I just read a nice humorous dialogue between author Robert Burton Robinson, mystery writer, and one of his characters.
It made me laugh out loud and it’s so true that fictional characters become real to an author.
Over the years of writing free online fiction, my online fictional characters have become real for me too.
One character called Alice is nudging at my conciousness and niggling for me to record further exploits in her ordinary turned extraordinary suburban life.
It doesn’t fit in with what I am currently doing - but she keeps on nagging me.
Maybe I should just give in and get on with it.
Or do I need to seek medical help?
Bye for now
Rob
(Rob Hopcott - online author - ‘I’m sane! It’s just all my characters that are mad!’)
I wonder if one could detect whether a woman or a man wrote a piece which otherwise gave no indication of the author’s sex?
Perhaps we might imagine a ‘flaming romance’ written from a female point of view might suggest a female writer. But could we be wrong?
If male and female readers bring different mindsets to a piece of writing, perhaps what is written might be interpreted entirely differently, even as if it was a different piece of writing, because of the mindset of the person reading it?
What do you think?
The similarity between a message in a bottle and a blog post has been fascinating me for a while now. It’s just yearning for a short fictional story and one has been lapping at the shores of my imagination for some time.
Problem is that I can’t identify the twist to give it a bit of umph at the end.
Maybe one day inspiration will strike 
Messages in bottles are characterised by cries for help for any person to answer. It’s a lovely idea but, on the Internet, we are one click away from the nastiest people in the world as well as the nicest. I wonder what it would be like to be contacted by people from the darker side?
One more thought. I’ve recently been thinking about longevity and writing. Perhaps the Internet will make us all as immortal as Shakespeare and our bottles will bob about in people’s minds for ever.
Rob
(Rob Hopcott - online author, castaway in a sea of Internet dreams)
