A Character in Reality

What would you do if a character in a novel you wrote actually came to life? What if the character learned his whole reality was just a construct created by you, the story’s narrator? In A Character in Reality, Detective Gladstone, a fictional character from the narrator’s Flaming Locket series, gains consciousness and steps out of a novel into reality. He adjusts to the real world with the narrator’s help, picking up insights along the way about what it means to be human. He eventually becomes too real to exist in the narrator’s fiction and is stranded in reality, taking up acting as a profession. He likes this work because he can be fully directed and have pre-written lines to say, just like in fiction. But when he becomes too famous, people catch on that he was originally a character from a novel, and an extremist anti-illegal immigrant group does not want him living in reality. The group believes that characters from a book belong in a book, not in the real world. Gladstone must face down the group’s leader and in so doing fully self-actualize, becoming a much loved American hero in the process.