I read and enjoyed Land of Hidden Fires by Kirk Kjeldsen very much. At first I had trepidation about reading it, but I’m very glad I read the novel. Mr. Kjeldsen was kind enough to answer a few questions for me. Q. How did you prepare to tell the story of Kari, a teenage girl? A. I didn’t intend to write the novel with a teenage girl as the protagonist; I first wanted to write about the story of my great-grandfather’s brother, Anfinn Kjeldsen, who helped a downed American pilot get to Sweden during WWII. I couldn’t find enough details, though, and trying to tell what had happened with what little that I had wasn’t working for me, so I put it aside for a few years. I eventually tried it again as fiction, making the protagonist a young man about Anfinn’s age, and it started coming easier. Then I thought it might be more interesting if the main character was a teenage boy, and then a teenage girl, and the story took off. So the character sort of wrote herself, in a way, which I think all good characters do.I didn’t consciously or specifically prepare writing the story of a…