Anyone who is following me on Facebook may have noticed some photos I’ve been posting of steampunk critters, from my series Rosie’s Rangers (Book 1 coming July 2016). It has been rather exciting seeing characters from one of my stories come to life. I now have a bit of an idea as to how Fenoglio, from the story Inkheart, would have felt. To see my words take physical shape is the strangest of feelings. Even more so when the character looked how I imagined she would.

I gave very little details about how Scraps looked so I was impressed with how much the physical critter resembled the one from my imagination. “The tinkerer threw the critter together in a hurry out of bits of watches and wire he had left lying around on his worktable. The critter needs to be able to fly and have a ‘finished in a hurry’ look about her.” There was a little bit of discussion about what items would be suitable, probably five minutes of talk at the most, before the artist went off to begin work. And out of that conversation, Scraps was brought to life.