When Your Characters Take Charge

I’m working on the Prequel to my fantasy series which started with The Castle in the Attic, a book I published in 1985 about a ten-year-old boy named William and his trip back in time to rescue his beloved nanny, Mrs. Phillips.

Although almost finished with a first draft of this Prequel, I feel myself resisting the next scene.  Why?  Because I’ve created two characters that I know my main guy, Richard, must leave behind in 1366 when he travels back to his own time, 1943 on the coast of Northumberland.

Richard dreads saying goodbye to Sonia and Eve, and so do I.
 
I never knew they were going to join me on this adventure, but at the beginning of the pandemic, when my twin granddaughters were finishing the spring semester of fifth grade, they didn’t have enough to do. Their school hadn’t figured out how to use Zoom effectively and so they were left with time on their hands. I hired them as my research assistants and promised them a cameo in the book if they did a good job. Sonia re-read The Castle in the Attic and took notes to help me with continuity while Eve did the same with the sequel, The Battle for the Castle.

Then they read as much of the first draft of the Prequel as I’d written and critiqued the manuscript. Finally, I gave them each specific research jobs which required digging into subjects as varied as the horses and saddles a knight would use for a tournament to a list of the household staff required for an imposing 14th Century castle. We negotiated their wages one week and the next, they said they would work for free as $5 a week per person put too much pressure on them. They kept their end of the bargain and I kept mine. I put them in the book, thinking they would have nothing more than a cameo appearance.
 
If there’s one thing a novelist learns over time, it’s that you’re not in charge, your characters are. These two strutted on the stage and refused to leave. Now, they are, along with others, so deeply embedded in my psyche, and I identify with them so completely that in fact, I too am living six hundred years ago. When the news of the world in our present day is too hard for me to absorb, I know that I can disappear into the Middle Ages where the plague is behind them and the War of the Roses ahead, and all I need do is get my character back through the portal to his own time while making sure nobody else tags along.  
 
Not even Eve and Sonia.
 
I promised myself I would never post a recognizable photo of my grandchildren on any kind of social media, so here is one of my favorite images of these two, just starting off in life and meeting it headlong.