I really need to blog tonight. . .

. . .because a bunch of family are coming in for the weekend.  We're having a New Year party in May as I spent most of January in the hospital.  So I won't have much time to be bloggin'.

What to write about that has to do with writing?  I'm really chugging along on TISHA.  I'm going to make my self-imposed deadline.  Today, I took one of my favorite characters into a situation that really bothered me.  I didn't like writing it.

It's just the whole God-playing aspect of writing, again.  You create your characters, decide what they will look like, decide if they will be happy, decide if they will find love, decide, as Charles Dickens said, whether he (or she) will be the hero of his (or her) own life, or if someone else will take that role.

At a conference I attended at the University of Rochester about 20 years ago, I wrote a piece about having a meeting with a character that I had created.  The character asked me why I did what I did to him, and I was forced to answer..  When I wrote it, people really liked it.  I wish I hadn't lost it somewhere, but it was created in those pre-computer days when you had to keep track of all your notebooks.

     Maybe someday, I'll use the idea again.