If you hang around authors enough, you’ll hear the phrase “be careful or you’ll end up in my novel.” Many threaten to murder, ridicule, or torture real-life people through characters who may only subtly resemble the characters in the book, but the author knows it’s them. I’ve never killed a character based on a real person—if anything I tend to base characters on people I LIKE—but I have made a few the antagonist. In Fracture, the female bully was based on a particularly lovely woman I worked with, and about two weeks ago I realized who inspired the Snow Bunnies, aka the Snow Bitches, in The Slope Rules.

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