I’m sure every author feels that they have a special connection to their characters. The process that gives birth to the people that populate a book tends to foster that connection. Not only do those characters go through the many trials by fire that make it into the final draft, but they’re also forced to plunge through all of the raging infernos and hop over all of the tiny matchsticks that the author discards on their way to telling “the story.” A single character may have been shot to death, stabbed to death, frozen to death and topped by a maraschino cherry, divorced by three different husbands with three different names and personalities all in the course of providing a tragedy worth telling. In the course of this torture, one can really see what the people subjected to it are made of, and in some ways, they become more real than real.