Meet the Characters #7: Angela Marie-Stewart

Portrait of Angela

Angela Marie-Stewart is a major character in From the Grave of the Gods.

Statistics

Full Name: Angela Marie-Stewart
DOB: 4th August 1984
Hometown: Chigwell, UK
Occupation: Secretary, Writer

Bio

Angela works as a secretary at a solicitor’s firm in London, but her true passion is for poetry. She studied English Literature at university where she was also a member of her campus table-top RPG society. It was here during her third year, while in full costume as her character and wearing black horns on her head, that she first met James, who was in the second year of his physics masters and looked as though he would rather be anywhere else. Despite the unsure start, the pair got on like a house on fire and started dating. Years later, Angela still meets with her friends from university every Saturday night for D&D.

During James’s time away on the Magnum Opus, Angela hosted for friends and family to watch and follow along with the various mission updates and live broadcasts.

All things considered, she’s been remarkably patient with James, who has repeatedly failed to make his proposal at every opportunity over the two years before the mission. She pretends not to have noticed, but she may or may not have an ongoing bet with her friends about when exactly James will pop the question.

Creating the Character

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I sure had a lot of fun and frustration doing the portrait. There was a lot of re-learning what I’d learned doing Grant’s portrait months ago, and I’m still not happy with the hair (though I recognise I’ve done better this time than with Yula’s).

For the character in the novel, I didn’t know that Angela was going to be in it at all until I was writing what became the opening chapter and James started talking about her on the Magnum Opus with the rest of the crew. Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t subscribe to the typical writerly thing of “the characters have a mind of their own and tell me what they want blah blah”. It was just at that early point in the story that I realised I hadn’t actually established much of James’s backstory before I’d started writing, and the first thing that came to mind was that he had someone waiting at home for him. As such, we don’t actually meet Angela until much later in the novel, but she quickly establishes herself as a major character and a massive nerd. I loved writing her, and I hope you love her too.

If you’d like to look back over this Meet the Characters series, just click on the MTC tag below and it’ll bring up all the others.

From the Grave of the Gods comes out on 1st November and is available to pre-order now!