gloves thrown down

After the first post, at the time the only post, I was challenged to continue. "I challenge you to write your blog for thirty days" she wrote in an email. I said I would if she didn't look right away, or at least pretend not to look for a while. On a dock, a few years ago, a stranger told me something. This stranger was one of those women that looked gay but probably wasn't, your classic high school field hockey jock grown up to a fifty five year old triathlete. She told me that anything you do for a month straight becomes habit. She was talking about exercise, training more specifically. So I know I'm being baited. Baited by a woman who knows how to sling about the chum. A thirty day challenge is really a much bigger thing. But I'm game to see where writing takes me. I'm a creative person, a visual person. I painted in college, I take pictures, the difference here is that writing is concrete and very personal. It's taking a stand, it's words with you behind them. No hiding behind the shield of abstraction.

But I have a character called littlegirlcop. Can I hide behind him? Can I have him do things that I wouldn't, or is having him act as I wouldn't or couldn't just as much me. Can you take shelter in fiction you write? In building my character I'll have to know what he looks like. Physically he'll look like the only cop I know. A guy that swims at lunch the same time I swim. A guy I talk to often but isn't really a friend. He's tall, big, not ripped but not fat, huscular. He looks like he can handle himself, but wouldn't just for sport. Character actor not leading man. He has a mustache, and on his locker he has the sticker for a surf shop and for a gun manufacturer. He got into police work because it was a good job that paid better than life guarding at the city pool. He said that dealing with kids there, some of them in gangs, was good training. He told me this one day in the sauna. He will be the shell of littlegirlcop. If I get past all this meta blogging about blogging crap, and if littlegirlcop starts to walk in fiction in my world, it will be on that frame he hangs.