Category: characters

Patty Scholes

Next in my series of occasional Character Sketches is Patty Scholes. Yeah, she’s the matriarch of the Scholes clan, collecting the waifs and strays of Trotterwell … the question is, are all her brood technically human?

Red-haired woman with a rolling pin.

We first meet Patty properly in No Fae Back Now, but she was originally a background character in Argana Zeit Collects Snow Toads. Ever since her first mention…

“…Patty was well known around Trotterwell, for both better and worse. Patty herself was big-hearted, but whether her family consisted of pesky delinquents or the high-spirited go-getters of the future was largely a question of who you asked.”

… I’ve wanted to bring her back in a bigger role. So, when it came to the novel, I knew she had to get in there. She distrusts authority, takes no nonsense from anybody, and has a formidable talent for dealing with unruly teenagers.

Like MacGillycuddy, we get the feeling that there’s some wild secrets in her back story -and there are! I’ve got 15 pages of flashbacks in my ‘deleted scenes’ bucket. One day, one day!

Akira Pixels

So, I went off and sketched Akira Pixels for you. But if prefer your headcannon version, you go right ahead and keep that 😉

Picture of young excitable man with spiky blue hair

Not that Akira is his birthname. We met his mum in Argana Zeit Rings the Other World, and she spilt the beans. He had the good fortune to appear in the first Argana Zeit story, where we discover that he’s the eccentric, wannabe entrepreneur owner of Brink Hall, a crumbling mansion outside of town. I’ve always enjoyed writing him, because he’s an easy conduit for new problems. That, and I find delusional characters inherently funny.

I wasn’t expecting him to become a mainstay – which is true of all those first-story characters. Argana Zeit and the Haunted Busker was meant to be a one-off short story. And yet, some 420,000 words later, I’m still writing her adventures. And Akira hasn’t quit yet, continuing to enthusiastically throw a spanner in the works in the name of a quick profit. Long may he carry on!

( Reposted from my mailing list )