Name: Leia Marie McKean
Alias: Juno Harper (Ivno Harper in signatures)
Nickname(s):
Date of Birth: May 1, 1985
Age: 24
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual
Height: 160.02 cm (5' 3")
Weight: 54.88 kg (121 lbs)
Hair Colour: Dark brown
Eye Colour: Dark blue
Spoken Language(s): English (native). French (fluent), Romanian (decent).

Leia is an unsuspecting human.

Leia is one of those people that will push themselves to their absolute limits. She sets impossible boundaries for herself to see how close she can get. However, if she fails, she refuses to let it drag her down. She knew she had set an unreasonable goal, entirely for the purpose of seeing how close she falls. Leia also likes to push others, just to see what their limits are. She doesn't push everyone around her, just those that she thinks could benefit from it. She never pushes someone that she thinks can't handle it, although she isn't the best judge of character in real people around her.
She is extremely talented with children, especially the younger ones. She is really very good at turning on the charm and making them think she's this really amazing and awesome and wonderful woman. She loves to babysit and often does for her friends. She babysits her publisher's daughter most often, and usually does the best with her.

Leia loves to cook and will practically adopt anyone who will let her cook for them. She uses her mother's recipes more often than not, and especially loves to cook southern foods. Her favorite food is chicken fried steak, and she likes to claim that the only person who do it better than Cracker Barrel is her mother.

She spends all of her time writing at local coffee shops. While writing, she often falls back on the tried and true method of people watching for her minor characters. Leia often uses other people as basis for some of her characters or problems: for example, a very tall man having to fit through a shorter door will make her think of a very large ship having to fit through a very small conduit of something in space. Leia has come into the habit of carrying small notebooks, legal pads, index cards, etc. in her purse so that she can always have something available to her to write on when she has ideas.

Like all good sci-fi writers, Leia is not (and has never claimed to be) normal. She is eccentric, but in the best possible ways. For example, she refuses to wear any shoes but converse sneakers (even and especially as Juno Harper). She only eats the red, orange, and yellow skittles, and absolutely refuses to eat m&ms. She uses rubber-band therapy to keep herself from editing as she writes. She also has mild OCD and will obsess over keeping her studio, kitchen, and bedroom organized.
In her studio, she is nearly always playing music, whether she's there or not. She keeps every bit of concept art anyone's done for her novels plastered up on the walls, as well as fan photographs, her own sketches, and family photographs. She intentionally keeps the pictures askew, and will smack anyone that tries to change it. She also keeps plants there. She has a Chamaedorea Palm, two Chinese Evergreens, and assorted Amaryllis plants of the "yellow goddess" variety. She also keeps a very small lime tree.

She was raised the "right" way, according to her parents. Leia's parents drilled sexual purity, being an upstanding religious woman, and proper "polite" behavior into her mind. She has a promise ring from her father, which she never takes off. She also still wears her wedding rings, even though she and her husband have been divorced for two years. She goes to church every Sunday, even when she's sick.

Leia has ZERO hand-eye coordination, and is actually quite clumsy. She has a tendency to fall off of chairs and countertops and run into walls, doors, and doorjambs. She has broken two ribs, three fingers, both wrists, and her tailbone.

Her writing style mixes fantasy and science fiction. Like J. R. R. Tolkien, she hates allegory and denies using her writing for this purpose. Her novels always revolve around a single object or person, providing the title and central connection for the book - but it may not always be what it seems. For example, a novel she entitles "The Grey Skies" may not have anything at all to do with grey skies, but everything to do with an obscure character that shows up from time to time and has stormy grey eyes. Another example would be her third novel, The Green Snake. In this novel, the item it revolves around is an emerald with a snake etched in it, but also includes an actual green snake. She likes to play games through her books and include very small obscurities, such as little plays on words, to see who might pick up on them, much like J. K. Rowling and her characters like Sirius Black and Voldemort.

Obviously, Leia is a gifted writer. She is also a talented pianist, although she has made it clear to everyone that she hates to play for an audience. She speaks French fluently and knows enough Romanian to get by. Her father insisted she take a Latin class, which she didn't excel in. However, Leia would use the knowledge she gained from this class she took her freshmen year in her novels. She took a self-defense class when she was sixteen and practices some of the techniques at least once a week. In addition, she also taught herself to sew and cross-stitch. She is fairly decent with geometry, but algebra always screws with her. She is also artistically gifted, although she's never used this ability for anything but literary development (e.g.: floorplans for her starships, alien species, etc.). She is mostly left-hand oriented, but has acquired the ability to use her right hand for certain things due to injuries in the past. Leia is a decent driver, although she prefers to let others get behind the wheel.

Leia McKean (neé Thompson) was born to Karl and June Thompson of Walnut Grove, Alabama. Walnut Grove has a population of roughly 710 people. Her father worked at the grocery store and her mother was a chef. She was raised in the deep south, and has the accent to prove it. Her mother and father insisted she go to church with them every Sunday, and to every church function ever held in Walnut Grove. Even as a young child, Leia was fascinated with books. Her mother will always recount stories of how she would throw all the toys out of her playpen and just sit in there with the books. It became a family joke that Leia had her nose stuck in a book all the time, and if she didn't have a book to read, the world just might have come to an end.

