I’ve mentioned before that my life seems to be reflecting my books. After creating my idealized small town in my mystery series, I ended up moving to a town that has a lot in common with the one I created. After writing about a woman stumbling into a hidden village, I moved to a town tucked into a valley.

The trend has continued. I wrote about Elwyn moving into an abandoned cottage with an overgrown abandoned garden. Well, the house I bought (which is somewhat cottage-like) had been abandoned for years before the person I bought it from bought it at auction and restored it. The yard had been very carefully landscaped by the former resident, but it’s been allowed to run wild, so I’m having to gradually dig out all the weeds to find the good plants. I don’t think I wrote nearly enough work to get the garden back under control in the books. In my case, it mostly seems to be flowering plants and trees, not herbs. I haven’t run across any herbs. I have one tree that might be a fruit tree, but I’m not sure, and there are some plants my phone’s photo identification software tells me are raspberries, but I’m really doubtful.

And then there’s the fact that I seem to have moved next door to one of my characters. I’ve been re-reading a book I’ve been working on off and on for years, preparing to do another round of revisions. And then I realized that one of the secondary characters who appears later in the book, a character I created when I still lived in Texas, has the same rather unusual name as my next-door neighbor for the house I just moved into. Then the other evening when I ran into this neighbor and was chatting, I realized that the neighbor actually looks a lot like I imagine this character to look. She even has a similar personality. It’s eerie. I’m going to have to rename the character. The description on its own is common enough that I don’t think anyone would read the book and think I was writing about my neighbor (she’s well-known in town), but with the name, it would make it a bit creepy.

With the town, it’s clear in my writing that this was something I was looking for, even if it was unconscious at the time, and I found what I wanted. I had no idea how crazy the yard was going to be because the person who restored the house had cut everything back, and it was late winter when I looked at the house. The yard didn’t explode until after I moved in. But moving next door to a character I wrote years ago, with the same name, is a little unsettling. Now I’m going to have to try not to think about the character when I see my neighbor. Changing the name should help.