It’s a good sign when this happens in some ways. It tells me that I have successfully created a world with enough layers to sustain a reader’s attention. But it’s not such a good sign when it comes to my real life, which suffers during this period from what some people have charitably called my “absent-minded professor syndrome” and others have called just plain old half-assedness. I plead guilty to both. But it is a condition impossible to fight. Whenever I am not concentrating on another task, it seems as if the characters I have created clamor for my attention and send me off on mini-daydreams in which I contemplate whether I have given their characters enough shading in the present draft or whether I am taking them in the right direction in the pages to come.

They can be quite insistent at times, which pulls my brain away from daily matters, and so I have found myself doing all of the following during this period of time:

• Forgetting to pick up the mail for 10 straight days… which also tells you how exciting my mail usually is.
• Forgetting about parties and birthdays (but somehow never forgetting about eating, drat it all).
• Not checking my personal voice mail for two weeks and counting. Apologies to you all, especially that company in Raleigh that wants to sell me a home security network for mere pennies a day.
• Getting in the car and heading in the wrong direction for a good 10 miles before I realized what I was doing.   But, hey, Efland is a lovely little town and I worked out a new plot point on the way home!
• Wearing my shirt inside out, usually until around lunch time when someone points it out with a puzzled look on their face.
• Wearing two different shoes, which in my defense were both black and remarkably similar in design. Sort of.
• Standing in front of the bathroom door with my remote car opener, clicking furiously while wondering why the hell the bathroom door won’t open. Words fail me at this one.
• Reading an e-mail on my Blackberry and then promptly forgetting I ever received it in the first place. But, face it — you do that, too, and you don’t even have a good excuse for it.
• Addressing my daughter by one of my character’s names, a practice that can be somewhat confusing to her when I demand to know why she’s not answering to “Rodrigo” or “Lamont.”

The older I get, the earlier I seem to enter The Twilight  Zone. This time, I have a good seven weeks left before my book is due and, honestly, my characters formed their Occupy Katy protest starting a good month ago. I can only hope that once the book is turned in, they will give me a rest — and the rest of my brain back. All of which leads me to an interesting idea for a Twilight  Zone style short story involving a writer whose characters won’t let her…  ah, well, never mind. The cycle will surely repeat itself again and again so I may as well make the most of it. It’s a good thing we Mungers have very big heads. There’s a lot of characters living in mine.

Today is my birthday. Not to put too fine a point on it, I am officially older than dirt. But I am also undeniably happy to be here and feel extremely lucky at the year behind me, a year which unfolded in unexpected ways and ended on a far happier note then it began. I woke up today feeling lucky and grateful for what I have.

I also woke up thinking of my friend Rick. I think of him on my birthday every year because of the great gift he gave to me, without even realizing it. Here’s how: Rick’s birthday is soon after my own. Conscious of what it is like to have a birthday near the holidays, I always tried to reach out to him and press him to celebrate in some way. But a few years ago, he explained to me that he liked to spend his birthday quietly and use it as a day of contemplation, as a time to look at his life and make conscious choices to do things differently if it was not as he hoped.

The idea of spending your birthday in such a manner was a revelation. It seemed the perfect way to celebrate for someone like me, who is often caught in the middle of a tug of war between my own yin and yang. You see, I grew up in a crowded, noisy house that believed deeply in conversation and connections and crowded, noisy parties. As a result, I am definitely an extrovert. I like being around people (so long as I can retreat for periods of being alone to recharge). On the other hand, as a writer, contemplation is something I need, but often fight, as I was raised to define my emotions mostly by reacting to others. And I am also a planner. Like my mother, I love to make lists: things to do, tasks to remember, thoughts that could lead to books to come. During my rare dark times, I will turn to my journal and write myself out of unhappiness. I believe in my ability to put my life in perspective, to order my priorities and to jump into the unknown, if need be. Certainly this past year, and all the changes it brought to my life, proves to me that it can be done. But to be truthful, in the past, I only stopped to look at my life when things were going badly. I took it for granted otherwise. My friend Rick’s comment changed that. His belief in using his birthday to look at his life, to give it 24 hours of introspection, seemed to me a wonderful way to honor life in all of its glory and capriciousness. Ever since he made that remark a few years ago, I have found myself happily and firmly in the camp of those few, those happy few, who see birthdays as a gift of solitude and unbridled self-absorption.

