By any other name
It’s not often an author gets to meet the characters from one of his novels but that’s what happened to me (sort of) during a recent visit to a school in West Yorkshire to promote my new YA novel, Twenty Questions for Gloria.
Way back at the beginning, this novel was going to be called The Fourth Wish and would feature a genie. While I was still roughing out a plan for the book I visited Scissett Middle School, near Huddersfield, to run some creative writing workshops. While I was there I invited the students to enter a competition by answering the question: ‘If you were granted three wishes, what would you wish for?’ The prize? I would choose the answer I liked the most and name one of the characters in my novel after the winning student.
In the end, I picked two winners: Jade Ellis (‘The ability to see myself in the future so that I could work on the things that I did not like.’) and Tierney Rhodes (‘To be able to see my future so I could see if there is anything that I would change.’)

In character (as themselves): Tierney Rhodes, left, and Jade Ellis. And me.
I am grateful to Toni Mann, one of the English teachers at Scissett, for allowing me to use the photograph of me and the girls, to her colleague Maura Ryan, who organised the three-wishes competition for me (and who has a police detective in the novel named after her!), and to Linda Dyson, the school librarian for hosting my latest visit.
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