Where is Ralphie Boy?

Some of you are probably wondering where that bedraggled old guy in the worn out bathrobe with a stogie hanging out of his mouth went from my blog. For better or worse, I deleted him. (I did try to bring him back but, evidently, in my playing with the design of this blog, I totally deleted any ability to put a photo on my page. So, unless I can figure a way out of the mess I've created -- or someone else can help me do so -- his picture is gone, unfortunately, for good ... at least from these pages.)

Here's the reason why: Ralphie Boy freaked out a few people, and got some folks thinking I'd totally fallen off the evangelical bandwagon. One of them even stopped talking to me. (Phew! I knew this blog would get me in hot water with some people, but I never thought they'd stop talking to me in real life. Golly!)

Probably calling him my muse is what got me in so much trouble. You see, in some quarters, muses carry some pretty heavy demonic overtones. I guess I kinda knew that. In fact, yeah, I did. But I thought I'd take the risk anyway, figuring people would understand, from the way I wrote about Ralphie Boy, that he wasn't a muse in that sense of the term. He's simply a major character in a novel I'm working on right now, my first, as a matter of fact. The only sense in which he's a "muse" is that he's the character through which my story is being told. It's his story and, as other writers of novels will attest, he tells me through a sort of interview process who he is and what he wants to say.

In essence, Ralphie Boy is a guy who has sort of been birthed, if you will, from the many interactions I had with friends in the homeless community, people whose lives have touched mine in such a powerful way that I have to write about their world. And I'm looking forward to doing so, through Ralphie Boy's eyes.

Now Ralphie Boy isn't the only character I'll likely write about. There will be others, too. Probably many of them. As many, perhaps, as there are characters on the streets of this world. I hope you'll want to listen to what they have to say. More than that, I hope you'll learn to love them as I have done.

My thanks to all the Ralphie Boys (and Ralphie Girls, for that matter) who have caused me to wrestle with the deep issues of life and become more "real" in the process. It's to you my novels are dedicated and from you that they spring.