Ms Frankenstein regrets

I've tried to move on.  I really have.  I've bought shoes.  I've bought myself jewellery.  I would have my hair cut if the salon were open on my day off, but since it isn't I shall progress through mildly unkempt to becoming prey for yeti hunters until I can get there at the end of the month.  I've even tried a little flirtation with others but all to no avail.

I am still in love with Fergus Palmer.

Now on paper, this is no bad thing.  He is kind.  He is charming.  He is witty.  He is also very tall, somewhat Scottish and has hair of the most spectacular shade of auburn.  He's about my age, he's got a good job, his own flat, his own car.  On paper, he's just what I should be looking for in a man.

That's the snag, those two words: 'on paper'.

For Fergus, my lovely, dearest Fergus is entirely fictional, supposedly confined to the pages of Looking For Buttons, in which he isn't even the heroine's love interest.  Yet here I am, sitting here with the laptop on my knees, sighing in a distinctly piney* fashion for a figment of my imagination.

Surely I'm not the only one who does this?  I've been falling for fictional men for as long as I can remember but when I started to write I never suspected it would happen with one I'd created.  I have the nasty suspicion that part of the trouble I'm having getting going with the next book is that I've yet to get over Fergus sufficiently to produce anyone to take his place.

But isn't this what writers do?  We put together people in a curious hybrid of doll's house and photofit and if we get it right by some elusive alchemy they step right into our heads and let us report on their lives.

I just wish he'd take me out for dinner while I'm doing it.






*piney as in yearning unrequitedly, not piney as in forest-fresh