One of the more astonishing features of being an author, aside from the ongoing miracle that is people wanting to read my stories enough to pay for them, is the existence of fan-created material. That is: Someone is sufficiently inspired by a book they read that they feel the need to create more. To extend the characters, see what they’d do in different settings, fill in offstage scenes. Or to draw them, to make them visual and beautiful and actually show them as they appear in the reader’s mind, rather than on the cover (which may or may not be in the same postcode as my descriptions).

I know a lot of people see this as quite normal and ordinary. I wasn’t remotely aware of it before I started writing (yes, I do live under a stone) and this whole world of vibrant creativity still hits me with something of a shock every time.

But think about it. Isn’t it remarkable that an author’s words on a page, conveying the characters in their head, can interact with someone else’s imagination to the point they feel compelled to create? And to create something that goes beyond the original writing?

I appreciate fan fiction of my books immensely, but I don’t read it. In part because I don’t want to accidentally steal someone else’s idea about my characters, in part because I see it much like Amazon/Goodreads reviews: it’s for and between readers, not for me. (And I’m also a horrific control freak when it comes to my words and characters, so if I just stay out of the way, we’ll all be better off.) I do, however, love to see fan art. I am endlessly fascinated by the way my characters look when mediated by other people’s brains.

So here. I wrote a story called ‘A Queer Trade’ (coming out as a standalone short on 2nd February) set in the magical Victorian England of my Charm of Magpies series, featuring a rather dodgy magician named Crispin, and a waste-paper dealer called Ned. Here’s Crispin from Ned’s point of view:

A flash sort, dandyish clothes. Slim, no great height, or age either: about twenty, Ned reckoned. A narrow, nervy sort of face, and a head of hay-coloured hair, that yellow-brown shade. […] He was a little older, when you saw him up close, not quite so far off Ned’s own twenty-six as he’d thought. Neat brownish brows over eyes that were a strange sort of yellow-green, like marsh gas or some such, not that Ned had ever seen a marsh. Freckles dusting his cheekbones. Full lips. Well dressed. White, of course.

Here’s Ned from Crispin’s:

Hall really was rather handsome. It hadn’t quite struck him at first, in the unfamiliarity of looking at a man of colour. He’d noticed brown skin, broad nose, not much more. After three hours of surreptitious glances and casually exchanged words, though, he was seeing deep-set dark brown eyes with creases that suggested Hall laughed a lot, and a bottom lip that dipped in the middle to devastating effect when he smiled. Crispin had always had a weakness for smiles.

Here they are as mediated by artist Mila May.

Crispin

Ned (I cannot tell you how perfect this is for the Ned in my head. It’s ridiculously good.)

And here’s a sketch Mila did. This isn’t a scene that appears in ‘A Queer Trade’ or Rag and Bone (their full novel, coming out 28th March). It’s purely Mila’s imagination, not mine. And yet it’s such a spot-on vignette of their relationship, their characters, their situation, them, that I had to run through my own stories mentally to check I hadn’t actually written it.

An artist picked up my imagination and ran with it to create something new that enhanced and built on what I’d done, while remaining absolutely true to my vision. I’m not sure it’s possible to pay an author a bigger compliment than that.

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Ned Hall and Crispin Tredarloe star in ‘A Queer Trade’ , out 2nd February, and Rag and Bone, out 28 March. For more, follow @kj_charles on Twitter, join her Facebook group for advance news and extracts, or get the extremely occasional newsletter.