Most of the time when I write, I don't feel that I'm channelling a character in the truest sense of the notion. I know what they're likely to do, to think, how they're likely to react, and so on. But it's still me, Alex, picking over the best way to structure the sentences, even as a sense of the character guides what I do.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like Alex is left to one side.

I had this with the 1,500 or so words of viewpoint that the Bone Queen has in the current novel-in-progress. (Yes, it's named after her, but she's not a viewpoint character. She's the catalyst.) Her words ran out of me onto post-it notes one afternoon at work, then on the train home; I couldn't stop until they were done.

And there's another character who's been in my head for some months now, ever since I had this dream about a conquering emperor and a rebellion -- and the thing that stuck in my head was the pinch of emotion felt by the young man at this one point. I couldn't shake it when I woke up, and I still can't. Normally I get zero inspiration from dreams -- they're too muddled, too vague, no arc or character depth -- but this one character has stuck and I may soon be ready to write a short story for him, I may be approaching good enough not to write something I'll find terrible, not felt I've done him a complete injustice.

I managed, just before dinner today, to write down a few lines in my notebook, to capture what I felt in the dream. I'll see where I can go from there.

I'm kneeling on the side of a dusty road, head pressed to the small, beige stones. Hiding my face. The Emperor's assemblage of cars comes past and of course he does not see the dusty, scrawny teenager in the stirred-up dust and identify him as his enemy's son.
I am surprised -- every hour today, this moment of not understanding -- that I have reached this birthday.

My father at the table, thirty-seven years old, saying, "My father went at eighteen, my brother at nineteen, my uncle at twenty-one, my other uncle at nineteen. We are not a family well suited to life."

Even though this is not my story, not my story at all, writing just this little bit of it feels like laying a small part of myself bare. I can't figure why. If I write the whole story, I wonder if this will be the first one that makes me truly upset when it's rejected.