Writers are both atypical midwives and partial parents to their characters. As atypical midwives, they deliver babies of every age in the form of words. As partial parents, they give a sliver of themselves to each character, selected genes from the author’s repertoire, not their whole genome. When the book is finished – the story concluded – the characters are both immortal and dead simultaneously. The characters are immortal because the book endures in the minds of the readers, and on shelves in stores and homes, and in libraries, and in electronic archives; the characters are dead because they don’t change in any way, they do nothing new and have no progeny. They are like perpetual runners that stay in place and go nowhere, or swimmers that tread water forever. They don’t grow or decay. It’s a rare situation: being alive and dead too. Sherlock Holmes is alive and dead; so is Alice in her Wonderland. They are safe because their fate is sealed between covers. We can revisit them whenever we want without peril to ourselves or to the author. They have made their statements.

It’s a rare situation: being alive and dead too. Sherlock Holmes is alive and dead; so is Alice in her Wonderland. They are safe because their fate is sealed between covers. We can revisit them whenever we want without peril to ourselves or to the author. They have made their statements.

Woody Allen’s classic The Purple Rose of Cairo gave fictional characters an even more complex existence. Tom Baxter, an archeologist, steps out of a movie – a movie within a movie – when he is attracted to Cecilia, an unhappy, battered wife and waitress in the audience who watches the same movie repeatedly. A lot happens. Baxter is a fictional character in the movie – a figment of Allen’s imagination – that falls in love with Cecilia after he takes her back into the movie. But the movie doesn’t work anymore without Baxter playing his role. Then Gil Shepherd, the real actor who plays Tom Baxter, shows up and woos Cecilia out of the movie. She falls in love with him and refuses to go back into the movie with Baxter. Reality – Gil Shepherd – turns out to be devious. Gil is not really in love with Cecilia; he just wanted to get her out of Baxter’s life because she was disrupting the movie and, consequently, Gil Shepherd’s career as an actor. Complicated, but clever. What’s real, what’s fantasy? The movie, of course, is fiction, but plays imaginatively with the nature of fantasy and reality, as if these two sides of humanity intertwine as one.

Enter my novel, Jellyfish Have Eyes. I was both midwife and partial parent to Ricardo Sztein, the protagonist scientist, and to his colleague, Benjamin Wollberg, as well as to other characters in the book. The characters are getting restless.

Ricardo, an old man now, in his eighties, but still alert, told me that he isn’t ready for an immortal death. He said if Tom Baxter could step off the black and white screen into living color, so could he.

“Maybe,” he said, “I’ll become the real Ricardo, the Gil Shepherd equivalent of Tom Baxter.”

He said he regrets that he never met Baxter or Shepherd, then he would have had a more realistic sense of his plans, but he has no intention of knowing only what I, his partial parent, taught him. He wants to learn more and understand his fictional self better. He said that Benjamin told him that he couldn’t do that because the book is finished, that he’s been given more than a life sentence; he’s been saddled with an immortal sentence.

“Oh yeah?” he said to Benjamin. “Bullshit. Just watch.”

Frankly, I’m not quite sure how Ricardo intends to jump out of the novel, and if he did whether any of his book mates would join him, but he seems absolutely determined to do it.

Quiet, he’s telling me something else.

“I’m getting out of this story, you can count on it, and I’m not going to just sit here in your website twiddling my thumbs. I’m going to my Jellyfishhaveeyes.com website for now, and if it works out for me – that I can exist both in the book and outside of it – I may start a website of my own: ricardosztein.com. I’ll be amazing! What do think of that?”

I don’t know what I think of that. He sounds a bit like Donald Trump at the moment. Certainly not like the man I gave birth to. I just have to wait and see. At least I hope he invites me to his website, wherever that is, if he does break loose, and if he does, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

Stay tuned.