Since I started writing a year and a half ago, and somehow decided that my first story would become a three-part, 1200-page novel, characters have been sprouting, growing, and taking on life like so many alien pods. My life is truly no longer my own.

The featureless entities shed their membranes and take on dimension as they flow out through my fingers and over the keyboard, then burst onto my screen. But part of them keeps growing inside me, their tentacles wrapping firmly around my consciousness, and oozing out through my senses. Then they become entangled with my emotions.

I would choose to live no other way. Their stories must be told. Telling them is my reward for being their host.

Soon it will be time to let them go into the world on their own, to make room for my imagination to be seeded again, maybe from a different part of the galaxy. But I’m not quite ready for that yet.

How do you deal with your pod people and the sense of becoming an observer in your own head, loving your characters like children who will leave you and maybe never look back? I’d love to know. I think readers get it.

I’m sharing some artwork by Artist Timi Honkanen. I think artists get it, too.

Timi Honkanen 2D artist