Tasha asked Josh Lanyon:

Of all the amazing characters you created in your novels, is there anyone that is especially important to you or that you still think about?

Josh Lanyon Hmm. This is a surprisingly difficult question. All characters feel very real -- like actual people -- when you're writing them. But after the work is done, you take an emotional step back and the process becomes much more academic.

The Adrien English series and characters still feel very much alive to me, probably because I've "lived with them" the longest. The original book was written and being shopped around in 1997/98 so that's quite a long run. Kit Holmes and J.X., Elliot Mills and Tucker Lance, Will Brandt and Taylor MacAllister...I'm still working on their stories, so they are always lurking in the back of my mind. And then there are a number of characters that I want to go back and explore...Nathan and Matt in Snowball in Hell, for example. They are not academic to me. They feel real.

Even more confusing is the fact that I'm often considering and testing out story ideas for characters I haven't written yet! So there is this nebulous sense of character and conflict...of "people" who don't actually exist.

No one ever said being a writer was a job for sane people. ;-D

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