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I ended today’s writing session in tears. I actually had to get up and find some Kleenex. Yeah, someone died. I won’t tell you who, because I didn’t see it coming until two days ago. Then the writing which had averaged eight pages, crept to barely four a day, because part of me knew what was coming. Then all of me knew what was coming, and I didn’t want it to come. Goddess, this is going to be a really hard book for Merry.
Hard book for the main character means a hard book for the writer. I’m still down, and no amount of sunshine is going to change that. One of the hardest things about writing for me is leaving the book at the computer, and not carrying it with me through the day and night. To be wrapped in someone else’s sorrow so that it colors your own joy gray, is not a fate I wish on anyone. But if I did not feel my characters so deeply, would you, the reader, feel them, at all?
It’s not all doom and gloom, this strange immersive way I write. I was looking on a website of birth stones for a potential gift for a friend. Then I saw that they had March listed as aquamarine. I thought, Nathaniel’s birthday is coming up. He likes jewelry. Maybe a ring, or . . . About then I realized that Nathaniel was fictional and so was his birthday. Only real people can receive gifts and actually use them. I felt silly for a moment, but Jon says, that it’s a wonderful thing that my imaginary friends are so real to me. It is, even I believe that most of the time. But it’s not just their sorrows that bring me down. I had a moment of true regret when I realized that I couldn’t give Nathaniel his present. Sometimes, even I wish that my imaginary friends were real. Not all the time, not every day, but there are moments when it seems wrong that I can’t walk into the other room and share my day with them.