Growing up, Leia bounced back and forth between being a very social young lady and a withdrawn intelligent girl that spent all her time reading. As a child, she was always very creative. Much to her mother's chagrin (and her father's amusement), she was always very entertained by shows like Star Trek, and movies like Star Wars. She even thought it was cool that she and the princess with the funny hair had the same name at the time. She was always dreaming up fantastic stories, creating new worlds, and coming up with beautiful princesses to be rescued by handsome spacefarers. Leia's creativity seemed to be boundless, and she even wrote a play when she was eight. She roped her father, mother, aunt, and cousins into performing it with her.

School was always a sort of a double-edged sword for Leia. She loved to learn, but if something bored her, she would ignore her teachers. She was often busted for reading in the middle of class - especially math. More often than not, she was in trouble for not paying enough attention, even though she had high marks in most classes (PE and art classes notwithstanding). She was involved in most of the school plays and dances, and was on student government in a non-official way all four years of high school. Her brother, five years her senior, had left a long shadow for Leia. He was always in trouble, and was actually threatened more than once with military school or something similar.
When he went off for college, Leia was just entering the eighth grade. He lasted in college for about the duration of a semester before he was back at home terrorizing people. She was the only one safe from his antics. Often, his actions were aimed squarely in the direction of protecting his sister. It's like all those older brother-younger sister teams on television: Luke would beat the shit out of any boy that broke his baby sister's heart.

She wrote her first novel when she was fifteen, and it was published when she was sixteen. It was entitled The Diamond Blade. This novel followed the adventures of a male protagonist against the government he was working for. In this case, the object the novel centered around was the ice-colored stone in the hilt of a dagger gifted to the protagonist by his commanding officer. This blade would be used to start the chain of events turning the protagonist (named "Marcellus 'Marc' Reid," meaning "Red Warrior") against the government, and would later be the instrument used by Reid to kill his commanding officer. The Diamond Blade was the first in a series of four that Leia wrote. As opposed to using her actual name when publishing the books, Leia decided upon Juno Harper as a pen name. Juno was the queen of the gods, the patron goddess of Rome, and one of the most powerful in the Roman pantheon. She was the goddess of fidelity in marriage, and also of women in general. Harper was the surname of her best friend at the time. As a sixteen-year-old author, Leia had to do everything with her parents' approval. She wrote three more books during the next two years. They would be entitled The Senator's Cross, The Green Snake, and The Captain's Mother.

By the time she graduated high school, Leia's novels had pulled attention from many people. Although certainly not as popular or famous as J.K. Rowling or Isaac Asimov, she steadily acquired her own little fan base. She launched full-time into writing, and produced two more books before her twentieth birthday: A Dry Creek and The Black Earth. While not the most life-transforming event she would undergo, Leia was certainly amazed at how much people enjoyed reading her novels and was extremely happy to do book tours to meet the people that read her science fiction.

It was on one of these book tours, in the city of San Francisco, that the nineteen-year-old met (supposed) marine biologist Jude McKean. He met her at a book signing. She was so intrigued by him that she actually put her phone number in with her signature. Later, after the book signing, she got a call inviting her to the Eagle Cafe. He picked her up at seven. They hit it off didn't get back to her hotel until 3:45 in the morning, by which point Leia's brother was frantic. This set the stage for Luke to absolutely hate Jude. After giving Jude the "death glare" and ushering him out, Luke gave Leia a piece of his mind. Needless to say, he was not pleased when they got engaged a scant two months later.

Within four months of their engagement, the pair was married on July 8, 2005. Leia was twenty, and Jude was thirty-four. They had one very small wedding for the family, and then another larger one for Leia's readers. She changed her legal name to Leia Marie McKean, although Juno Harper remained unchanged. During the three year period of their marriage, Leia wrote only one novel: The Gentleman's Code.

The pair was happily married for two years before Leia became pregnant. Although this happy event seemed to be a reaffirmation that their marriage was going well, it would prove to be one of the key factors leading to their destruction. She miscarried at five months of pregnancy. After this, the couple grew apart. Jude, a Christian at the start of their relationship, grew slowly farther and farther apart from God. This, coupled with the loss of their child and their constant bickering over tiny things, led Jude to suggest a divorce. After three years of marriage, Leia and Jude McKean were getting a divorce. When Leia's brother found out, he made good on his promise: he beat the shit out of Jude.

Leia and Jude stayed on semi-friendly terms, seeing each other fairly often. Immediately after their divorce, Leia moved to a loft in Los Angeles, to be closer to her publisher. Since their divorce, Leia has been working on an eighth novel.

June Thompson, mother (living)
Karl Thompson, father (living)
Luke Thompson, brother (living)
Jude McKean, ex-husband (living)

      → "marc reid" series
The Diamond Blade (2001)
The Senator's Cross (2002)
The Green Snake (2002)
The Captain's Mother (2003)
      → single novels
A Dry Creek (2004)
The Black Earth (2004)
The Gentleman's Code (2006)
      → current project
The French Soldier (tentative release date: December 2009)

• Leia is allergic to penicillin, arithromycin, and ceclor.
• She has drawn every piece of important art (maps, schematics, ship sketches, etc.) for the actual content of her novels. She has not, however, drawn the covers.
• She loves to play the song "My Heart Will Go On" on the piano simply because she really likes the way it sounds. Similarly, she enjoys playing "My Immortal," "Time in a Bottle," and "Annie's Song."
• She wanted to name her baby Daniel Jacob if it was a boy and Anna Christine if it was a girl.