Half the cast of FABLES OF THE FLYING CITY are women. It feels like a lot, but it isn’t. I’m a creature of modern fiction, used to films, books, and television shows where are four boys for every girl.

FABLES isn’t like that. It couldn’t be.

Hélène Dutrieu – flying (LOC)

In all honestly, I didn’t plan it that way. It just happened,  in my effort to avoid cliches. It started innocently enough:

Our protagonist is a girl, and I thought, “Well, she should have a girl buddy.” I mean, the she’s gotta bunk with someone, right? And then I thought that our heroine needed a rival, and I didn’t want her to have one of those “girls are just as good as boys” stories. So her rival became a girl. That was three.

The heroine has no family,  so naturally, her rival should have too much family. But I didn’t want to be living up to her father’s expectations, since that story has been done. So she’s living up to her mother’s expectations. Her mother also happens to be the Commander of the Aerial Guard. There was a gruff and blustery Sargent, who handled training of the new recruits, but again, to have  a large brutish man in that role seemed like it had been done before. So, despite how much fun I had describing his mustache, the stocky man has now become a tall, imposing woman. And the story is the better for it.  Now we’re at five.

There’s a character who wanders halfway in the story, but who’s presence is felt much earlier. It’s one of those characters who gets to be filthy and wise and funny, while everyone else is trying their best to be serious. I’ve never hidden my love for the work of Emma Thompson, and I won’t lie, there’s a great deal of her performance as Sibyl Trelawny in this character. This character had to be a woman from the beginning, or else how could Thompson play her in the inevitable movie version?

The main antagonist, who represents the opposite of the argument that our heroine is on, also is a woman. But again, she was one from the start. That’s seven.

This isn’t even mentioning some of the side characters who are women, including the Raptorwife, whom I’ve mentioned before, and has one of the best occupational names I’ve come up with.

There are men in the story, too. Best friends and  lovers and commanders and comrades. But the story is about a woman who finds out who she is in the sky. It seemed inappropriate to imply she was the only one who did.