Author's Message

It may be part of the new-author daze, but sometimes I hold When Sparrows Fall in my hands and wonder where on earth the characters came from. I didn’t know much about Jack and Miranda when they first wandered into my brain. My imagination produced Miranda first, walking through the mist with her old-fashioned cape flapping in the wind. Then Jack showed up, wearing a rumpled raincoat and driving a sexy black convertible that looked like a toy beside Miranda’s big, boring white van.

Wherever these two came from, they had to clash. She’s a mild-mannered homeschooling widow whose late husband believed fiction is frivolous, if not evil. Jack is an opinionated college professor whose world revolves around fiction, including Chaucer. And Chaucer isn’t for prudes.

Jack was sheer fun to write, but Miranda was a challenge. A spunky, admirable character lurks inside her, but she’d been stomped on for years. When she first walks onstage, she’s carrying so much baggage that it’s nearly impossible for her to take her fate into her own hands. Enter Jack, who wants to shake that baggage right out of her grip. His motives are good, but his methods aren’t necessarily wise. He learns to deal gently with battered hearts, while Miranda decides she’s not a doormat; she’s a woman who’s willing to kick a door in, if necessary.

Except there’s a dragon on the other side of the door—a dragon from her past—and she has to deal with it, alone. For her children’s sake.

Like Jack and Miranda, the children seemed to materialize out of nowhere, except they showed up as a mob. They became individuals as I worked through successive drafts of the story. If I’m allowed to have a favorite among them, it would be Martha, the four-year-old. She steals Jack’s heart but stumps him with questions he’d rather not answer. For instance: “Where do babies come from?” Red-faced, he finally tells her babies come from “a conflagration of desires.”

Silly man. That’s not much of an explanation. I sympathize with him, though, because I find it just as hard to explain when people ask where my fictional characters come from. Honestly, I don’t know. Sometimes they show up uninvited when I’m not looking for new characters. Sometimes they migrate from one story idea to another one, insisting that I’d put them in the wrong novel. Sometimes they take their own sweet time about cooperating with me, or they turn into villains when I least expect it. None of them are based on real people, yet they need to be “real” to me, so I can make them real to my readers. There’s nothing I’d rather do.

- Meg Moseley