The Characters of Creighton Hill

Creighton Hill has gone through enormous changes since my original idea. The big non plot related change is in the structure. Originally it was supposed to be one book. Then I changed it to two. Now I think it is going to be three. This change in structure I think will be final, since it seems to have solved the structure related problems I was having. And the trilogy will be called:

Time Captives

Book One is still Creighton Hill, and I will today introduce you to some of the characters from it.

Joey Hubbard is the current protagonist, though in earlier drafts he wasn't. He is ten years old, likes to be crazy, and always has a response . . . not always a nice one.

Allan Hubbard is Joey's older brother. He is chivalrous and gentlemanly.

Jill Hubbard is one of Joey's older sisters. She is eleven, and is really nice. She is scared of a lot of things, though.

Emily Hubbard is their oldest sister. She is fourteen and she acts like it. She really is a typical teenager, which really aggravates her siblings.

Peetur is a kalican who accompanies the Hubbards on their journey through Calhortea.

George Hubbard is from 1800. He disappeared from Creighton Hill when he was twelve years old. There are nine other Hubbards from history as well: Abigail, Thomas, Mary, Theodore, Samantha, Calvin, Eleanor, Jonathan, and Bethany.

Toarna is the main villain. She is a stryte, and the queen of Calhortz.

Captain Jeremy Herb is a pirate captain.

There are many other characters in the series, but these are the primary ones at this point.

Z: Zoology

This is the perfect day for this post. Why? I'll explain later.

Zoology may be a bit of a stretch, but it's something for 'z.' For this one, I'm going back to the beginning of The Experiment. Audrey Raingold is taking Biology the year The Experiment happens, which necessitates learning about animals. So some of the course would be considered zoology. Audrey's introduction into the story is when she is dissecting a frog for school.

Audrey is somewhat based on me, and so her frog dissection is as well. She finds a beetle's exoskeleton in her frog's large intestine as I did in mine. I don't really remember much else from the dissection, except that I got bored with it before I was done, but the beetle experience has been incorporated into a story. After all, stories are better if they have some truth in them, and I've heard that authors are supposed to write what they know. (Though I have also heard it is better to write what you want to read.)

Why is this the perfect day? My sister and her friend dissected their own frogs today. My sister's frog has a more interesting story than mine. It had a ladybug in its mouth. It was also full of frog eggs, which was pretty gross. Biology can be quite interesting, and even furnish stories for fiction.

Y: York and Jen

York and Jen Mercer are fifteen year old twins who meet up with the Raingolds about halfway through their adventure. They both went to public school where they constantly got themselves in trouble by questioning the wrong things their teachers tried to teach them. As Jen tells Audrey, "My teacher had been trying to teach us some baloney about the Constitution that wasn’t even slightly true, and I proved her wrong straight from the Constitution itself. Apparently they can’t have people doing that."

Jen wants to be a nurse. Her father was a doctor, and so these two combined gave her the medical knowledge necessary to deal with some unfortunate incident which befell them.
I'm not sure what York's ambition is, it wasn't necessary to the story, but he does have a dog. His dog is Canis, and Canis is very attached to his young master.

Jen was a dream character, she was in the dream about the fight on the bridge. That's where she got her name. York got his name because of Ian and Kansas. I was going to have a bunch of characters with state names, but in the end there were only three: Indiana (Ian), York, and Kansas.

York and Jen have a smaller role in the story than I at first thought, but they do have a role and they play it well.

X: eXperiment

It's been exactly one month since I wrote my last blog post. I never intended to let it go so long, but life has a way of getting busy, especially when one is involved in a congressional campaign.

I have to cheat a bit, because again there are no X-rays or X-boxes or xylophones or people named Xavier. So we have eXperiment. The eXperiment is what The Experiment is all about. It is a plot by the President and Miss Reginald to control the lives and minds of the American people. Along with that, there are scientific experiments performed by Miss Reginald.

Miss Reginald is trying to find a way of weakening the mind and making it susceptible to mind control. One of the ways she tried it was weakening it with the infirmities of age. Her experiments don't always go as planned, as Georgie Prescott could tell you.

She also was working on experiments to create fearless warriors. The one line I had in mind from the very beginning has to do with this experiment: "It is my pet project. To see what kind of monster I can create." This experiment causes Anne Rubin no end of grief. It is one she is determined to reverse, even more so than the experiments on the general population.

The eXperiments are a central element of the book, and what I desperately hope will always remain science fiction.