Baby come back...

A few weeks ago I played around with a story about where characters go when they're not remembered anymore, when they're not wanted or needed.  It wasn't my intent to make it morbid, and I hope there was a sort of wistful happy note, an F or maybe a B flat, at the end there.

The reason for that is all this enforced blogging has stirred a lumbering beast within my psyche.  Once spry and energetic, able to leap into action with nary a moment's notice, this creature has been slumbering deep within me, and is slow to wake.  This elder being, Write-clthu, The Scion of the Infinite Story, is starting to rise again in me, and there are plenty of sacrifices that must be put upon its alter before it can return.

Sever years or so ago, I had dreams of writing a novel.  I had enough friends tell me I was good at writing characters, and I thought if I could just focus enough and bang on it, I could have...something.  It was a time when I was out of college but not working yet, an adult in body but not in mind or spirit, and I could afford such delusions.  I practiced, honed my skills.  Slowly taught myself how to create plot along with characters.  Studied how others created people, objects, worlds, universes, and what worked and what didn't.

Not too long, though, and it was no longer fun.  The release of jumping into an unfinished world of my creation, making and connecting the next series of dots diminished every time I tried, until at one point I just set everything down and walked away.  It was no big deal, I tried to console myself, I was no longer having fun doing what I did, so just move on.  Sort of mirroring my Pez hobby interest as well.

But like Pez, writing's now again in the forefront of my life, and 'Super Sally's Diner' was my apology to the characters in my head I'd abandoned.  It might sound odd if you've never written fiction before, treating my characters like they're real and have honest emotions.  It's not that I believe the characters are real in the sense of them being able to talk and converse with me.  That's just crazy.  Rather, it's that characters, good characters, the one you want to populate a book with and create a scaffold of a world around, giving them a plot to go on their merry little way, have a spiritual substance that is tangible, made up of the same whipsy threads dreams are made of.

That feeling you get when you finish a good book, or during the credits of a long movie series or an epic video game, the sense of loss?  A mourning for not being able to hang around or observe any more?  That is the spirit of the character(s) leaving you, returning to the aether.

When I write, the good characters do all the story telling for me.  If I can craft them fine enough, once I drop them into a situation and trigger an action (The war starts, the baby dies, the teleporter goes haywire) they act on their own.  All I have to do is have enough stamina to listen to everything they tell me and mark it up in neat ASCII characters somewhere.

These characters of mine, five adventures from a world they know exists but one I have yet to finish putting in words, three teenage super heroes each with their own secrets and their super villain arch nemesis who is also their math teacher, a merfolk priestess, and a young adult finishing college with an odd ability to talk to ghosts, these folks and more have been trying to grab my attention for years.  And I've been the rude guy who bought them flowers  and took them to a nice restaurant on the first date, but hasn't called back and is blocking their calls.

The least I owe them, and owe myself I guess, is to know that characters don't die when no one believes in them; they simply hang out in an old 50's diner telling their stories to everyone else stuck there, and having a good time there.

And maybe in the next few months and years, I can slowly start listening to them all again.