Not a costume—just a picture of me messing around with a crown I made myself last April in a vaguely queenly outfit.

But this first photo reminded me of the Snow Queen, which—as many of you know—is the main villain of The Ever Afters series.

What you may not know (unless perhaps you watched all the author videos that came out with the OEAE paperback) is that I based the Snow Queen, in part, on myself. 

When I say that at first, people are like, “Wait, what??” 

But as I’ve mentioned before, all the Characters in the Ever Afters are based in part on myself. When writing, especially fantasy, that’s an easy way to weave in a real-life flavor. 

But I also was following a specific piece of advice about writing, which I heard when I was a kid and which I now share with you. 

Paul Zindel came to my middle school and gave this really cool speech. I don’t remember much of it, but the part I do remember is that he had two masks:

One was this werewolf rubber mask that covered his entire face. 

The other was this half mask that only covered the top half of your face, but it was flesh-covered, and kind of had a weird nose and a bulging eye, and it was vastly creepy. 

Mr. Zindel goes, “Okay, guys, which one of these is scarier?” And he put them both on. 

Everyone agreed that the one that only covered half his face was much scarier. 

He said, “That’s what you need to remember when you’re creating your villains. If it’s too far off the mark, if it’s too far from reality, it’s not going to scare people. But if you base it a little bit on yourself, it’s going to be much much more terrifying.”

So, in the series, Rory notices, over and over and over again, that the Snow Queen’s best tool in her arsenal is that she can figure out what other people want, and she learns how to twist that to figure out how she can get what SHE wants. 

I can do that too. I try to use my powers for good, but that power does scare me sometimes. 

And so, since Rory, the main character of the Ever Afters, is also based on me, that trait--the way the Snow Queen can see what other people wants—also terrifies Rory. It freaks Rory out especially, because Rory already knows that she has a great deal of similarity of the Snow Queen. She sees the way the trait can be twisted, not to help, but to harm.  

And because she is aware of it, because she is determined to stop from turning into the Snow Queen, Rory ultimately does. 

This is not a comfortable way of looking at heroes and villains, especially as the writer. But that psychological tension makes for characters with more real-life texture, more relatability, and—ultimately—better fiction. 

And at least for me, the writing process helps me resolve some of that tension inside myself too. I used the fear of that trait as one of my emotional entry points into the series, and by the final book, I came to the same conclusion that Rory did:

Traits and talents are not good or bad on their own—and neither are people really. 

At the end of the day, it’s the choices people make that determines what kind of impact that they make.