You know you’ve got a good thing when bad things happen.

Emotion and feeling spiral, sprawl, taking on an unlife of their own.

Characters, long thought of as being “distant”, “removed” or well, “just characters” enter your every day lives.

When they interfere, intervene, and do things seemingly impossible – that’s when you take notice, or at least you should.

I should have know something was “off” when I went to update my website. It looked a little different one day… sentences consisting of 13 words, mostly.

Colors meant to pair words, grouping them into thoughts. Each sentence represented, well, something unspeakable. Someone, or something was trying to take my thoughts. Each sentence somehow, whether blatantly or abstractly, referred to a novel, to a category or genre.

And, they stretched together, forming their own sentences.

I left it alone. I bothered it not, in contrast to the way it actually disturbed me.

Three days later, well, things changed again. A small sentence, out of place, took control. It simply said: Amalie is here. It was a simple thing, really. It wasn’t underlined, so it didn’t stand out. It wasn’t a button. It did, however, have a lovely coral color to it, and, with adequate spacing around those words, it did, actually, stand out.

I hovered my mouse, and it gave me an option to click. I did not. I closed my page and walked away.

No updates needed by me, none were required, so I read through my notes. Book four – untitled as of present, was coming along nicely, and it was prepared to hand off my First Responder series to the edge of a cliff. From that cliff, it was free to branch down a steep hill, up a treacherous mountain, or off to the side, to a prequel.. Who knows, I thought, we’ll see.

Stopping there, and now a few days after feeling somewhat violated, I loaded my home page peggylanders.com. There it was. Still there. Still beckoning, as I hovered, their coral hue teasing me, mocking me; begging me.

I did not.

Scrolling down, I saw the inevitable. It appears others had joined her in chaos. Dr. Stevens was-, and below that sentence, The Creepy Thin Man Might Be. That settled it.

I’ve been hacked…but by my own characters? Absurd. Or so I thought.

Again. I did not.

Will you?

There are moments when a page becomes more than a page.

Not because it changes.

Because it knows exactly how to wait.

This one didn’t need noise. It didn’t need movement. It only needed presence, repetition, and the possibility that what I made had finally decided to step closer.

The disturbing part was never that the words appeared.

The disturbing part was how easy it became to believe they belonged there.

James H. Summers