Maximilliano.... First, Congratulations on your award! Very well deserved. I'm sorry I've been so busy and didn't make it by in time to send wishes during your week.
But also Thank You! You were certainly one of my most valued and enthusiastic supporters, and I appreciate it!
And it's an honor to receive this award. I always saw the characters in Fire Warms as the center of the story, with the game/historical portion wrapped around them, rather than the other way around.
And -- as Frogbeastegg says -- it amazed me how these characters took on a life of their own that I could never have predicted.
For instance, a character I meant only to use once or twice (Pavel Skiedweza) ended up being nominated by several people as their favorite character in the Forums!

So he became a recurring character. I also never intended for Rensselaer to take on a major role in my story. He was a plot device, early on... meant really as a one-time cameo appearance. But it kept turning out that he fit into new elements of the story I wanted to tell, so instead he became central to most of 19th Century Prussian History!
And he tied in so perfectly with one of my favorite recurring characters, Louis Napoleon. They knew each other too well, it seemed, and so they kept crossing paths.
It occurs to me that I killed off two of my favorite characters in very bloody ways!

Both Louis Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm II were very complicated characters who were fun to write for because of their contradictions and their dual sympathetic/antagonistic natures. Both were tragic heroes, and both were infamous, in their own ways.
And they were also fun because they were historical characters, which I tried to represent with faithfulness to their historic attitudes, aptitudes, inclinations and personalities. Their real-life complexity made writing for them ten times more fun than a character I could have come up with on my own!
But I'm not sure who -- of all the dozens of major characters -- was my favorite. Pietr Van Rensslaer, Joachim Longanecker, Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm, the fictional Kaiser Waldemar... All are my favorites in different ways! I even made the author of my alternate history book -- Miss Dr. Reinicke Herz -- into a flesh and blood character in the story!
Naturally, like any author, I enjoy hearing why different readers liked different characters -- usually for reasons very different from what I might have predicted.
Thank you all for your kind words! Now I have the pleasure of deciding who, among so many brilliant character authors, to pass this along to!
Rensslaer