Remember that time when I used to blog about stuff in my life, like important stuff, thoughts and hopes and dreams and cures for cancer and solutions to the health care crisis and posts that brought families together and made you laugh and cry?
Yeah, me neither.
However, I have noticed that I've used this space to promote what I'm working on (Woke Up Dead, Valemont), my dog (she is cute when she eats ice cream), the GAP (Miz Brat, your gift certificate is in the mail, I swear), the show I host with my husband every Saturday night (except for this Saturday night, we'll be seeing my nemesis Paul F. Tompkins and friends at the Largo.)
I haven't written about anything going on in my life because I haven't been living my life right now.
As a writer, you breathe life into your characters on the page. While you're supposed to know what their favorite color is and how they feel about their father and what they've got in their pockets, your characters live and die on the page. (And eventually, on the screen if you're doing that sort of thing.)
But when you're working on a project that covers multiple platforms - call it outreach, call it viral marketing, call it transmedia - your characters are always living and breathing. On Facebook. On Twitter. They react to events. They converse with their friends. They pick fights. Sure, they promote your project but they promote it simply by existing. By being themselves. Unique voices. Unique perspectives.
It's a pretty exciting time, seeing how people react to these beings out there - part pixel, part actor. The audience can choose to accept them as real and participate, or watch them as a separate storyline, or ignore them completely.
Just like they'd do with living, breathing human beings.
Except that these characters need someone to breathe life into them.
And currently I'm performing a lot of CPR. ;)
