Tuesday, August 27, 2019

When characters wake you up at night

by Rick Blechta

Back from a few days away to regenerate the inner self, aka a lovely — although far too brief — vacation, I feel as if I’m ready to face the fall and winter.

Did I manage to get a whole bunch of writing done? Frankly, no, but now I’m primed to get back down to it.

The past few days, I haven’t written a word (except emails), but there were a number of things to catch up on. Plus I also managed to screw up my work computer again — this time completely my own fault. I should have known better than to mess around with computer things on which I’m not really “literate”. Luckily, I managed to clean up my mess myself (thank heaven for Apple’s Time Machine feature).

So I thought about my WIP (work-in-progress) a whole bunch and then didn’t act on anything yet. Seems I pissed off one of my protagonists.

She woke me up at 2:30 a.m. this morning, after I’d gotten to bed just short of midnight. Seems she wanted to talk.

Now, us writer-types are used to having discussions with our character-creations. Some of us here on Type M have written posts about it. Last night was different, though, with my character not contacting me during “business hours”.

I tried to ignore her for nearly an hour, using all my tried and true get-back-to-sleep methods. She kept shouting on me to give up and listen to what she had to say. I also must have slightly dozed off somewhere during the struggle because I had the clearest image of what she looks like. Interestingly, my previous mental image was incorrect.

I finally gave up and went downstairs, thought about various aspects of my nascent novel and realized she was trying to share some pretty good ideas while also pointing out some things I’d written that were dead wrong about her. In the end, I was glad that I hadn’t managed to roll over and go back to sleep.

After taking nearly two hours of dictation, she returned control of my brain to me and I suddenly was very sleepy.

So that’s the reason I slept in and my Tuesday post is rather late.

Honest!

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A follow up to my post from two weeks ago about the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. Seems the closed-circuit video footage of his cell at the critical period when he supposedly took his life is "unusable". Hmmm… You’re not surprised are you? View some coverage HERE.

1 comment:

Sybil Johnson said...

Those pesky characters! Sometimes they won't talk and other times they talk at the most inconvenient times like when you're driving and can't write anything down. I do have a digital recorder, but half the time I forget to bring it with me. But talking is preferable to not talking at all.