The music at the top is up there for no reason except that I listened to it on repeat like seventeen times while writing this chapter and I have no idea why.

I had a conversation with my friend the other day, related to ethnicities. Inevitably, my thoughts circled around to the weirdness in the Ceristen Series... the weirdness that still exists, but that nobody sees.

When Mercy and I made our paper doll families, we threw traits and colors around at random without any regard for genetic logic -- except that, you know, some of the kids looked more like dad and some looked more like mom. But then, sometimes we didn't seem to care what either of the parents looked like. Hair was the worst. In most families, there was at least one star of EACH of the following: blonde, red, black, and varying shades of brown.

Later, while writing the Ceristen Series as it stands now, I tried to weed out some of these wildcards and create more uniform families. Most of the time, it was easy. The Earles have a black-haired daughter? Well, maybe I can give one of them black hair too, instead of having them both be straw blondies.

But of course, the more we did with a character and the more familiar we grew with him/her, the more likely their appearance was to be set in stone. In these cases, I simply invented reasons for the wildcard to exist.

The Kenhelms never gave me much trouble. They were actually the first family to have an almost complete family resemblance (Binky Baby, later deleted, was the odd one out... and boy was he odd.) Laufeia's strawberry-blonde hair caused me a bit of head-scratching, but Mercy and I finally inserted a distant marriage to a redhead in the Kenhelm's family tree and thus that elusive trait ended up in the gene pool. (Laufeia is the first Kenhelm to be born with red hair in five generations)

But then you have the Kings... which leads us to what may be called collectively

The Royal Mess of Fearnland

Braegon King always was a bit of a dark fellow. Dark hair, dark eyes... and even dark complexion. His father was an Arthurian guy with shining golden hair, and his mother, despite her darker hair, was as pale-skinned as the moon.

Well, thankfully the parents didn't show up in Ceristen at all. I simplified things and orphaned Braegon and his siblings like the serial killer I am. I also darkened the tone of Filian's skin, not a difficult choice, to match Braegon's olive. For some inexplicable reason I did not do the same to Mirda, but we'll get to that.

Presumably, if the King children had a darker skin tone, their now dead and nameless parents had had the same. I couldn't help but notice that Hunter Thorne and several other Thorne children had dark complexions as well... and their mother, like the Kings, had come from Fearnland.

This made me another head-scratcher. Because Ladeia Thorne (despite the color of certain offspring) was one of those characters that I had always envisioned particularly clearly -- and she had very pale skin. If, as seemed evident, the Fearnish people were generally dark-skinned, how was I to reconcile that with my mental image?

Well, Hunter's appearance was a lot more integral than Ladeia's, in the end. I thought of several escapes, including making Ladeia an exception to the Fearnish appearance through a foreign marriage, but working that in would have been more trouble than it was worth. I sensed anyway that Ladeia needed to be a full-blooded daughter of Fearnland.

And when I sat down and wrote My 'Deia, I finally caved and forcibly altered my mental image by writing Ladeia different from how I'd pictured her. I found I actually enjoyed it. She was different, in a good way. Not quite the Ladeia I'd remembered, even in personality. Not quite the Ladeia Fred remembered. But Fred hadn't seen the full Ladeia, had he? And that actually added even more depth to the story as I was able to portray her change from the headstrong, spirited girl to the woman that Fred remembers in The Journey.

*coughs* I got waaayyyyy off track.

We were at the Thornes' heritage and appearance. Anyway, by the time I'd hammered all this out into solid canon, The Journey was past the editing stage and out of my hands.

Was this a problem?

Well, unless you count the fact that Ladeia has a high percentage of unrealistically white children... no.

Fred, Marjorie, and Sandy's appearances are fixed. But if I could go back, I'd add some clarification about Daren and Isabelle, who like Hunter take after their mother. Guy and Gilbert (who don't show up in TJ) do likewise. Even then, I'm pretty sure that more than half of the Thorne siblings should have been affected by their mother's skin genetics.

And in the end you've just got to throw up your hands and say, you know what, whatever. Ceristen has haywire genetics. They also have a peculiar abundance of orphans, or is it just absence of parents? They also have a whole lot of families who started traveling at different times but arrived in Ceristen in oddly close conjunction to each other.

But we need to return for a minute to Mirda...

When I harmonized Braegon and Filian King's appearances, so, you know, they actually looked like brothers (they already did, but now they had the same skin), Mirda had already had her special treatment. She had gone from red straight hair to brown curly hair, and from a flat disposition to a very sunny and laughing one. Perhaps it was because of this that I couldn't bear to change her appearance -- so soon after she'd fallen into place for me. So Mirda remained an anomaly.

I thought of the foreign-marriage argument for her appearance, like I had for Ladeia. But this was even more improbable, given the Kings' life situation, and would require tiresome explanations. Besides... I already knew exactly what the Kings' parents looked like (the new versions). Braegon's father, a slight, little dark man, a lot like Braegon. Iolaine, the mother, a slightly more sturdy build and lots of long, dark, curling hair. Poor dead bebes. They're not turning into a silly foreigner on my watch.

But The Village is all mine yet, and I know that sooner or later Mirda's logic-less appearance is going down the tubes. I will conquer, as much as it may vex me to leave behind her springing brown curls. I can keep the curls, and maybe even the blue eyes... it won't hurt to have one more oddball trait in there.

But for real, what is it with me and making two brothers so much alike and then the girl the odd one out? *stares at the Kenhelms and Laufeia's red hair*

*cough* Hope you enjoyed this ramble on Ceristen's haywire genetics. I'll make a sequel when I think of more.