Creating Strong Female Characters

Lois Peterson, the older woman protagonist of The Mage of Motor Avenue series, is one of my favorite characters. She’s snarky and doesn’t take shit from anyone but she’s also kind, and those are my personal favorite type of people.

Lucinda (the younger woman protagonist of The Wanderer series) has a dry sense of humor but her story is a lot less funny and she is perhaps a more nuanced character who grows and develops significantly over the course of her series.

Lois changes, too, although her changes are a bit more subtle; she’s a reluctant hero throughout but learns to accept her power.

As a character, Lois came into my mind full-blown. She was her take-no-prisoners, wise-cracking self from the first words that flowed from my pen.

Lucinda, on the other hand, was a much more difficult character to write. She started off as fairly young and much more naive, and the whole story world and situation was a lot simpler. The Wanderer started off as an historical romance until I realized I wanted it to be a much bigger story. So while it does have some romantic elements, I dropped the historical aspect (though the whole of the Stone Island is heavily influenced by the England of the early medieval period).

This gave me freedom to explore but it also led to my having to create a more complex character to cope with the more complex story world and plot.

Creating strong female characters is important to me, but they’ve turned out to be wildly different!