Wednesday 21 February 2018

Thomas Tambourine Merriweather

Thomas Tambourine Merriweather from The Kissing Ring (2018), and a fistful of other books in the same series. Character Post 4

Tom Merriweather was just a name for a while; the laid-back husband of Ryl and father of four sons and, in a retrospective title set in the 1980s, the best friend and flatmate of pre-med student Si Bakewell. That is, until I spotted a cover my publisher had going spare. As soon as I saw the picture I thought, That's Tom and Ryl when they were young! so of course, I had to write their story, working backwards from the Tom I knew to the Tom he must have been in the 1980s. 
Tom was born in the mid 1960s; the only child of a music teacher and an architect. An easygoing young man, Tom left home at eighteen to share a flat with Si while doing part time university and working in a junior capacity at his dad's firm. The only unusual thing about Tom was his second name; Tambourine, bestowed by his mother who had always wanted a big family of children with musical names. Talked out of naming her son Tom-Tom, she made do with Tambourine. At twenty-one, Tom had a girlfriend named Mish, and a comfortable future. The only glitch was Mish's mother Annabel, a Mrs Robinson who wanted to add Tom to her collection of trophies. Trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea of acquiescing and facing a possible backlash if he refused, Tom made a decision that had long-range consequences. Unable to face Mish, Si or indeed, anyone else, he took up his dad's invitation to spend a couple of weeks checking out a large job on the mainland. 
It soon became apparent there was nothing ordinary about these clients. In fact, they weren't even human. Even that would have been acceptable if their granddaughter hadn't taken one look at Tom and decided he was hers. Poor Tom went from feeling like Benjamin Braddock to playing a waiting game like the biblical Jacob. Having made it through the minefield of courting a fairy girl, he settled happily enough. 

In 2018 he's the proud if slightly bewildered father of four teenagers whose typical antics are complicated by a tendency to affect their surroundings and companions if things get fraught. As the eldest,
Tom and Ryl in the 1980s.
Tab, tells a friend, it can't be easy being the only human in a volatile fay family, but Tom reckons he must be doing all right. His wife loves him, his kids are still speaking to him and his irascible grandfather-in-law hasn't yet threatened to knock him down.   


To find out more about Tom and his family, check out THIS LINK (but only if you're over eighteen.)


ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. She runs http://www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. 2017 is now behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of February 18th 2018 I STILL haven't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books to come, and I'll certainly showcase those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, just for a change. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!

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