How can anyone write a short blog entry on obsessions, passions, and fixations? That's an impossible task, at least for me. It also risks making me think like a psychologist (which I am) and getting too technical. How are they different? And how about compulsions?

Anyhow, I have to get back to finishing my mystery. It's taking longer than it should, because I keep obsessively checking my word count, so I can enter it on that nifty little word count graph I discovered. I got hooked on it when I did NaNoWriMo in November. I emerged from my first NaNo with the draft of my first novel (and second book) along with this new obsession. Or it it a compulsion? But now I'm hooked on word trackers. I went through withdrawal when NaNo was over, because I wasn't allowed to keep posting more words after the month ended. Then I found another word tracker graph. Thank heaven.

Anyhow...

My first book, Accordion Dreams (a memoir) was all about obsession, compulsion, fixation. And passion. For the accordion. For Cajun-Creole music. I knew what I was writing about.

Fiction, though, is a different thing. It's like a projective test. (Sorry--I'm being a psychologist for a moment!) I think I'm in charge of my characters, my story. But then it takes charge of me. And then the obsessions I hadn't planned on start to creep in, when I least expect it.

Oh, there are Cajun accordions in my mystery. I planned on that. But I didn't count on the old obsessions from childhood to slip in. Or maybe I should call them passions. The passion for mysteries, for one thing, goes back to my childhood. The passion for snakes. My passion for cooking and cookbooks, which I kind of outgrew once I had kids. I'm even tempted to include recipes in this book, but that would make it a cozy mystery, and I don't want that. So I guess I have a little control over my obsessions--at least the old ones.

Then there's my adult passion for exotic, "other-looking" dark men. Like my husband. (Well, back when we met in college, that's how I thought of him. Jewish, dark-haired, and from New York. Very exotic to a Scottish-Slovenian Unitarian from the midwest.) My 8th grade biology teacher. Dark, brooding, Macedonian, and with a PhD. Wow! Going back farther: Jungle Larry Tetzlaff, the host of a wild animal show on Cleveland TV. And then my first love: Zorro.

So why was I shocked, completely shocked, when my main character, an accordion playing psychologist, decided to drop her nice bookseller boyfriend for an exotic dark-haired Latino who plays the bajo sexto? She didn't even ask my permission.