Ghosts

Sometimes, I feel surrounded by ghosts. I know, I know. Creepy. But not really.

What I mean is, some characters in older books show up unexpectedly. I’ll be stumbling down the aisles in the grocery store, and I’m not thinking about what kind of cereal the crew would like, but Henry in the Tal Jefferson books. I’m still stuck on whether or not to kill him off, even though I know book 4 needs him to die. I just can’t kill him. I’d cry too hard to write the scene. He’s right beside me as I have this internal argument, nodding when I say he has to live. As a result, I buy the healthy granola no one will eat and blame it on Henry.

Mythmaker, Elizabeth McFarland, can appear out of the blue. I wonder what she’s been up to in the years since her last appearance in the series. Is she still happy? Does she still long for the plains way of life?

Real life, real people are not adverse to giving these ghosts a place in my life. My Beloved never balks when I bring up a character from a book and talk about him/her as if they’re in the room with us. He understands. They’re real to me.

Ghosts. I live with them every day.