Something interesting has been happening since Sunday. A commenter left the suggestion on my “Cry Baby” post that I put some of my struggles with vulnerability and other issues onto fictional characters and see how they work through them. I find that idea very interesting, and while I’ve not been writing beyond my daily journaling, I find that a couple of characters seem to be haunting my awareness anyway.
I “won” NaNoWriMo two years ago (in that I completed 50,000 words of a novel), but the novel I was writing was only one-third done when December 1st hit. I just dropped the book and haven’t even looked at what I typed during those thirty days, but there’s one character from that unfinished novel who’s been lurking around the past few days. I wrote around him—about his relationship to the other characters who were more central to the narrative of that first third—but not about him directly, and I just find myself wondering what he’s up to and what he thinks about when he’s drinking his coffee.
Another character that’s been hanging around is a midwestern midwife I wrote about soon after my son was born three years ago.
I like thinking about these characters; they feel like old friends with whom I’d like to reconnect. I wonder if they’re on Facebook, and if they would know me if I tried to friend them (if I had a Facebook profile)? Or maybe they’d rather sit down for tea or a glass of wine and chat in person.
Imperfect Happiness 
I find my personal issues cropping up all through my fiction, these days, even when I didn’t intend it that way.
In one of my novels (a fantasy with shapeshifting hunters as an integral part of the culture), a young girl is poisoned by her mother. Maddened by the toxins in her system, she tears out her mother’s throat.
Later, her child is born, and, very soon thereafter, dies, without ever crying…
Both are, at least in a symbolic sense, parts of my life….
I wish you many, many lingering musings about those characters of yours!
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