It’s tempting to see a woman as a poem. Men too, but I happen to be thinking about my main character, Carly Rouhl in the Requiem novels. She’s a poem in the sense that she was created with imagined characteristics: appearance, personality, fears and ambitions. She took shape in my mind the way photographs used to develop in solution, faint at first, then sharp and real. I wove details into her image lovingly: her wide mouth inherited from her father, and more to the point, from my own grandfather, her quaint prudishness, her concern for other people. The way she cares for her ailing father and stoically takes on responsibilities on top of her demanding career.

            I pictured a sensible woman. You always need somebody down to earth and rooted in a novel of the supernatural, and Carly is established early as a no-nonsense pragmatist. This sets her at odds with her dream-sodden father, and makes her an ally of the bookish detective who wants to get his paper work done right.

            I made her my idea of beautiful because I’m a guy, but I tempered her beauty by giving her a professionally gorgeous boyfriend who works on television. Evan intimidates her and Carly is self-critical anyway; she isn’t defined by her beauty. She is ‘less beautiful’ the way the moon is less beautiful beside the earth. In fact style is almost thrust upon her; she edits a glossy magazine full of ads about fashion and jewelry. And she gets discounts. 

            As a poet does with his poem, I sculpted her with my favourite words and phrases until she finally opened her eyes and looked back at me. Hello gorgeous. 

            But the fact is, none of us are poems, because poems are like portraits—portraits done by flashes of lightening and shell bursts, but static sketches nonetheless. 

            No, we are rivers, all of us. We flow from the foothills of our youth, carrying memories , habits and the vestiges of the things we loved. We pass the viewer, who peers from the bank, and we flow on to our future. In this rather heavy-handed metaphor, I guess the ocean is the final dissolution—and a return to the endless cycle of evaporation and rain. Who knows? It’s the business of ghost story writers to speculate about all this, and hard-nosed journalist Carly is forced to do that too as events overtake her. 

            All this means that Carly is changing. And that brings us to the business of writing novels in series. Carly is set in turmoil by two main things: she witnessed the creative process first hand, watching her father turn from the boozy, distant typist of her youth, to the beloved national treasure in whose shadow she lives. Then the everyday premises of her world view are wrenched out of alignment by her father’s impossible murder/suicide.

            So now here she is, attempting to follow in her father’s footsteps by writing fiction, but she knows that her father’s genius was the result of his ability to let go of reality and trust in the authenticity of his imaginings. It’s not easy for her. She’s an educated woman who thinks she knows the difference between imagination and reality. So what about these fevered imaginings she’s giving in to? What does she do when the weird logic of her dreams seems to explain the contradictions she faces in real life?

            The answer to that question can be found in the three novels, Requiem for Thursday, Requiem for Noah, and Requiem for Mary Mac. The point, though, is that Carly is changing as the seasons change, and as the river flows onward. That’s what novel series are all about. They give characters like Carly a chance to evolve, to hone their personalities, and find the stable Lagrange points in their relationships.