Since this was a question raised elsewhere, I think I’ll recap and explain just how I created Blitz in more detail. It actually is a more complicated story than it looks, and it may help readers with more context.
If you’ve not read any of the Blitz stories yet, feel free to ignore this, as it may involve some small spoilers.
Although it might not look that way, Blitz was not originally meant to be the main character. In fact, this wasn’t even originally intended to be a series, much less a whole universe. It just gradually evolved over time until it reached its current shape.
Roughly five years ago, I agreed to take part in a play-by-post role-playing game set in a superhero universe. (I’m pretty sure that the site in question no longer exists, so no point in digging around for it.) It sounded interesting, and I liked the challenge of creating new characters, so I was up for it.
True confession, and one that shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise: I wasn’t anywhere near the writer I am today. I had aspirations of writing back then, but I was doing mediocre Marvel Universe fanfic, and hadn’t yet branched out into doing my own stuff. It took Blitz for all that to change.
So, anyway, the RPG. That game pretty much was responsible for creating all the core formative elements of what would become the Blitz series. I initially created two characters for the game: Night Spider and Miranda Mason (aka Spectra). When the game started, Night Spider was the character I most focused on, since he interested me most and I’d done the most work on his backstory. (You’ll see more of this in an upcoming story arc.) Miranda began as my reserve character, though I honestly never really thought I would even use her, much less that she’d be an important character.
Everything changed over the course of gameplay. Events conspired against the story, and the GM allowed me to use Miranda as a second character. It turned out that the GM had plotted the story as a high-powered campaign. The problem was that most of the group were street-level heroes, including Night Spider. Miranda was brought in to maintain game balance. So I agreed, since I wanted to try this character out.
As the campaign went on, Miranda ended up growing in importance until she became one of the main characters in the game. It then struck me that I needed to polish off her backstory, and give her a supporting cast. This was easy enough, and from there, I began to add details around her.
Before I started playing Miranda, I had the idea that she would have a kid sister for some reason. I never put much thought into who she was before the game. At that point, I only knew that Miranda was a career woman with family concerns, and a kid sister she was helping out. I never thought seriously about her personality, who she was, what role she would play, or any of that stuff.
But when Miranda grew in importance, the kid sister character jumped back out at me. Because I had some success in establishing Night Spider and Miranda as foils, I decided to keep doing that because it seemed to be working. So looking at Miranda Mason, who is a cynical, mature, and responsible heroine, I knew her sister should be a more innocent, fun-loving, and reckless character. Amy evolved from that initial idea.
My initial thought was that Amy would be Dawn to Miranda’s Buffy. That’s actually rather a simplistic version, as more actually went into it, but that was the story role I needed her to play.
I won’t deny that Dawn was an important influence on this series. At the time, I was heavily into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as I’d only finally watched the DVD sets not long before I played the RPG. Dawn was a character that I enjoyed, but she really wasn’t being written to potential. She’s a powerful cosmic artifact with the false identity of an ordinary girl. She is, even if by plot-driven artifice, the sister of the Slayer. She studied magic with Willow, and was even a candidate for Watcher training. Any of these elements could have been used to further Dawn’s growth and give her a direction. Instead we have plots where Dawn becomes a kleptomaniac, tries to raise her dead mother from the grave, and that’s when she was used at all. To be fair, “Potential” would have been a promising start to address her character had it been developed more, but then the Slayer Army showed up, and Dawn became an afterthought.
In my mind, something had to be done about this.
Just as Joss Whedon created Buffy to give the blonde cheerleader the power to fight off the creatures of the night, I wanted Amy to show what could be possible with a character like Dawn. I believed that she could be more than the annoying or reckless sidekick that the hero has to rescue every other mission. That was the goal, at least.
Other influences crept their way in as well over time. Kitty Pryde and Impulse are the main ones as far as comics go. It might also be that Elsa Bloodstone worked her way in a little bit… she and Amy have the same knack for improvising. I’d also not be surprised if a little bit of Spider-Man influence crept in as well, given that we’re talking about an impulsive young heroine who is learning about responsibility.
But I get ahead of myself.
Amy did not initially have super-powers, nor was that necessarily the plan. I’d just trot her out, have her interact with the cast members from time to time, then file her away. Except a curious thing happened. Amy kept having memorable scenes, sometimes stealing the spotlight away from the other characters she interacted with. I never intended that to happen at all.
Finally, the GM suggested giving Amy a hero origin, giving her powers, and bringing her in as a third and final character. I went mainly with powers I considered defensive, which is why she has the abilities she does. Amy has been Blitz ever since. Once the origin happened, Amy pretty much became my dominant character pretty soon after, and remained so until the game ended.
When the game was over, I realized that I had stories I still wanted to tell with these characters. They were, by then, too compelling for me to just let die. I’d invested too much into Amy, Miranda, and Night Spider, and wanted to do more with them. That led to the creation of the Blitz series, Centennial City, and the wider universe that came after.
Without giving anything away here, the origin for Amy in “Borrowed Time” is very loosely based on what we did in the RPG. Most of the RPG version of the origin was my idea, though not all of it was. That said, I changed a few details for “Borrowed Time” out of practical necessity, so what you’ll find there is mostly my invention. A few characters were changed, some of the hows and whys of it changed, but the basics are still there. I wanted to keep was the emotional core of the original origin, which seems to be intact.
Amy is probably my favorite character that I’ve written to date. She’s virtually unique among all my characters in that she established herself as a central character through stubbornness, improvisation, and sheer dumb luck. Which, come to think of it, is definitely an Amy thing to do. 
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