My MC and I.

We share a thing. It's not the crazy thing that some authors do where they become their main characters, because that is definitely not me. I have an author friend who does that sometimes. I'll see him and he will be completely different in personality because he's "test driving" one of his characters. I find that weird.

But my MC and I have a very special thing. I think mostly because she's such a long-developed character who has been a part of two novels and around six or seven short stories I have written, and is a favorite among many readers which has allowed me to continue working with her.

I think more often than not, the link between an author and their MC walks the line of some sub-disorder of schizophrenia. It's almost unhealthy how much some of us get involved. And I experienced that excessively today. And it made me think about it in depth for the first time in years.

I was writing from the point of view of my MC's best friend. Almost a sidekick-esque sort of character, a secondary protagonist if you will. This character is a large part of many of the stories, as her POV tends to fill in for whatever my MC can't, or whatever is not best seen from my MC'S POV. So, I was writing a particularly hard chapter in which the MC goes through an unexpected tragedy, of which her friend is a disconnected witness. And the anguish the two go through separately is quite extreme, but unfortunately they both are feeling different sorts of pain for slightly different reasons, resulting from this one event. One because it happened to her and one because they couldn't prevent it and then altogether because the event signifies the "impending defeat" of their cause.

I had to stop writing. I damn near needed to run for a paper bag for how light-headed I was feeling from the emotional onslaught. I ended up throwing my ball again for some time to calm down and downing about half an ocean's worth of water. Not only did I feel exhausted from my race training, but it emotionally drained me and put me off for the whole day.

And it's just sparked a sort of thinking about how writers, especially writers of my genre of choice, never seem to fully abandon the childhood imaginary friends. It's not like people with schizophrenia or split-personality disorder. We all realize they aren't real, but at the same time, they are almost as real as half the people in our world, and MORE real than the other half.

It's an odd sort of concept if you think about it. It's not really crazy, it's not grown up at all, yet readers just love the characters, no matter the means for their creation.

Interesting.