Prelude to a Bad Ass

Confession: Almost nothing made me nervous about starting the Wilfair books back in 2009. Taking on a major project and setting it in a fairly zany world can give anyone the collywobbles, but I subscribe to confidence, fun, and being true to yourself, things that made this project a joy.

But... I was a little hesitant, at first, as I fashioned Ms. Fair Finley's character. As a comic book fan and admirer of tough heroines, real and fictional both, I knew that I, too, wanted a strong-hearted heroine, but I didn't want to start her story where her toughness was already a foregone conclusion.

The Wilfair books, in short, are Fair's prelude to becoming a bad ass.

Kirsti over at Melbourne on My Mind recently picked Fair Finley as one of the ten characters she'd dress as for Halloween, and what she said about our Fair resonated with me. 

5. Fair Finley (Wilfair series - Alysia Gray Painter)

Fair's not a badass in the same way the other characters are, but she does a lot of discovering-who-she-is stuff over the course of the series and comes out the other side stronger and more confident. And I could use that right about now.

All of this, yes. Thank you, Kirsti.

And maybe there's no final terminus for a person's evolving bad-assery. Maybe there's no single place where a person's bad-ass-a-tude is suddenly set in stone. Fair does some slipping back and forth, confidence-wise, as she makes strides forward in the Wilfair books.

But as long as we keep moving forward, we're gold.

Fair, by the way, ends the books as her own pretty nice self, the person who wants everyone to win and nobody to be sad, but she is, in my mind, leaps and lightyears ahead from where she started. 

No longer an aspiring bad ass, Fair's a newly minted confident person who has no trouble standing her ground on behalf of herself and her friends. To me, that's pure bad-assery.