Writing, by its' very nature, is a solitary, time-consuming process.  Almost always done in a quiet place away from any people or distractions.   A great deal of time is spent developing the personalities of the characters, both while writing and other times such as when driving a car, walking the dog, lying down to sleep, etc.    So much time is spent thinking about them that they become family-like.  Some times, in fact, it becomes difficult to separate my fictional characters from real people!  Sometimes I even wonder if I have crossed a line into becoming one of the fictional characters myself.  For instance,  I became very close to Acadia in "Beware of the Banker" and almost started to cry when I wrote about what her mother did to her on the  day she graduated from high school.   When I was writing in detail about a bank robbery on Route 1 in Falmouth,  I was running through it step by step  in my mind and stopped to pick up some groceries late at night in Falmouth.  I was thinking about what to write about Clyde when he burst into the bank when I turned down an aisle and came face to face with a uniformed Falmouth police officer.  I panicked as my first thought was that the policeman was coming for me!   Busted!   That's an example of just how real the story can become in the writer's mind.   The biggest challenge I had writing the book was ending it.    The story follows the tale of Bonnie and Clyde fairly closely and everyone knows how their story ended so when it came to the end I felt like just saying, OK, you know the rest and write "The End."    So the challenge was ending it true to real events but also keeping the reader in suspense. You'll have to read it to see how I handled it in a way to keep the reader's interest.  

Or, did I end it?