I have half a dozen or so characters that have been with me since I was a kid. They were my imaginary friends then, and still are now. They’re surpisingly good company, considering that they’re, y’know, fictional.

I talk to them during the day, I dream with them at night. They’re my resident ghosts, the ones who share space in my head, the ones who will always be with me. The ones who have always been there.

Others turn up unexpectedly, inspired by something innocuous or ridiculous: the broken window on a house, the bared ankle of a stranger sitting on a bench, the guy wearing a hand puppet at the gas pump, singing to himself. These ones bring the stories with them, like movie trailers appearing before my eyes.

And some characters I have to go find, searching through an empty world for a person to fill it.

I imagine it’s the same for other writers, but I do wonder sometimes if other writers rely on their characters as much as I do. I exist in two separate worlds and often it feels to be that my imaginary world is more real than actual reality. So much of my life is lived in my head.

Ebron, the MC from The Dead, came to me out of the blue one day and pretty much has been making me crazy ever since. Because he has so many stories, and I struggle to tell them. Boneyard, the second in the Thaumaturge series, is coming along at a glacial pace and part of the problem is I have Big Decisions to make about where Ebron’s story will go and where he will end up. I want to right by him, but once I decide, there’s no going back and that determines the trajectory for both this book and the next one in the series.

Plus, a few new characters have popped up and I’m struggling with them to, not sure of their motivations. Needless the say, Boneyard is getting quite an overhaul and barely resembles the first draft I submitted to my editor all those months ago.

I’m getting there. I’m working every day. The Thaumaturge short, Season’s Bleeding, is now available at Amazon, Smashwords, and ARe. I’ve got a decent chunk of the unnamed stand-alone novel finished. I’ve got outlines and bits and pieces in the works.

But I’m ignoring all of that until Boneyard is done.

Decisions, decisions.