Selkie Goes to Paris!

Selkie’s work as a seminar presenter takes her around the world, where she’s a magnet for mysteries and secrets.  In Book Two she’s following a hunch by going to France and creating the next mystery as I write.  It’s hard to explain why I’m not in control of what she does, but John Fowles says it well in The French Lieutenants’s Woman.  In the middle of the book, Fowles abandons the story to speak to the reader because his main character Charles has suddenly taken a course of action that disobeys Fowles’ wishes.  He tells the reader: “It’s only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they start to live.”  Whenever I force an action on Selkie it backfires on me somehow in the next chapter, so I’ve learned to get out of her way — and keep writing.