Imitating Life

We hope you already know this, but our third novel, The Dragon Princess, is available. The easiest way to get it is to go to http://lynnevansbooks.com/, click on the cover, then choose one of the hot links to Amazon, B&N, or our sales site. And, since we are adding any sales through June from The Dragon Princess and The Valentine’s Game to our ongoing efforts to raise funds for PHS Student Services by selling Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain, now would be a great time to pick up an e-copy.

Laura

As some of you who’ve read The Mark of Kain know, we like to name some of our characters after the people in our lives. When we wrote Bobbie, we chose names from that year’s peer counselors. In that case, it was just the names. There was no attempt to imbue our fictional characters with any real life personality. This time around, with one notable exception, it’s family, and, because it was family, we put a little extra into our fictional characters. 

Sarah

Those who know our daughter Laura will attest to her calm, steady, powerful, but understated presence. It won’t surprise her friends that the fictional character who bears her name is heir to the throne in our fantasy realm, Elan. We had a little more fun with our daughter Sarah’s character. She is the closest thing we have to a wizard in real life so making her the anti-wizard was a backhanded compliment. And if you think we are trying to imply that we would like more grandchildren in this dimension because we gave Sarah nine children in Elan, we plead guilty as charged. Our son-in-law and future son-in-law make appearances as well. It wasn’t even a stretch to make Terence the theatrical Lord Finewit but crafting Stephen as General Whitefang required considerably more artistic license. 

Terence

He was still in diapers when we borrowed our grandson’s Ethan’s name for one of the two main characters. He’s still too young to make any real comparison to the young man who comes of age riding snow dragons in Elan. We just hope he ends up liking his namesake when he’s old enough to read the book himself. And, when you read the dedication page, you’ll learn that the protagonist Maggie is named for one of our very first fans. Since Maggie Oyer has her own literary aspirations, we hope she thinks we’ve done well with her fictional character.

Stephen

Just in case you’re wondering, we do make fictional appearances ourselves. Lynn is more envious of her Elanian counterpart. She’d give just about anything to be a tall, flying, beautiful, Amazonian warrior. Evan’s character hones closer to reality. We’ve even sprinkled some real facts about us in the book. Like Lord Birch, Evans has a fear of heights.  And no one should mess with either Lynn or Her Highness Goldtrace when she has a basketball in her hand.

We had a good time sneaking some real life into our fantastic fictional world. We hope you think so too. So go get a copy, read it, and let us know.

Ethan                               Maggie