I love Doc Holliday (He inspired a new book idea)

Really I do. It's something that's quite hard to explain to people.

But since I saw Tombstone (1993 Movie) I was intrigued by him. Or maybe it was the way that Val Kilmer portrayed him. I mean, here was a man that suffered from consumption for years and years, but mastered living every day of his life as if it was it was his last.

He was the one that everyone expected to die in a gun or knife fight with his boots on. Instead, he died in bed, reportedly staring at his bare feet and uttering: "My. This is funny."

I love characters like him. Deeply complicated and somewhat twisted. I love that someone like him really existed.

And... I love him since he got me thinking about my Western. Part of me is sort of upset, but not really. My muse got a sniff of a story and is quite happy to lead me back to the one that got away.

I even figured how I would get both books done. My fantasy novel is priority number one, so that's the one I write on every weekday. The western I'll get to on weekends. If I want to write fantasy instead, that's fine. As long as both keep moving. Incidentally, the western will be computer typed - with backups.

To be honest, leaving a project like the western unfinished has always irked me. When I mentioned it in my first blog, it bothered me even more. Doc just sort of reminded me that there's this little gun-slinger in the making that's waiting to be penned down. There are quite a few changes to the plot, characters and names, but all for the better. 

Since the Fantasy is my one and only first book, that's the one that most of the blog will be about, but I might not be able to resist mentioning the western on occasion.

I've been a little worried about cross-pollinating my characters, making the cast the same and putting them in different stories. I don't think that is likely, though, since the characters are very very far apart. Still, I want to hear some opinions. Have you ever worked on two books at the same time? Under what circumstances? How did it work out? How did you keep your casts of characters unique?