Growing up as a girl in the 90's, I was a bit of a unicorn. As a girl with early diagnosed ADHD, I knew a lot of boys with ADHD, and saw a lot of negative representation of ADHD in popular media, but I had few friends who shared my diagnosis, and even fewer fictional characters who shared my diagnosis with whom I could identify. When creating Kara, I wanted to change that; I wanted to create an ADHD girl full of courage and hope, a positive representation of what ADHD can be.
Kara is everything I wish existed when I was a girl growing up with diagnosed ADHD. She's friendly and outgoing, ambitious and excitable, sometimes irritable and irrational, but always loved and valued on her own terms. Kara brings brightness and fun to everyone she meets, and I hope that by loving Kara, readers with ADHD can also embrace those traits within themselves. I hope ADHD readers young and old can identify with Kara. ADHD has its ups and downs, and I try to create an accurate depiction of those experiences, and much of Kara's behavior and reactions are modeled after my own as a girl.
As someone with ADHD, I wanted to create an accurate depiction of childhood ADHD without any of the negative connotations clouding Kara's life. I wanted to create a fictional heroine readers could cheer for, and a fictional world they could happily escape into and explore. By adjusting the scale, the world is familiar yet new—a world any reader can imagine themselves in just by adjusting their point of view.
