall as "Mom" and "Dad." To her surprise, and to everybody else's, they went along with this, adopting her as their daughter.

As parents, Jan Sleet and Marshall are somewhat unusual. For one thing, they have no idea where their daughter sleeps. They did insist that she attend school, though only on a part-time basis because of her postal responsibilities. Ron persuaded them to move a second desk into their bedroom. This made it fairly crowded, but it meant she could work on her homework with them in the evenings.

The great detective's urge is generally to investigate everything (or at least to be as nosy as possible), but Marshall convinced her to resist poking around in Ron's history, or at least when the only purpose is satisfying her own curiosity. However, she is keeping her eyes open, and making deductions based on what she sees.

Here are the conclusions she has come to so far:

• Ron was abused growing up.


• She was also, and probably more often, neglected.


• Her parents came to the city for a vacation, bringing Ron, and that's when Ron ran away. This was at least partly to get them to chase her, to demonstrate concern.


• Which they didn't do. They reported her missing, finished their vacation, and went home.

Many children, in that situation, would have run back to their parents, chastened, but not Ron. She was both proud and resourceful, and she decided to figure out how to live on her own.

Somehow she learned about U-town, or stumbled into it accidentally, and when she came over the bridge she saw the daily mail delivery (as described here). Seeing how casually it was all handled, she stepped in and began to organize the young runners who were (mis)handling it. Then, hearing about the mail for the informal committee that ran U-town (the "big fish," as the runners called them), she decided to handle this part of the process herself.

Before Ron took this over, their mail delivery had been rather erratic, and this had caused a few problems with legal documents and diplomatic communications, as well as personal and family mail.

Ron may have had a somewhat abrasive personality, and a voice which could be loud and annoying, but nobody could deny that she was dedicated and efficient.

Ron appears in all of the mystery stories after The College Mystery (some more than others, of course).

It’s a little surprising that there hasn’t been an entry about Marshall until now. I had to go back and check to make sure.

After all, his employer (Jan Sleet) was the first character to get one, and it’s not really possible to think about her without thinking about him. Sherlock Holmes, as I think he pointed out at one point, was lost without his loyal friend and biographer Dr. Watson, and how could Nero Wolfe have solved a single mystery without Archie Goodwin?

So, it’s really a shame that Marshall has not been recognized until now. Jan Sleet wouldn’t have got far, as a reporter or as a detective, without him, and the one time we see her on her own for an extended period (in the first four chapters of U-town) she’s clearly miserable. Her eerie self-confidence returns the minute they are back together.

But there’s something else important about Marshall, which is that he’s narrated quite a few chapters, the only character to do so. He narrated the last four chapters (and the epilogue) of A Sane Woman, and three chapters in U-town (including the last one). Which is an interesting coincidence, his always narrating the ends of the novels, because current plans are for him to narrate the ending of the current one as well. I didn’t really think about this pattern until now.

We don’t know much about Marshall’s early life. His last name is mentioned only once (and there is a chance that he gave the wrong name in that situation, to see if anybody would notice). He is Irish, and (we can assume) at least a bit older than his employer. There has never even been a physical description of him (as there never was of Archie Goodwin), though I have the idea that he’s good-looking. It’s hard to imagine Jan Sleet hiring an assistant who was not pleasant to look at. After all, one of the few things that Dr. John (or possibly James) Watson and Archie Goodwin had in common was that they were obviously attractive to women.

Of course, Marshall has often had difficulty translating this attractiveness into anything tangible, since his employer is always watching, ready to interfere.

I don’t think I’ve quoted this exchange I had with Cyndi about Marshall:

Cyndi: hey are we going to see any more Marshall’s-POV chapters?
John: yup. not soon, though
Cyndi: woot. I like him.
John: he’s not flashy, kind of quiet, but he’s a good character to write
Cyndi: yeah that’s what I like about him. you kind of have to dig to make him seen.
John: exactly, he’s an observer, but he’s a feeling person, not emotionally shut off (like some people who observe a lot)
Cyndi: right. I like that.

Marshall is currently assisting his employer in a series of mystery stories.

Neil first appears as the bodyguard of Dr. Lee, the leader of the Jinx. But it becomes obvious, especially starting in the chapter The Burning, that he’s much more than that. When there’s an emergency, he automatically takes command, coordinating and ordering his “troops,” as he does here, but it’s Dr. Lee who ultimately decides what they are going to do, though she doesn’t issue orders or raise her voice, as he does here.

But Neil sometimes has his own agenda, as he does here, when he indicates to Pete that he wants to set up a situation where starling will kill a murderer for him, because he is not allowed to take private vengeance. And he is honest enough to admit that it’s not because the victim mattered to him, it’s because his pride was hurt that the murderer was able to succeed despite his plan to protect the victim.

It is pretty clear in the novel U-town that Neil and starling had some sort of history (this is much clearer and more detailed in the new novel, of course). The first hint is when he calls her “Kat” (the first time we see anybody call her by her name other than Pete), and it’s clearer in the scene I link to above, when Neil gives Pete some very good advice.

Neil is very tough, and he sees a lot of things in terms of strength and weakness, but he obviously does care about people, as we can see in the passage I mention above. And it is significant, too, that he made a different choice than Dr. Lee in the Return to U-town chapter. However, his disdain for human weakness will be called out very soon, and very forcefully, since U-town is not based on the same ideas as the Jinx.

In the new novel, we see Neil functioning without Dr. Lee, and he has somewhat fallen into a similar role in his new situation, letting others figure out what should be done, and then seeing his responsibility as figuring out how. But U-town is not the Jinx, and they don’t have any use for that sort of military discipline.

Neil does not appear in A Sane Woman. In U-town, he is first mentioned in A World So Alive, and then he is first seen in Prove It (Just the Facts). In the new novel, he is first seen in the Return to U-town chapter.

Tammy Everett's walk was one thing she was proud of, one of many.

Tammy was a successful attorney until she decided to retire from active practice (for her health, as she says now). Since her retirement, she has concentrated more on her family, which she had little time for when she was focused on her career. She is trying, very quietly, to rebuild some bridges.

She recently learned that her real father was Jacob Everett, the famous (and reportedly deceased) novelist, and she decided to take his last name as her own. She has read all of his novels, and many of the protagonists (most commonly described as macho, taciturn, grim, stoic, reserved, individualistic and humorless) appealed to her, though of course they were all male.

When she and SarahBeth have been together, Tammy has been appalled at the younger woman's relentless broadcasting of her urges, opinions, humors, desires and bodily functions to the world, but they do share one thing, which is a disdain for what SarahBeth inevitably refers to as "mushiness." The Old Man (as Jacob Everett was known for most of his life) would have agreed with that.

Tammy is first described in Chapter Five of A Sane Woman. We first see her in Chapter Eight, and the other characters meet her in Chapter Thirteen, the chapter which bears her name.

She does not appear in U-town. In the new novel, she first appears in the chapter Return to U-town.