Recycled Characters

Several of my characters have appeared in one or more stories. Here's the full list.
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Bethany Caleb, the main character in Bethany Caleb, appears in almost every other novel I've written. She is a secondary character in The Art Kids, and pops into Seven Minutes to Midnight a couple times. Emily Seoul, the fairy girl who is friends with Bethany and James, makes a brief appearance in The Horizontal Ladder and dates Paul Hoffman in The Art Kids.
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Miss Downey the Creative Writing and English teacher appears in several of my novels. She first shows up in The Art Kids as Sophie's Creative Writing teacher. Then she appears in The Wolven: Animal Nature as Shyanne's English teacher obsessed with fairy tales. She presides over in-house suspension during second period in The Abandoned. She's based on my best friend who is a real teacher...
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The story behind the death of cheerleader Jessica Granger, which first appeared in The Horizontal Ladder, is referred to in The Art Kids, and one of the characters involved in that story, Mandy McDowell, is often described in other books when talking about evil cheerleaders.
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Paul Hoffman made his first appearance in a novella titled "Gifted: Confessions of a serial killer." He was a new student at the high school in Oakridge (next town over), and became friends with Joe Jenkins (the genius/serial killer of the title). Paul's interest in serial killers made him easy to frame for Joe's first murder. Paul was arrested... his fate unknown. I doubt I'll ever do anything with "Gifted", so I felt okay with planting him in a new story... The Art Kids. His appearance and his house remain very similar.
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Kate Roberts originally appears in one of the first long short stories / novellas I wrote, More to Tell, where she deals with being the victim of a sexual assault. Later, I brought her back for The Promise, which explains the actions that led to her grandmother sending her off to St. Joseph's Academy as punishment, and attempts to give her a happy ending after the events that transpired there. The two stories are very different - More to Tell is very dark and psychological, while The Promise is a more typical horse story. Kate also briefly starred in a novel I extensively outlined and wrote very little of, in which she was a married woman working with disturbed children. She becomes pregnant, and thanks to a car accident and one psycho kid, convinces herself that her child is the Antichrist... the title of this one escapes me, but there were a lot of references to Dante's Inferno. At some point I realized that someone already wrote Rosemary's Baby and the whole thing got scrapped. Her husband, Michael Taylor, came from a sappy "novel" I wrote in 9th grade called Michael's Home, which was about an abused runaway who goes to live on a horse farm. I guess I thought they'd made a good couple.
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Amy Vaughn, Veronica Resmini, and Frank Pierce of Seven Minutes to Midnight first appeared in both Bethany Caleb and The Art Kids (they may have not been named individually, but referred to as "The Coven"). Shannon Lavoie, Brittany Bowden, and a number of the other popular kids who harass Bethany Caleb also harass Amy in gym class.
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Mara Wozniak, Roger's photography buddy in The Art Kids and Bethany's friend in Bethany Caleb, and Chester Fitzpatrick, bandmate of Kevin and James in The Art Kids, play slightly larger roles in The Wolven: Animal Nature (intended to be the first in a series about teenage werewolves). Since both Mara and Chester are vegetarians and animals rights activists, it makes sense that they would join the Animal Rights Club formed by the main characters, and become involved in a protest when the town wants to hunt down some mysterious wolves. Later, when Shyanne Brown and David Lupien from Animal Nature appear in Seven Minutes to Midnight, Mara again turns up.

All content copyright © 2007 by Kate Spofford.