One of the most difficult writing assignments I've had was creating the still unpublished book The Blue House on Sterling.  I haven't worked on that book for a year now, but it's starting to nag me.  I wake up at night thinking about it, and one character from the book haunts me.  Being hauted by a character you brought to life is hard enough, but I made it worse on myself by creating a guy who's damn hard to ignore.  His name is Oscar Reynolds, and he's a central character in that particular novel.  He may be the toughest guy I ever created, and he only lived for one year.   Yeah, just one year.

The book is actually about an unusaul man who forgot who he was, lost his identify for a year, and in fact became a new character called Oscar Reynolds.  It's a story involving a disorder called dissociative fugue, a condition where the person in question just walks away from their life.  In researching the disorder, I found cases of people who disappeared, only to surface with a completely new identity many miles away.  No one knows for sure exactly why they forget their former identity, who they really are, but it seems that stress is partly the cause.  I person can become miserable enough with their existence that they just push it aside and become someone else.  Sometimes they snap out of it after a few weeks or months and go back home, but sometimes they must be hunted down and treated for the disorder.  When they regain their memory of who they previously were, they never remember their identity while in the fugue state.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I've wanted to change identities from time to time.  I've been so miserable with the person I am that I would gladly have given up any memory of my identity to have something different.  But I worked through those difficult times without doing that . . . lived the life I'd always had, and ended up writing about a man who lost his real identity for awhile.

A strange thing happened in the course of that novel.  I became very fond of Oscar Reynolds, the fugue state character, and we made friends in a most unusual way.  He never existed, not really, but what I brought to life in that novel is now still very much alive in my head.  Oscar, you see, was a make it happen kind of guy, a fellow who could step up to the plate and get a hit when you needed it.  He knew how to handle hard times because that's all he ever knew.  Oscar Reynolds, you see, was essentially a street person, a drifter.  The man he replaced for a year was a college professor, a smart man who had difficulty in dealing with a particular crisis in his life.  What he couldn't handle, Oscar took care of . . . and then he went away.

I finished that novel still undecided about some things, and maybe that's why I can't bring myself to finish it . . . to do the polish work, the last bits of research to make sure my facts are right, and the rewriting so it can go to the publisher.  But Oscar comes around at night, stands in the shadows and looks at me through eyes only someone who's seen then can possibly imagine.  And I wake up talking to myself.  "You must finish it, you lazy sonofabitch.  You've got to finish it."  I'm just saying the words Oscar's eyes say . . . and I know that he's not going to go away.  I know that because I made him that way.

The Blue House on Sterling is a story of recovery, and not just from a devastating stroke that nearly killed my character.  It digs into the deepest, darkest corners of our psyche, takes a close look at some life changing philosophies.  The book has many voices, but the one that seems to have left the most echoes is Oscar's - that common sense approach to meeting madness straight on and dealing with it.  Corpus Christi is the setting for this story, for the most part.  I know that city well now, and I can take you to the exact location where I met Oscar. 

I pulled my car into an abandoned park in a bad part of town.  The place even had the smell of atrophy about it, but people still lived there - poor people, people who had no way out.  Not far away from where I parked, I could see an old graveyard, with tombstones broken or leaning to one side.  No one had obviously been buried there for many years . . . at least, not officially.  And then two men started walking toward me, just seemed to come from nowhere.  One was a tall white man with grey hair, long and pulled back under a baseball cap.  The other man was Latino, shorter and hefty.  Both men had a hard look about them.  I cranked my car and pulled slowly away, and they stopped and watched me drive off.  That's when I started thinking about Oscar, and within a few hours, he was born.

That book is by far the best thing I've ever written.  Keep pushing Oscar, I need to finish it.  Keep pushing because readers will love you, if . . . . if . . . . I can ever give you a chance to make it to the pages of a real book, not just the hard drive of a computer.  Keep pushing, buddy.

Cletus, 2/18/08