Loving A Character Too Much

Sarah McNeal is a multi-published author of several genres including time travel, paranormal, western and historical fiction. She is a retired ER nurse who lives in North Carolina with her four-legged children, Lily, the Golden Retriever and Liberty, the cat. Besides her devotion to writing, she also has a great love of music and plays several instruments including violin, bagpipes, guitar and harmonica. Her books and short stories may be found at Publishing by Rebecca Vickery, Victory Tales Press, Prairie Rose Publications and Painted Pony Books, and Fire Star Press, imprints of Prairie Rose Publications. She welcomes you to her website at

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LOVING A CHARACTER TOO MUCH

Have you ever created a character you just fell in love with—and then you couldn’t get him out of your head even after you finished his story? Well, welcome to my world.

When I wrote Harmonica Joe’s Reluctant Bride, it was not intended to have a sequel, nor was it supposed to be the beginning of a family saga.

 I’ve mentioned before that I couldn’t get Banjo off my mind. He was the street-wise teenager, raised by whores who was not only courageous enough to go up against the villain to save Lola with nothing more than an ice crusher, but he was also inventive and clever. So I gave him his own story in For Love of Banjo. 

You’d think that would be enough and I could let him go, but nope, I couldn’t shake the magic of Banjo. And to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure why.

In my WIP for the Christmas anthology at Prairie Rose Publishing, I decided to tell the story of the widow, Penelope Thoroughgood. Now maybe you don’t know who she is. Banjo mentioned her in his story. He spent the night with her and said she had taught him some important things. Without besmirching Penelope’s good name I had to figure out how I was going to accomplish that feat. I also had a character in my story, Unexpected Blessings, for the summer anthology Lassoing A Bride 

and her name was Lucille Thoroughgood. Now I have plans for Lucille in a future story, but I had to get her age young enough for this future story and how did the widow Thoroughgood end up with a child with the same last name some ten years or so into the future? Oh, the brainstorming that took place.

But I wanted to get back to the original topic which is characters we can’t shake. Banjo is one of those characters for me. He has shown up in every single Wilding story I’ve written. Well, it really got out of hand with Penelope’s story. He is not supposed to be the main character. Yet, he kept showing up in all his magical, handsome glory trying to nudge his way into first place. I had to restart the Christmas story three times before I was able to subdue the irrepressible Banjo Wilding.

Have you ever had that happen to you? What did you do?