It was not enough to find myself in a large house that I could, for a week at a times, turn into a place where I could pretend to be someone else, I had to create the people I wanted to be there.

In fact, it became a castle, passages here, passages there, and endless rooms to explore and hide away from my brother.

My brother became the eldest prince, next in line to the throne, and being the way he was towards me, often mean, condescending, or just plain horrible, he was going to make an evil king when he succeeded the throne.

And not above assassinating his father the king to get there sooner.

My grandmother, the owner of the house, and such a kindly lady, I had an impossible time trying to figure out how our mother had turned out so bad. She was the Queen that everyone adored, the one who was always there when she was needed with the right words, and treats when we needed picking up.

My grandfather had died about a year after I was born and I never got to meet him, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a role. Of course, he was the king, kind and just, but strong when he had to be. Everyone respected him.

Oddly enough, neither my mother nor my father ever figured in any of my stories. To be honest, I never knew why that was the case. Usually for a person to become a character they have to have some memorable trait, and when I think now about it, neither of them did. Both rarely had any interest in their children, certainly, neither did anything for us, and my mother in particular often treated us as if we didn’t exist.

My uncle, a large scary man who for a long time I thought was Andre the giant’s brother, was the King’s brother, and the man in charge of the castle guard, and the King’s bodyguard. I could always imagine him in his armor, carrying his sword, ready to slay the King’s enemies.

He used to clomp through the house at odd hours of the day and night, and those strange creaking noises of moving floorboards, and other odd sounds were the ghosts of previous generations.

My aunt, so very different from my mother, was the Queen’s consort, the one who made everything happen.

Next door was a small country church, and that became the village attached to the castle, and once a week it became the imaginary marketplace, and the people the villagers, a wide variety of characters indeed.

For a long time, in those early formative years of becoming a writer, those people became the models of many different characters, but oddly enough, they all had the same traits, no matter who they were in the story. They only evolved into more complex characters after I had stepped out into a much larger world.