I've decided to write in purple today. Even though the color blue has a lot of significance in the story, I feel like a change. And since today's post is about Diana, I figured I'd use her favorite color!
Full name: Diana Beatrice Jerkins
"Diana" : "Divine"
"Beatrice" = "bringer of joy"
Her last name is purely fictitious. It just came into my head one day and stuck. When I tried to look up a meaning, I always got "unkown". In regards to her middle name, I want to say that Diana was the character I wanted to be able to help Cassie when she has problems and doubts herself. She is doing a great job, if I do say so myself.
Diana has one younger brother, Zachary ("God has remembered") about 10ish years old. What is so interesting about Diana and her family is that out of the four main characters, she is the only true practicing Catholic. Cassie is not sure what religion she believes, and she is a bit surprised at Diana's faith. I wanted Diana to be Catholic to add a different element to the fantasy genre. I want to show that it is okay for Catholic readers, like myself, to read fantasy, even though it is not real. The whole point of stories is to teach a lesson, not align yourself with a belief system. Going along with that, I wanted to show the outside world that there are many friendships that are strong even if the people are very different. Cassie and Diana are very, very different girls.
To go along with their differences, I actually changed Diana's physical appearance a third of the way through writing the book. When I first started writing, Diana had short black hair and was only a few inches shorter than Cassie. Even though that image was hard to let go of, I really wanted Diana not only to be considered really short by a lot of people's standards (but she's not, okay! I'm only 5'1' too!), I also wanted to physically put differences between herself and Cassie. There were getting to be way too many dark haired people in the book anyway. I needed some variety.
I also added the fact that Diana used to be a cheerleader in grade school and freshman year of high school. She had to quit, however, because of back problems. This is a shout out to the few nice cheerleaders in my class in my own high school. I know that the sport does not automatically make you a selfish brat (not that all cheerleaders were nice to me...but hey, nice people and mean people in every clique).
Around the same time I changed Diana's appearance and gave her a bigger personality and more character traits, I was inspired to add Thomas as a character. I will talk about their relationship next month!
If I don't get to another post before January: Have a Merry Christmas!
