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There are signs that the new Anita book is going well, and that I am heavily into her world. What signs? I saw a small pile of mail on the island in the kitchen last night. It had a note on it that said, Richard’s. My first thought was why would Richard have any stuff in my house? I was thinking of Richard Zeeman, one of my imaginary friends. It would indeed be surprising if he had real, concrete stuff at my house, or anyone’s physical house. It was, of course, a note pertaining to our dear friend Richard, who some of you have met at signings. He was the one with the camera. He is now in Italy with his girlfriend, permanently. But we’re still getting his mail and some of the stuff he’d ordered that didn’t come in before he got on a plane. So he’s got a pile of stuff with his name on it. We’ll mail it to him when he tells us where to send it. But for several moments when I first saw that note, I thought only of Richard, the character. When I have moments like this, I’m never sure if I should be happy, or disturbed? Happy that the world is that real to me now, and since I’m in the end game of the book, last third, the world should be at it’s most real for me. The world, the voice, the characters all so real. Final choices to make. The plot coming together, all the various threads, in hand, and we’re almost ready to pull them in, like a handful of balloons that you drag from the sky and only when they’re close enough are you sure what colors they are.
A lot of people on tour asked me, how do I keep the characters straight. How do I remember what they look like? I told them that these are my friends. When you go into a room full of your close friends you don’t need notes to remember what they look like, they’re your friends and you know their faces. I may not be sure who has grey eyes, and who has blue, or how tall everyone is to the inch, but then, truthfully, I don’t know the height of my closets friends to the inch, and unless the eyes are amazing I tend to lump bluish, grayish into one color in my head for eyes, as well. But other than not being absolutely certain of the shade of blue or grey, I know my friends, and my imaginary friends, too. I know that some of you that asked that question are writing your own stuff and trying to figure out how things work. I can’t tell you how to make your characters that real to you, as a writer, but I can tell you that they become real for me somewhere between book four and book eight. I’m experiencing the same evolution with Merry and her men. Book four was the book that they began to coalesce for me, and it’s becoming less effort to remember what everyone looks like, and how they behave, they are becoming real to me, as Anita and her gang became. I think my characters are like my real life friends, the people I like, I like more and more the longer I know them. I like knowing the ins and outs of a person, the good and bad, the happy and sad. I like it all, and my friends let me be the moody bastard I can be, and I allow them the same freedom. The freedom to be yourself and still have people who love you. I love my characters, I just do.