Winter's Edge

Author's Notes 2: Supporting Characters Inspirations

Before I go into the main characters, I'd like to thank my friends whom I was allowed to put in the book. Kat, Tony the garage owner, and Murph are all real people and good friends of mine. Sam is a mixture of a best friend personality and the crazy nature of my cousin Lynn. Agathe was the name of a French girl I met on a bus ride once who was so pleasant that I told her I'd use her name for one of my characters in the book.

All of my friends I used in the story are very nice people, but my characters are my characters alone and not meant to be the real people.

SPOILERS: Make sure you've read the book before reading past this point.

Kat, for instance, is hilarious and very sarcastic in real life but not in a cruel way like her character. Her character was made cruel for a few reasons. First, to misdirect readers and make them think she could be the murderer. And second, because it's fun to have a character who you don't like but sometimes comes to the rescue. I like when readers judge her and then find out they were wrong to judge her. Judgment usually doesn't turn out well. And it fits with the theme that not everything is as it seems.

Murph is an exceptionally-nice guy and he really is a Taurus SHO fanatic—owns like four or five SHOs—and so is Tony, the owner of the garage at the beginning of the story. One of Murph's SHOs has something like 700+ hp and Tony's has quite a bit more. Maybe around a thousand when it's running properly. We're not sure exactly how much horsepower, but among all of the Taurus SHO clubs in North America, no one knows of one with more power. We just think it's hilarious to have a grocery-getter car that whoops up on Lamborghini's and Porsches. The scene in the book where Abby races the Porsche actually happened to Tony. It was a Porsche GT2 Turbo and the story was pretty funny the first time he told it to me. Tony really does own a garage.

I've also owned many Taurus SHOs, but I've never had the money to put that kind of power under the hood of one. My current one is built to handle really well on a road course. Though I enjoy going stupid-fast in a straight light, I enjoy going stupid-fast around turns a lot more. By the way, if you've never raced on a road course, you don't know what you're missing. I've owned a couple of Mazda Rx7 Turbo II's like the one at the beginning of the book, as well.

Now, on to more prominent characters in the next author's note.

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