Insignia Ebook Sale + How Wyatt Enslow Came to Be

            Thanks to you guys who commented on VORTEX at the Pentagonal Spire! Just a head’s up: INSIGNIA the ebook is on sale right now for $2.99, all platforms! And I want to post this lovely cover again, just because the blue is very pretty.

Now, onto more character origins.

             Funny enough, since she’s such a large part of the story, Wyatt was a very late edition to INSIGNIA. I had two girl characters in her place before her. One was this African American girl named Brianna Badelle who had a genius-level IQ, who could’ve gone to MIT, but instead came to the Pentagonal Spire. She was a programming whiz, and physically very small, in stark contrast to her admirer, the very large Yuri.

The other was this curly-haired girl, Nicole Wurtzel, an Alexander who had this crush on Tom and didn’t really want to be there. She had a fairly negative attitude, as well as a tendency to butt heads with Vik, though Vik had a huge crush on her, anyway. (And just FYI, since I forgot to mention it earlier: Yuri had a much, much larger role in this version. He and Brianna originally saved Tom from Karl, and he single-handedly debugged Tom after the Dalton stuff—no Brianna/Wyatt involved.)

            I was revising other aspects of the story for my agent when I turned my attention to Nicole and Brianna. Both the girls were okay, but I was lukewarm about Brianna and kind of disliked Nicole, so obviously, I wasn’t doing justice to these characters. I didn’t want to have a story where the boy characters were very developed and the girls were neglected, so I knew I had to do something to fix this. It occurred to me that perhaps I should integrate Brianna and Nicole into one girl character, and really focus on her, and just make her totally awesome. Yes, having only one girl would fall into the ‘token-girl-in-a-group-of-boys’ cliché, but quality was better than quantity. One awesome character outweighed two meh characters.

            So that’s where Wyatt came in.

            Her name was the first thing that came to me. She’s ‘Wyatt’ for one reason alone: she’s supposed to hail from a preppy New England family, and there’s this practice in the North East where people name their kids after the surnames of relatives.

            Wyatt really is what made the story for me. I had all these elements that were in this manuscript, but there was something lacking until she came and made them all fit together somehow. I think she brings out something I like in Tom, and though I had to scale back Yuri a bit to give her character more to do, I think it was well worth it.

            Thanks for reading!