Stephanie Tiner asked Lana Krumwiede:

About halfway through Freakling at the moment and was wondering why you made Taemon 12-13?

Lana Krumwiede Hi, Stephanie!

I did think very carefully about how old Taemon should be. When I first conceived of the idea for the story, I wasn't sure if Taemon should be a teenager or a pre-teen. I actually tried writing it both ways, but the teenage Taemon just didn't feel right for a number of reasons. His character begins a certain innocence, a sort of unjaded view of the world that seemed to fit with a pre-teen. I wanted him to be someone who wouldn't be initially thought of as a threat by the adults in his world. Also, the more I wrote, the more I began to feel that the story would work better as a middle-grade novel rather than young-adult. For those reasons, I settled on age twelve for Taemon at the beginning of the trilogy.

The funny thing is that the first time my editor read the manuscript for Freakling, there were a few places where she said Taemon's voice sounded older than in other places. She asked me to rewrite a few things because of that. Those scenes were exactly the places where I had experimented with moving Taemon's age up to a teenager. After I had settled on to having him younger, I made the mistake of not going back and rewriting those portions. I didn't realize that an astute reader would pick up on the nuances in the two voices. I'm not even sure I was aware of the nuances in the two voices--I think I was just writing by instinct. Once my editor pointed them out, I saw what she was getting at. And of course I did rewrite the narration in those scenes to make the voice more consistent throughout.

Thanks for asking such a great question!

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