rior to starting my Untitled Work of Ornithological Unmarketableness–a bit of a misnomer, now, since it has gone through two tentative titles, one of which sounds like it’s a Houdini self-help book, and the other of which sounds like the fluffy romance it is–so much so, that the title has been given to more than one other book–I read voraciously. I probably went through four, five romance novels a week. And that’s now, during a time period when I have maybe two hours a day for myself.

After I starting writing Ornithology, my desire to read other romance fell through the floor. Don’t get me wrong. I still read Pleasure for Pleasure in the first instant that I got it. But I’m no longer reading to occupy my mind. My mind, when free, naturally shifts to Claire and Gareth. It gets annoyed when I try to shove other romance characters, nowhere near as interesting to me as my own, down its throat. The book has to be damned good to grab my attention.
At the end of Fanlit, I hated Patience and Damien with a passion. I figured it was just long exposure, and since I wrote all of, well, maybe 18,000 words about them, it didn’t seem to bode well. But I’ve now passed the 18,000 word mark in my work in progress, and I can’t get enough of them. I just adore them.
Do my characters ever do anything that surprises me? Well, yes. They’ve ended up being far cleverer than I had imagined. And my initial thought about Gareth just didn’t work. I couldn’t write him the way I imagined. He ended up becoming less methodical and … well, more like me. They’ve both ended up far more proactive than I imagined. The big picture view of things hasn’t changed much, but the details constantly shock me. And sometimes, the details metastasize…
The biggest shock for me came when Claire sat down to breakfast with her father and brother. Originally, it was going to be a simple scene that sets the way for one of the subplots that blossoms into the main plot about three-fourths of the way through the book. And it still is. But suddenly, amidst the bickering, her brother wished that their mother was still around. This scene came out of nowhere–how the mother died, and how everyone around her saw it. About five percent of the scene made it onto the paper, but it’s there, encoded.

At the time I wrote it, my mother was in the hospital. She’d rushed there after the abrupt onset of a life-threatening condition. I had never thought about her as mortal, and truth be told, I hadn’t really yet comprehended what it meant. She’s much recovered now, but it wasn’t until I saw the indelible print that Claire’s mother left on her family–and the wounds her death had inflicted–that I came to grips with my own situation, and really understood what it would mean if my mother died.

There’s a lot of me in what I’m writing. There’s a lot more than I had imagined. My characters can have no fears but my own, transfigured though they may be; no cleverness except what I endow them with; no love except what I experience. I have no life to breathe into my characters except my own. And so writing gives me another excuse to live life fully, that I might have more to breathe.