It's a Sunday afternoon. We have 4 or 5 inches of snow on the ground, melting, and for some reason I put on the DVD of Animal House, which I don't know how to italicize on this ptogram.

I ought to be kept away from technology for my own good.

Anyway, what I've been thinking about is point of view--specifically, writing a mystery from inside the character's "I."

I've written most of my books in 3rd person, multiple viewpoint. Both I and my readers go back and forth from inside the head of one character after another.

There's a lot of scope there, and I've always enjoyed reading that kind of thing as well as writing it.

But even in that structure, it's sometimes hard to get some readers to understand that the characters are not all me--that if one character hates chocolate, for instance, I must hate chocolate, too.

Writing in first person absolutely convinces a big chunk of readers that the character MUST be me. If my point of view character is a dog loving vegan appalled at the very thought of cheeseburgers, I must be too--right?

Wrong, obviously, but that brings up the question of who the POV character actually is.

Dead Letters, the new book I put up for Kindle a couple of weeks ago, is first person point of view from the perspective of Georgia Xenakis, our heroine.

And in many ways, she is a lot like me. She's Greek American, for instance. She had a mother in deep dementia. She wrote for magazines in NYC for years.

But in a lot of other ways, she's not like me at all. I have cats, for instance. I'm unlikely to get confrontational in person, no matter how angry I get. I almost never burn bridges, even when I ought to. And I find it excruciating to listen to the radio except in the car.

Never mind being 20 years younger than I am.

I like her a lot, which is good, since I have to spend a lot of time inside her head.

But I don't really know who she is, and that means neither do you.