Killing A Character and then it comes back

This is the memory of an event that happened while I was writing my ninth novel, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy. This isn't a story about the novel, but something that happened while I was writing it.

One day, when I had finished a long session of writing, I was in one of those head spaces where the rest of the world didn't exist, and all I could think about was the story that was in front of me. It was a somewhat critical point of the novel, too, because one of my important characters, named Tina, was killed as a progression of the story. It was a difficult choice for me, because this was one of those secondary characters I really liked, and my original thought was she was going to make all the way through the novel. But at one point she HAD to die, because it was one of those turning point moments where nothing else made sense. So, after agonizing about how I might save her at the last moment, I finally killed her off.

I was really tired as I had been writing all day, and I was trying to finish up the follow up to that particular scene, when there was a ring of the doorbell in my apartment. I worked on the second floor, so I climbed down the stairs, wearily, not really thinking about what I was doing, but because I lived in Daly City, and you didn't just open your door to ANYONE, I asked "Who is it?" to the person on the other side of the door.

She said: "Tina."

My jaw dropped, my body started perspiring almost immediately. I mean, I'd been thinking of nothing but Tina this whole time, and there was this person at my door with the same name. Coincidence, obviously. Had to be. So I said, "Um, what do you want?"

"I used to live here," she replied through the door. "Can I come in?"

I about freaked out right then and there. I mean, this didn't make any sense, but I was thinking it was her. She came back. She didn't want to be dead, and now she was here. I kept thinking, okay, Stephen King writes this kind of stuff, but this sort of thing doesn't really happen. I mean, does it?

So I tried to look through the spy aperature to see if she looked like I had imagined "Tina" would look, but I couldn't see anything. It was like she wasn't there.

"Um, I'm not opening the door until I can see you through the peephole."

I stared through it again and then this little, tiny woman appeared before me. She had to back up a bit because she was a bit too short to see if she was standing in front of the door.

It wasn't Tina, or at least the Tina I knew. So I opened the door.

It was a friendly Hispanic woman who said that she used to live in my same apartment and was wondering if any mail had come for her as she took a long time to forward her address. I then remembered there was some, but we had given it all back to the postman the next day each time we received it.

So, she thanked me and left.

It dawned on me then that it was from her letters where I actually got the name Tina for that character. I had seen her mail come every day for a few weeks, and the name just stuck with me.

But that was what happened when I killed my first major character. She came back. And she wanted her mail.

Stumble It!