Captain Epic Kindred, rock star extraordinaire

Random facts about Captain Epic Kindred

• Captain Epic is the father of Eeare Kindred.
• His real last name is Fitzgerald.
• He is a vegetarian and likes tofu burgers.
• His favourite game is Mah-Jong.
• He calls all his butlers Giles.
• He has a gold tooth and likes to lick it with his tongue to try and suck the mineral content out of it.
• He owns a genuine astronaut's costume, which he has worn at fancy dress parties.
• He likes dating famous models.
• His favourite drink is water (contrary to popular belief!).
• He is thirty-nine years old.
• The famous French musician Christophe Apostrophe remixed Captain Epic's single Global Insanity.
• He has signature dreadlocks.
• He is a single dad.

For more about the lovable party animal Captain Epic, you can purchase Drive to Nowhere at your favourite online retailer!

Ugenia Lavender and the Geri hype machine

A year ago, as I was finishing the first draft of Drive to Nowhere, I heard about Spice Girl Geri Haliwell's plans to launch a new children's book series based on a girl called Ugenia Lavender.

Ugenia would be sassy, incredible, energetic and ingenious. "She's flawed and yet she's inspirational, and she challenges the world she lives in," Geri proclaims on the official Ugenia Lavender website. Her dad, Professor Lavender, works in the dinosaur museum and "Ugenia goes to him when she's got a problem, as she does in The Lovely Illness", Geri says.

I groaned. What about sassy and smart Eeare Kindred, daughter of single dad Captain Epic Kindred? Similar 'bizarre' names... bags of attitude... Eeare, a heroine for the Facebook generation with her own imperfections? The one I'd thought up in 1992 and had begun writing faithfully about in November 2006?

Was Eeare (and Drive to Nowhere) going to be sidelined by Ugenia's adventures and the Geri hype machine before her own story had even begun?

Thankfully, I soon realised, these feisty and 'flawed' girls can live side-by-side. For Ugenia is only nine years old; a completely different role model for a completely different 'girl power' market. Eeare is fifteen; an adolescent, who is more like the eccentric outcasts in the movie The Breakfast Club than the small troupe of misfits in the Ugenia adventures (although I've only heard what the video says on the Ugenia website).

Even so, I'm still jealous of the publicity Ugenia has received solely on the back of the Geri/Spice Girls music 'brand'. Already I've seen articles pushing Ugenia in women's magazines, gossip websites and blogs (here's a leak of one of her books). No doubt closer to the release date, around May 2008, we'll see posters, interviews on TV and so on. Oh well. We self-publishers can only dream of that kind of hype!

Stranger than fiction

One of the main characters in Drive to Nowhere is Captain Epic Kindred, rock star extraordinaire and father of Eeare Kindred, the feisty teen heroine.

Now, I did start a MySpace page about Eeare and mentioned that she is a fictitious character. But I've since received communication from people who are interested in hearing Captain Epic's music "but the only things I found on Google have been references to the book". My friend Sean who's written a music industry satire called University of Death (the name of the rock band) also has MySpace people contacting him thinking the band is real (he has created a music track for them, so at least there is some kind of plausibility, but still).

All this is highly ironic as there are actual real artists out there who would pay to get complete strangers to listen to their music. But I've got a fictitious character with no back catalogue that people are willing to look up on the internet. How postmodern!