Happy Banned Books Week! As a writer, I clearly have opinions on banning books. (It’s BAD. Duh.) Another profession that generally comes with opinions on book bans is that of librarian. Which takes me to the first of a series on introducing my characters.
This is not my character. This is an image I yanked off of the Fantasy Flight Games site. It’s from the Lord of the Rings card game. You can tell it it isn’t my character because the color scheme is ALL wrong and this person’s hair is far too well behaved.
Kaz is a secondary character in the first two Snow Kiss novels. At the start of Book 1, he’s a socially awkward librarian who hasn’t lived in our little mountain town for long enough to have true friends there despite his wide spread popularity with local kids, who feed off his enthusiasm for reading and respond well to the questions he asks about their opinions on books. He’s gradually pulled into the friends group at the center of the novels, even though a few characters have reservations based on the lengthy academic rambles he can’t help but deliver and his similarity to someone negative from the past.
Kaz is described as a remarkably average looking elf with greyish blue coloring, standing out largely due to his fashion choices. Drawn to bright colors and bookish themes, he has a wardrobe full of decorated vests featuring things like flying books and children’s literary characters. And since his hair will attempt to take over the world if left to its own devices, he tames it daily with a vast array of barrettes shaped like books, iconic characters, and assorted animals.
Kaz is a transplant from a distant province of the Ashareen Empire known for its religious conservativism, but to paraphrase one of his new friends, there’s a reason he lives so far away from his family. This is something I strongly relate to as one could easily say the same thing about my region of origin and why I’m as far from it as I can get within the continental United States.
As I begin to think about what I want Book 3 to focus on, I’m strongly considering moving Kaz up to Main Character status to better explore the themes of moving past the toxic aspects of ones upbringing while perhaps holding on to the healthier parts of it.