Some characters develop to fit what a particular story requires; others evolve independently until a story shapes itself around them. Tamzin is one of the latter, and has been about for a long time in various different forms. I can no longer remember exactly when she first turned up and I wouldn’t say that I created her; more that she solidified out of a collection of ideas and influences, and kept presenting herself for my attention until I found the right story for her.My earliest memory of her is as an eleven-year-old princess, being rushed from her home while a volcano explodes above her city. Later, I imagined her as an unconventionally talented mage’s apprentice, and later still she morphed into a teenage warrior princess. From there, the ‘warrior’ part grew until the ‘princess’ was crowded out. I was never a particularly princess-y person myself so perhaps that’s not surprising, but also I had realised that involving royalty meant writing about politics, and it was action and adventure that I was interested in.That process of evolution spanned my own mid-late teenage years and, given the time period and the various changes in Tamzin’s life status, you’d be forgiven for asking why I still think of her as the same character. Certain things have been constant: she was always a stubborn, tenacious personality; she was always a little precocious; and she was always unconventional according to the accepted norms of her world. Looking back, the exercise of trying out a character in different situations, and of adding and subtracting years from her, was probably invaluable to my development as an author even though none of that work has been directly incorporated into the books I’ve ended up writing.The form in which Tamzin finally settled has come to represent a return to my personal roots, as it’s heavily influenced by books and characters which made an impression on me as I was growing up. On the subject of writing influences I frequently name-check Brian Jacques, whose adventure stories not only contain fantastic action description, but are remarkably equal-opportunities when it comes to characters’ career choices: males and females alike can pick up a sword and set off on an epic quest, and their success or otherwise rests entirely on their strength of character. Tamora Pierce’s novel ‘Alanna: The First Adventure’, in which a girl swaps places with her twin brother to become a knight, presents the opposite scenario, where the heroine has to resort to deception to even get an opportunity to prove her worth in a male-dominated world. My lifelong fascination with computer games played a role too: the advent of Tomb Raider captured my imagination, and certainly had an influence on how I thought about Tamzin’s physical training and survival skills. There were others, but those are the ones which I feel were central. You may have noticed a theme here. Gender equality in storytelling continues to be a topic of much discussion - and rightly so - but for the purpose of explaining Tamzin, suffice it to say that I was drawn to strongly adventurous female characters and felt that the world needed more such!I have had one or two people ask whether Tamzin is, in fact, me, but that was never the way I intended to write her. Certain elements are borrowed from me, however: to name a couple, we both incline towards stubbornness, and neither of us thinks that “Because we’ve always done it this way” is a good answer to “Why do we do things the way we do?”. Creating a spectrum of characters with differing roles and viewpoints is an acquired skill in my experience, because it involves removing the personal perceptual filters through which we usually see everything, and donning other viewpoints which might be quite alien to our normal way of thinking. Since Tamzin is one of my first developed characters it’s therefore only natural that much of her outlook started out close to home. Beyond that, her personality is born out of the characteristics that a person would need to succeed as an adventurous outlier within a pontifical culture: inquisitive, tenacious, loyal, a bit opinionated and increasingly cynical, with a good balance between caution and outright daring. What she’s going to do after the events of ‘Tamzin and the Black Widow’ is currently a matter of internal authorial debate, but I remain very proud of her and I don’t think she’s going to disappear from the stage anytime soon.