Thank you, Jackie! I love how you create your characters -- layered and alive!

Thank you, Moya. I'm glad it "talked" to you.

It is! LOL!!

Those wretched hangers-on who just won’t let you write in peace 😜
It’s a wonderful world we disappear into whenever we enter our characters’ minds ✍️📚🙏♥️

Thank you, Jennifer. I feel the same way about my characters. They have to speak to me or they just don't work. I even have some still waiting in the corner of my mind who inhabit unfinished stories, scowling at me because I don't just get on with it. One day, I keep promising them! I really will allow them their days in the sun.

The following portion fully resounded with me:

“A character who is alive will not let you write the wrong scene. They will not let you force them into a shape that doesn’t fit. They will not let you silence them when they need to speak.”

‘Lara’, one of the two protagonists in my first series, would often ‘speak to me’ as I was writing. In two distinct places she took me down significant paths that were never part of my plans for her, and yet they were absolutely necessary to make her character and circumstances ‘real’ - both in simply telling her story, and also understanding the depth of the emotional, and often lonely, journey she endured learning to live without her soulmate.

When I had my husband read the first draft of that very long manuscript, as he reached the second one I heard his unhindered exclamation, “What did you do THAT for?”

I knew exactly what he was referring to and I’ve had several readers since state much the same thing in emails or text messages. Both decisions were necessary ‘evils’ that were both believable and yet took her down two distinctly different though significant paths for the eventual outcome.

A few years ago, I stumbled across a fabulous online ‘short expose’ written by Winston Graham, the author of the Poldark series, where he was walking down a Cornish lane one evening and suddenly encountered Demelza, his leading lady.

They had the must profound conversation as to why he had created her the way he did, what her life with Ross and all the other characters was like now, and simply a revealing of their thoughts of one another in this fictional scenario.

I absolutely adored the following paragraph and could imagine a similar scene if I was to ever meet my Lara or Adam by chance…

‘We stood there for a long time, smiling at each other, eye searching eye, in mutual recognition of a strange bond. I felt an extraordinary moving intimacy with this woman whom I had never met before. I felt as if I could understand her closest feelings, even her most personal bodily secretions, the stirring of her spirit within her, as well as I ever had my own.’

Every second of their encounter I could imagine as a real experience for him because of the way characters do become a part of you, even though they are still distinct individuals in their own right with their own thoughts and desires.

Thank you again.

Thank you, Karen!