If you have looked at my new website for Small Town Witch, you may have already read the character sheets I posted about the main characters. These include a lot of interesting facts about the characters to help you familiarize yourself with them. Reading them is not necessary for understanding the story, but they may add to the experience.They contain some of the information that I keep for myself to remind me about the characters.

Well, the things that I included on the website were deliberate–and so were the things that I left off. For example, you may notice that I included a “race” designation for all of the characters (referring to which type of magikin they are) but no “ethnic” details. This was left off because it’s not important to the characters or the story, for the most part. The story is not about ethnic tensions or racism in the sense that humans are judged for their skin color. (There is tension between humans and magikin, so those details are explicit.) From the names of many characters, ethnic diversity even in the small rural town can be implied. As far as I am concerned, they’re Californian.

In the same vein, I have not noted any characters’ sexual orientation. This is a little more relevant to the story because sexual orientation is discussed a little bit. But I absolutely did not want to make this an important point in my characters. I want to have diversity in my stories, because there is diversity in the people that I know, but I do not want them to be defined by their sexuality. This is not a LGBTQ story or a time to preach about LGBTQ issues. This is a story that happens to have some non-straight characters. (more…)