Fantasising… when to stop

Quite often my stories spring from me fantasizing about what would happen if I met someone, did something, said something… a little trickle of narrative starts, new characters spring into the stream, tributaries of memory and imagination join the flow and soon the story is racing along taking its own course.

Usually the original little bubble of my fantasy about me doing being in a certain situation, or doing or saying something has disappeared and I have disappeared too. I am definitely not Deke in ‘Farholm,’  and I really am not Tyche in ‘The Stalking of Rosa Czekov’ although she and I do share some of the same characteristics; I might be a bit eccentric, a little whacky, Tyche’s totally crazy and does mad and dangerous things. My quiet side may be a little like Rosa Czekov, but I am not passive and quiet like she seems to be.

The current novel I’m working on ‘Loving Judah’ has a heroine, Aislin, who is older than Deke and Tyche and shares more characteristics with me; she is a teacher, she teaches English as a second language, she has pastoral responsibilities in school; she married later than many of her friends, when she was in her thirties… but stop!!  I married when I was forty, my husband did not have any children, he was not a cool, calm and controlled man – my husband’s a rock drummer!

Aislin’s husband had a son, Judah by his first marriage and part of his reason for marrying Aislin was because she would be a wonderful mother to his son. It was a happy marriage, cemented by Judah as he grew from a child to a young man.

Aislin is like me; she isn’t me, but every so often as I am writing about her, I stray away from what she would do and into what I would do… the fantasizing has to stop and the imagining and creating has to take over.