Fun facts about

TRACES

The first characters I imagined were Aiden and Gracie. I know it sounds cliché, but they came to me in a dream.
In the very first version of Traces, Cole was able to transform into a fox. I changed it after the first two chapters (it was pretty cringe), but I still see Dawn as a part of him.
Cara was originally named Ophelia. What was I thinking!?
I don’t usually pick out actors to play my characters. That said, Robert Carlyle would make a perfect Lawrence.
Mark used to have a twin sister named Morgan, but she was basically a molecule of him and Nikki, so she had to go.
At a Pennsylvania high school, I met a junior who convinced her guidance counselor to let her take three foreign languages. Without her, Aiden would have been limited to two.
On the same trip, I actually met a real person shooting groundhogs on his neighbors’ properties... recreationally. Hello, Mr. Carter!
I’m basically a hobbit at 5’3”, but Aiden is another two and a half inches shorter than me.

Kirkwood is a fictional place, but it’s based on a city in western Pennsylvania that I visited and fell in love with.
I dislike it when people on TV live in unrealistically upscale houses. In Traces, I tried to add small details like the worn linoleum in Cara’s kitchen to give my characters’ homes a more realistic feel.
I used Google Streetview to walk around Lawrence’s fancy-ass neighborhood.

When you spend a lot of time in your characters’ heads, you start talking like them. I definitely took over some of their verbal quirks, like Aiden’s excessive use of the word “seriously.”
As Aiden suspects, language aptitude is indeed an empath thing — mainly because they don’t need to translate what’s being said in order to understand the gist of it.
While I understand medical terms pretty well (thank you, Latin!), I can’t use them as fluently as Cole does. I managed just fine with a little help from Gray’s Anatomy (the book) and Grey’s Anatomy (the show).
I’m bilingual (English and German), but my French sucks. That’s why I consulted a friend who’s a native speaker to check whether I’d messed up. She was particularly amused by Estelle’s way of doubting Cole’s sanity because one of her family members keeps using the same exact phrase.
One of the things I enjoyed the most about writing Traces was the challenge of finding the right tone for Aiden and Cole, respectively. Switching between them is always difficult, but once I’m fully immersed in their heads, their way of thinking (and speaking) feels completely natural to me.
I used dashes and (nested) bracketing to show that people’s inner monologues or streams of consciousness tend to be everything but tidy and neat. I’m curious how people will interpret the different types of punctuation and their respective functions.

Questions, comments, concerns?