The intention behind the creation of the Compendium of Characters is to give a ready guide to anyone who ventures into the Maltherian Universes. It is a vast place where my books act as planets with their own particular orbits and trajectories, inhabited by colourful characters intricately interacting with each others. The Compendium maps the revealed territories of the published stories. It reveals with parsimony some unchartered ones as well, making one envisage the beyond and the further. This guide will be expanded each time more of my novels are released into the public domain to provide the ultimate companion to my printed work at any point in time.

Exploration of the micro-cosmos of each story in its own right, the Compendium offers the ‘who’s who’ of my Characters. As an Author, I live everyday in a fantasy world where my characters, heroes, heroines and baddies form my fantastic family where I know all its members intimately down to a ‘t’. Somehow sometimes I feel that they are my everything from best friends to life long partners. They knock on the doors of my imagination, individually, one day, unannounced and stay with me forever. They help me transcend, understand better and deal with my daily life. Not unlike a child’s imaginary friends, or James Stewart’s ‘Harvey’, that giant invisible rabbit that follows him everywhere, my characters, down to their pets, like ‘Geddy’ the Dra-Rex, the half dragon half tyrannosaurus with a canary brain, who eats demons for breakfast, occupy me day and night. If you see me sitting on the train, commuting quietly, not noticing the other passengers, time or stations that go by, I am probably lost on a chair, a director’s one, visualising a scene, and asking to its actors to do it one more time, with more passion, just for the pleasure of it. At night, my keyboard will receive all the results of the seemingly absent moments of my day when I dived into my creative fantasy worlds. Sometimes it will collect the fruits of another gathering altogether, when I paid attention, observed, maybe a particular individual of interest whose encounter results in a caricature of words of some sort or a moment where acts will be transcribed, woven into my work, exaggerated or not.

Writing is for me, more than I can say. I would describe the feeling like the one that a tame little white goat, with a singing bell at her neck, which has been enclosed in a dark stable full of stinking rotted straw all Winter, experiences on her release to the gloriously green and lush mountain pastures for the Summer. More than pure escapism, writing makes me analyse the stable in its every single corner and detail in order to make sense of it, whistle blowing it, accept it or reject it, totally or in part. I find writing not only pleasurable but therapeutic. It made me be who I am now. It helped me grow from all my experiences.

To explain this by an autobiographic example, the day I planned to throw myself under a train with a depressed exactitude, down to the minute, I stood there, in front of a passing train, alive and well, still, with a retaining scream in my head. It was a commanding ‘Hold on you do not know what’s up there or if there is an up there. Make her fall under the track. Stay on them, write it.’ On the Barnet tracks, the trains left, there was a dead pigeon, grey yet colourful, red and green feathers on its chest, wings spread open, laying lifeless. I didn’t know how long the bird had been there, but I took my normal train on the opposite platform flying back to what my nest was in that troubled time. That night, I wrote about what was up there and ‘Clementine Boatswain’, who took the big plunge for me, was born. She endorsed my shortcomings and struggles. Her adventures in the After-World were blogged regularly. Her story will be re-published. Writing her took me out of depression right and proper. She led me onto a different track altogether.

Her success was consequential enough to make me believe upon my abilities, build upon them, and start creating my own path. Director of my own publishing company and author, my Characters took me on a memorable journey, a trip of a lifetime, and I hope they will do the same to you all.

Let me take the honour of presenting them to you, for they are my dearest friends,

Let me lead you forward to their fantastic worlds that mirrors ours,

Let’s take the plunge onto the unchartered track together,

Xxx

Cordelia Malthere.