Wearin' O' the Green

I mentioned last time that of all the inital ideas I pitched to Daniel, there was only one that made it into the Enlightenment concept; That one idea was the introduction of a character named Miss Nadia Green....

Dan's intial idea, which I really loved and still do, was that Enlightenment would feature a main character who knew the Spiritual aspects of the Universe first hand; He was a person for whom seeing was really believing. One idea that I proposed before I had gotten Dan's e-mail was almost the inverse- I wanted to do a story about a young person who discovered that there was a real Spiritual world all around them, and that the stories about this character would center on discovering what it was all about.

As we communicated more about ideas we would do together, I took Dan's basic idea and proposed that we add this second character, so that readers would have someone to see all these things for the first time with. Someone "Green" to the world of the Spiritual. This person would be a blood relative to Aaron- more of a nephew or niece than a child, because I figured that a guy like Aaron probably was too busy hunting satan to get married. Dan loved the idea... but, for some reason, he thought I was proposing a CHARACTER named Green and he asked if this character was going to be male or female.

I thought a bit about it, and being a huge fan of Horror movies, I thought having a strong but somewhat conflicted female character would turn a few things about the genre on it's ear. Dan agreed, and we began to flesh out who she would be.

For both of us, it was important that Green be somewhat of an "Anti-Glamour" girl; We wanted to avoid the big boobs and revealing outfits that would be both distasteful as well as impractical for a woman who would be plugging demons full of lead. We wanted her to be strong, but to have all the quirks and minor inconsistancies that any real person might. And like any real person, she needed a name. I picked Nadia- partially for personal reasons that I won't go into here, and partly because of it means "One who has Hope."

As for the visual of Nadia- You can all thank Dan's lovely wife for that; She's both the inspiration and the life model for Green when Dan needs to capture a pose for the book. The picture you see today is one of the photo's Dan took of her dressed as Green when he was developing the look of the character...