Today, I intend to unearth my beloved mahogany writing desk, which is currently hidden by stacks of moving boxes, find a chair and sit down with my open journal in front of me and a fountain pen close to hand. I intend to look ahead. I am now past the halfway point of my life and I am determined to make the most of what is left. I am not certain what will come out of this introspective journey, but today it is mine to make.

It is a familiar process to me: outlining a character, its motivations and the actions I want them to take. Of course, when I am writing a book, I get to decide the outcome. I am the arbitrator of success or failure. When it comes to my own life, though, god knows what will happen. But I like the illusion of control and I like the sensation of my pen scratching over the pages of my journal so I am going to do it anyway. And this year, because I am inching toward being a little old lady who — and I say this to you, Mary Lee — intends to sit at the end of bars well into my 90s, sipping cocktails, I may even have a glass of Firefly over ice at my side. This is, to me, a grand celebration. I want to get to know who I am at this point of time and space since, trust me, I am a different person than I was a year ago. Mazel tov to us all!

My Dad, top row at right, at Harvard on a Neiman Fellowship in 1955, before the responsibility of caring for six children derailed his exceptionally promising journalism career. Rather than working late at the office and climbing the career ladder, he would come home to cook dinner for us.

Is there any obsession greater than death? No matter how hard we try to hide it, isn’t the popularity of crime fiction an indication that we humans remain, as we have for thousands of years, obsessed with the idea of no longer being here?  We are driven to wonder…. Where do we go? Where do our loved ones go? Do we linger, somehow, in this world? And if it is true that readers of crime fiction are, perhaps, more obsessed with death than most people — what does that say about the writers of crime fiction? Surely, we are the most fascinated by death of all? We spend our days thinking and writing about nothing else.

But the truth is that death is benign when you are writing about it. All those words, the plot, the puzzles, the mysteries surrounding it are artificial buffers that protect both the writer and the reader from truly experiencing the ultimate power of death. These buffers allow us to dance around it, poke at it and flirt with its finality without actually feeling the incredible pain it can bring into our hearts. Reading and writing crime fiction is a talisman of sorts — maybe if we steep in it enough as entertainment, it will pass by our door in real life?   This is impossible, of course, and when you feel an all-too-real threat of death that hits close to home, it looks and feels very different.

I have been lucky in my life. Even at my age, I have experienced relatively few losses. Yes, I have lost a friend who died far too young. I have even lost a sister, which was like losing a part of myself. She had always been there in my life and then she was gone forever. But her conduct in the face of impending death was one of such bravery and fierceness that her death was less a passing and more of a battle that left me filled with awe at her spirit. I have lost a parent as well, when my mother passed away almost five years ago. But she had suffered from Alzheimer’s for nearly a decade and when her body finally gave up its burden, we had long since come to terms with having lost her.

Now, though, death has become so much more than an abstract. My father, frail in health at age 86, survived a night two years ago that no one, most especially the doctors, thought he would make it through. Four times that night the doctors came to us to confirm that we had a “Do Not Resuscitate Order” on him and four times we confirmed it. He did survive that night, though, fueling my belief that, somehow, my family had cut a deal with death to pass us by. Since then, my father has been living with his heart working at 25% capacity, no small feat for a man who towers at over six feet tall. As it turns out, as we had always suspected, he really does have the heart of a lion. It has been steadily beating over the past two years and this tenderhearted, uncharacteristically sweet man has been with us for far longer than we expected. His life has become more limited, of course. He is confined largely to his bed at his nursing home. But in that time, it is as if his essential nature has distilled and burned even brighter, endearing him to staff even as it has made it more inconceivable to his children that we might lose him one day. This is no ordinary father, mind you. He did the heavy lifting when we were children, taking care of us in addition to working full time. When you have six children, this is an accomplishment that borders on the heroic.

A few days ago, the bones in one of his legs — brittle and weak from disuse — broke for unknown reasons. Yesterday, he underwent surgery to have a titanium rod put into his leg, a procedure necessary if only to stop the excruciating pain his broken bones caused him. It was high-risk surgery because of his heart problems, but once again he survived his brush with death with flying colors. He has amazing fortitude. But no one in our family has the luxury any longer of pretending that death is going to pass by our door forever. As a reminder, while I was visiting him in the hospital yesterday and the nurse was checking his respiration, he simply stopped breathing. He became completely inert and his chest stopped in mid-breath. Five seconds ticked by, then ten as the nurse and I waited for him to begin again. Thirty seconds passed before the nurse thumped his chest and shook his shoulder, startling him into breathing once again. But it was a reminder that not even a larger-than-life man is immune. Those who love him are all too acutely aware that every health crisis he endures, and every day that passes, is a gift that will not last much longer. For now, we are grateful that he is still with us but we are also all too aware that the inevitable day draws near.

