How did I come up with the novel’s major character, Thomas Walters? What does he mean to me?

In writing my first novel, Feel the Spin, I imagined how an educated person with a secular worldview would respond to the events of the period following the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Thomas Walters’s father was a widowed, impoverished laborer who struck it rich in the California Gold Rush. Thomas grew up in comfortable circumstances on his father's horse farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Although he had earned a degree from Franklin & Marshall College, Thomas’s academic aspirations were unformed until, after his father's untimely death, he resolved to seek his own path to self-respect and success. Accepting a professorship at a small, orthodox religious college in Tideland, South Carolina, he was initially welcomed because of his training in new and unfamiliar scientific disciplines.

Thomas, being sympathetic to the secularist Freethought movement, was soon shocked by the apparent alignment of religious institutions and a reactionary community against his efforts to promote a scientific outlook among his students.

I wanted to develop a character who would both suffer and mature as a result of this confrontation.

Thomas represents the people of this period who valued science and rationality. Privately, he rejected religion for its foundation in fantastical and false narratives, and over the course of the story he becomes convinced that organized religion could be harmful to society. Like many people of his time and even in the present day, Thomas hoped for progress to a world unshackled from superstition and myth.