Image: ICanHasCheezBurger.com
It’s that last one that plays most decisively into the insanity defense. (Wouldn’t we all be ecstatic if spreading hips did?)
I finally succumbed to the realization I was lost in a fiction fog when I began talking to characters. By “talking,” I don’t mean the occasional rhetorical “Hmm…. What would you do if…?” I mean literally carrying on protracted give-and-take conversations. Actually, arguments might be a better term.
These fanciful forays into which I seem to depart more frequently as time passes both amuse and appall people of the grown-up variety. Even my dog becomes concerned—or perhaps I’m mistaking his pawing and whining for something it is not. He simply may be jealous that none of the entities with whom I communicate so elaborately is him. Oddly, children don’t seem to mind at all.
After nearly twenty-five years, my significant other has learned just to ignore me. The crazy babbling and fixed stares no longer cause him to reach for the phone number of the nice men with white coats and butterfly nets. (Of course, this is the same man who frequently finds his life in jeopardy when he bursts into my writing space to tell me some horrendous, funny-only-to-men joke just as I’m about to craft the quintessential bit of dialog that will save the day, so his judgment is questionable, at best.)
But I digress (which ought to be another of those fully disclosed possible side effects). About those character interactions: Lately
57
Continued on Page 58