For someone who writes about death from the comfortable distance of fictional characters and with the ability to stage the emotions surrounding each death, the inevitability of real death coming to someone I love so dearly is truly a game changer. It is forcing me to reevaluate every word I write in my book-in-progress, and it has surely caused me to care more about the reality behind my fictional insistence that, when we die, part of us remains with those we love. It has become harder to write my current Dead Detective book knowing that the central theme of it is no longer an abstract. You see, I am now attempting to convince myself that my unwavering belief that the dead stay with us will be rewarded. But, in the end, I think it will be good for this book. If we crime writers are to serve our readers well, death must be more than a plot point. It must be more than an abstract. We must feel it in our hearts. Having less of a buffer between me and death will surely make my book better — and I know that honoring my commitment to writing the best book I possibly can will make my writer father proud, wherever he is, when the book comes out a year from now.

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”

I came across this quote from Mark Twain this week and loved it. Being a writer has one big advantage  over other occupations: it is one of the few jobs where your age is largely immaterial. But even better than that, as the books pass by, you start to acquire an awesomely-tuned ability to cut the hell out of your prose. The way I write has changed so much since my first book. I have now developed a system where I have a detailed outline to guide me, but then I cut loose and write fast and furiously in wherever direction it takes me, knowing that I will be waiting with my editing knife in hand at the other end.

God bless computers and word processing. You can turn the messiest, most meandering manuscripts into a fast-paced, tight story by the time you’re done and no one will ever know your book once looked like something you dredged off the ocean bottom and pulled, dripping and covered with seaweed and slime, to the surface.  The best part of this approach? It’s fun. You get to go off on side adventures with your characters and wander through their world without worry, knowing that, in the end, your travels will lead you to those essential passages that need to stay in.

My system is pretty straightforward. I write when and where I can, given my schedule, but I always aim to have a complete draft ready at least a month before my manuscript is due and, preferably, two months before. I then scrub all prior knowledge of the book from my head and start at the beginning, reading it with draconian standards of pacing and slashing out whole gobs of words at a time. My word count feature helps a lot in that regard. I become the Queen of Hearts, shouting, “Off with its head!” on every page. At first, I was sure this approach would create holes in my narrative or cause sections to stick out like amputated stubs. But I quickly learned, thanks to  second, third and even fourth read-throughs, that this is not the case. It is possible to polish a manuscript with the same loving care you would bring to polishing a rock and, hopefully, in the end, come up with a finished product that is distilled, vibrant and full of color.

Now, I am not so sure.

As I continue to write about good vs. evil, and the different forms these forces can take, I wonder about these minor characters of mine. Most of them emerge from obscurity because they are serving as some sort of metaphor or archetypal character in that fundamental battle of good vs. evil. They are the simple man speaking out for the truth or the battle-worn woman who only wants to return to hearth and family. And so far, these characters with minds of their own have mostly been on the side of the forces of good. But I find myself wondering what will happen the day that a character emerges who is pure evil hiding under a façade of likability. He could undermine my whole book and then where would I be? I be left high and dry with a useless outline and a bunch of once-pivotal characters relegated to second-rate.

On the other hand, the propensity of side characters to take over has served me well in the past — Casey Jones was actually a minor character in the third book of my first series, when I was still writing as Gallagher Gray. She appeared as a detective in Death of a Dream Maker, my favorite of the Hubbert & Lil mysteries. Casey ended up being so important and distinctive that I spun her off into her own series. Six books later, she is still going strong. So perhaps it is better after all to let these characters, the ones who are fighting so valiantly to live fuller lives, to muscle their way into the plot and be who they want to be after all?

If you enjoy short stories centered around crime, check out Dead of Winter, an anthology of mystery and crime short stories by established authors belonging to the Thalia Press Authors Co-Op (TPAC). My writing partner, Lisa McClendon, and I edited this collection of stories by such talented writers as Taffy Cannon, Kate Flora, Gary Phillips, J.D. Rhoades, Sarah Shaber, Bren Witchger and, of course, Lise and myself. You get 8 great stories in e-book format for $4.99. Buy Dead of Winter in Kindle format here, purchased it in Nook format here or visit smashwords for other e-book formats. For more on this anthology and other TPAC authors, visit our blog.