Difficult character? Try all of them!

For the last few weeks Jayne, Hannah, and Leesa have posted on difficult characters and/or how to deal with them. I'll admit, I've thought of what to post since I learned what the theme o' the month was, but nothing has really struck me as "the post."

In my blog post last month, one of my suggestions was to write about the character that is motivating you the most at the time. But what if there are different characters from different books screaming at you inside your head? Well, then you'll be where I have been for the last few years. My most difficult is all of my characters.

That might sound like a joke, but I'm not kidding. It's hard to weed through the chaos going on inside my head and distinguish one voice from the others, to learn that person/demon/whatever inside and out, while keeping the other alpha's at bay.

The last few days I've been off-grid, enjoying some time surrounded by pine trees and quakies, deer, bears, and mountain lions (thank God I didn't see the latter two), and that's why I'm getting this post in so late. If my characters could speak to you without my knowing it, well for one, I'd be schizophrenic. For another, some of them would tell you that I was a big old meanie-head (not in those words of course. My big, burly demons probably wouldn't say it quite like that...). I opened two WIPs (works in progress) this weekend. The two that were the loudest. And I'm so glad I did. At first, I figured I'd be bouncing back and forth between the two books, adding in paragraphs or entire scenes as my men demanded, but what happened was that once I started typing in one book, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

So this month, my advice is nothing more simple than: Just write. You'll get farther than if you don't.