Princess Monday

Happy Monday, everyone!

This is a very special Monday, as it’s also the birthday of my beautiful older sister Cherie, the inspiration for Monday Woodcutter.

People always ask authors if any of their characters are based on real people. As a general rule, the characters in books are always based on some facet of the author him/herself. But sometimes, in some ways, life just fits in FAR TOO PERFECTLY.

Monday’s Child is fair of face. That’s what the poem says. In Enchanted, Monday Woodcutter is the eldest of the Woodcutter sisters, a beautiful girl who marries a dark prince and leaves her family when she is still quite young. She has some fey blood, which she inherited from her mother, and so she ages slower than normal humans.

My sister Cherie was once runner-up for Miss Vermont. (I’ve seen the winner from that year–she wasn’t prettier.) Through the years she has been Bo Derek and Farrah Fawcett, but always my big sister. She got married when I was six years old, to the dark and handsome man of Lebanese descent that she dated all through high school. Very soon after that my parents left Vermont, moving my younger sister (Soteria) and me away to South Carolina. We visited every summer, but it wasn’t the same.

People laugh when we refer to Cherie as “The Beautiful Sister.” Soteria and I merely shrug because IT’S TRUE. And not just because she’s blond.

I will not tell you how old my eldest sister is today, because it doesn’t matter. Thanks to the fey blood we’ve all received via our mother, Cherie hasn’t aged a day. But I will tell you this:

She was born on a Monday.

Happy birthday, dearest Cherie. You always have been, and always will be, the fairest of us all. xox