Forget what they tell you. Writing fiction is marrying your children. And vice versa.

And as the troubadour Jackson Browne put it so elegantly, “to love and get away before the walls have arisen, you’ve got to be free.”

But when your idea of a first novel is a five-part epic saga, you’d have to be me.

So I have some, shall we say, special experience in this area.

In the way of most marriages, TABOU and I had been together quite a long time before I really began to see my characters as living breathing beings, living lives on their own terms.

Beginning writers dream of This Magic Moment and wonder when it’s going to happen. Will they be driving through the Bridges of Madison County, when like a thunderbolt their characters descend like Riders on the Storm? And suddenly the novel they’ve been slaving over is Raptured, transported heavenward straight to Simon & Schuster?

That never happened to me. I think it’s because I was a helicopter parent, hovering over my children at the keyboard every night, pregnant with more, then listening to talk radio shows every morning where famous authors described the fiction process like the birthing process.