For reasons… I’ve been playing around with character cameos for Instagram… Which admittedly is partly procrastination. As I am making them anyway, I’ve decided you, dear readers, may enjoy seeing them, with a little background on the characters featured.

Today’s offering is a second major character from the ‘A Ballard of Maybe’s’ series… Indeed the Ubiquitous Eliza TuPaKa herself, otherwise knows as Miss Maybe who lends her name to both the series and its first instalment ‘Maybe’.

The Maybe series is set in the same universe as the Hannibal Smyth novels, but takes place a hundred and fifty years or more years before the events of Hannibal time. Miss Maybe’s world is closer to the real Victorian era, an age of steam power and strange inventions, just as things are about to get very strange for all concerned…

From her first, somewhat volatile, meeting with Benjamin West and his former man servant Mr Gothe featured earlier in this series, it is clear that Eliza is driven by her rage at the death of her father, a passionate belief that she is more than capable of running her own affairs and a determination to see justice done. The daughter of a Polynesian engineer and his English wife, she has to struggle against the preconceptions of Victorian society which is oppressive because of her sex, the mix nature of her race and her working class roots. From the outset I was determined to write her as a feisty, strong willed young woman of surprising caperablites (surprising to Mr West that is). As she grew, as characters do when you write them, she turned out so much more than that, with hidden depths and a strong sense of self and personality to go with it.

No one ever has to rescue Eliza, she rescues herself, and on occasion Mr West who is in the first novel far more the damsel than she.

These cameos were build for Instagram, if you would like to follow me there the link is www.instagram.com/markhayes6/