Out of control

 

 It's happening again only this time with Florence DuBois.

She was going to be a walk-on character in my book, Lexington, about a British soldier that died at the first battle of the American Revolution.

It is not the first time this has happened. In Murder in Caleb's Landing, a woman who came for a quick coffee and ended up with her own subplot and running an underground railroad mirroring the slave underground railroad of the early to mid 1880s.

And Brenda in Day Care Moms was going to be an exercise for me to explore the characters of my four moms. She turned out to be the central figure.

I am not a writer that pre-plans my work. 

I have an idea.

I start.

I stop.

Words appear on my screen, but I'm unhappy with them. 

Facebook, computer games, newspapers on the internet draw my attention. 

Tomorrow, I tell myself.

And then it happens. At some point I become consumed by the characters or my characters consume me.

It wasn't happening with Lexington, mainly because I would have to stop and research some little detail. The internet, Ranger Jim and others helped. But then it was hard to get back to work.

Now I'm consumed, not just with Florence, that pushy wife of the French Consul in Boston. Daphne, wife of the British Consul, tells me to listen to her. James, the baker, is busy adapting to his new life as a private in the 43rd regiment paroling the streets of pre-Revolution Boston.

This is the way my books are born and grow. My thoughts are on the story line, a sentence, a paragraph. When I'm in the shower, James may be hankering after Molly whose father is a member of the Sons of Liberty. When I make avocado toast, I think of beer foam used for leavening in the bakery in Ely. 

I resent being interrupted by dentist and doctors' appointments and as we drive into Geneva the day's color of the lake (it can be anything from brown to royal blue) makes me think I should do a better description of the sea as James sailed from England to Boston.  

I'm writing this blog in bed before getting up. Today, while I do research into stolen cannons and rearranging my 50-odd pages of historical notes, Florence will probably be in the room mumbling about her American Harvard professor father and her French mother, her insistence on going to art school and how, because of her multi-cultural background she always felt like an outsider.

James may stop by. He is asking me if I want to do the scene with the dysentery or the one where he is part of the search party for a deserting soldier. I've a few sentences scrawled about his growing relationship with Molly. Do I need to write an article as it might have been written in Boston Gazette in April 1775?

I'm not worried about chapter arrangement yet. I do go back to add to what I've already written and if there's a problem with new work, I go back to polish previous writing.

It is time to shower, eat and get back to work.