Suzette asked Shannon Messenger:

Are Iggy, Silveny, or other animals behaviors/personalities based on your cats? Also, do elves really keep pets at all? Aside from Sophie, Grady, and Edaline, I can't remember anyone keeping an animal at their house. It made me curious. If elves do have pets, are they magical creatures or regular animals like cats or dogs? Hope your tour goes super well! I'm excited to read Lodestar, your books are fantastic ;)

Shannon Messenger Bits and pieces of them are inspired by my cats, but obviously since they're such different creatures I also had to find inspiration from lots of other animals. And yes, I do imagine many other elves keeping pets. Sometimes it's a simple matter of, "I can only include so many details before it slows the scenes down and makes it too hard for readers to remember." And something like whether a character has a pet at home often becomes one of those unnecessary details.

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