It is an odd feeling to flip through the pages of my published novel. Naturally, I am thrilled that the book is out, living a life of its own, conveying issues that I'm passionate about to others. At the same time, I'm reluctant to leave the lives of my book heroes behind. Once imprinted onto the pages of the novel, my book heroes' lives are beyond my reach: I can no longer reshape them, for better or for worse.

I do not wish to equate the presence of my characters with the presence of real people in my life, for this would be an over-exaggeration. Nevertheless, my characters did inhabit my thoughts for a while, sometimes making me forget to look at the traffic light before crossing the street. Their infiltration of my thoughts made it easy to step into their shoes and understand their actions. I felt empathy for them, a trait without which I would not have been able to peer into and describe their inner lives.

Now that the book heroes no longer occupy my mind on the everyday basis, I have the freedom to trace the process of how they actually came about. None of them simply descended from the sky, none of them appeared at the eureka moment. Instead, they were conjured up by a combination of my own experiences as well as the stories of others, written down in articles, personal journals, and novels, or retold to me. In the blogs that follow, I will tell you about them, so please, come back soon!