Behold the creepifying plot bunny!  http://www.aliencrossing.com/black-eyed-kids/

I need a new author photo, one that's less than a hundred years old.  First, though, I need a new face.

Ugh.  Why can't I be invisible?

I'm still here, Crickets.  You may have thought you'd lost me in the silence, but believe me, the inside of my cranium is anything but still.  The racket from the accumulated voices of dozens of characters talking at once has been the mental equivalent of a jack hammer in the middle of the night - startlingly loud and unbearably distracting.

Welcome to summer, my friends, and to the ongoing heap of things in Real!Life that need to be done.  I'll be flitting to a new hiding hole in early July, and will hopefully set up an actual office where actual writing can happen once the boxes and detritus of the move have been cleared away.   With any luck, my cast of thousands will have agreed among themselves and will have formed an orderly line so that I can write their stories one at a time.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!

Hoo, that was a good one!  ::wipes eyes::  ANYway....

I wonder if other authors have to contend with this sort of thing.  Am I the only novelist who perpetually lives one banana peel away from pure schizophrenia?  Is this actually some form of borderline personality disorder? It's hard to say.  I do know that my "people" seem extremely real, which has different effects depending on which person we're discussing.  Tobyn is amusing and aggravating and entertaining and frustrating all at once, and it's a miracle that nobody has killed him yet, in the permanently-dead sense.  Saul is comforting and reasonable and a soothing presence in my head.  Marvin was... well, let's just say that I'm glad I finished that story and got him evicted ("Head Hunter" in my Collected Stories, for those playing along at home).  Rick is far more complicated than I expected him to be, and Tsung Li still watches too many movies.  

I'm not crazy, honestly.  It just seems that way sometimes.