Houston, we have a problem.

So, as you may or may not know, I'm a self-proclaimed writer. I like to post article style non-fiction things, as proven by this blog, but my real passion is fiction. Science fiction and fantasy mostly, but there are many stories dancing around in my head.

And with these stories come characters. Dancing around in my head. Or sometimes not.

See, there's this one character. Her name is Alice Cheshire Morgan, and she's more than a little fucked up. She's also very desperate and impatient for me to tell her story. So desperate, in fact, that she managed to weasel her way into my almost-finished second novel, Celestial Starshower. Didn't mean for her to be there, but she managed to enter the Vivid universe and, well, I didn't have the heart to drag her back out of it. It was a fit, of sorts.

Anyway, I was busily making my way through the novel John Dies at the End (by the amazing David Wong), given to me for Christmas by a friend of mine. The book is pants-shittingly creepy and hilarious all at the same time. Seriously, I'm going to be jumpy for weeks. To say the book was absorbing (I read it in two sittings over a 24 hour period) is an understatement.

Alice managed to slip out on me before I was finished the book. When I turned the last page, I knew something was missing. I rifled through my memory warehouse (thank you, Stephen King) and realized the side door was wide open, smashing against the outer wall in the fierce wind.

Normally when a character gets super antsy, they escape into the written word, but I've been squashing Alice down for at least a decade. For whatever reason, I've never had the pristine clarity of inspiration to be able to write her story. And in that time, she's gone a little whacked. This isn't the first time she's done this, either. The last time it took me two months to find her, because she'd convinced herself that she was an eight year old Korean boy trapped in a bomb shelter in Texas. One of my sources found her posting excessively on a dead-for-years message board in broken english, trying to reach out to someone who could help her.

Naturally you can see why it will be difficult. Every time she slips out she takes on a different identity and hides in the internet. This time I might just let her go. I haven't decided yet. Maybe after enough trips throughout her own personalities I'll have a proper story to tell.

In any case, I'm proposing someone else look for her this time. Not sure if she'll be a he, what her name will be, where she is, or what she's saying, if she's saying anything at all. So I can't really give you any clues. If you come across her, let me know. Or just talk to her. Maybe she can tell her own story.