If you are a writer, do you ever have totally unplanned for characters pop up and highjack your story?  If so, do you mind?

I recently restarted a 19th century novel that I begun over 15 years ago.  I had stopped to write a short story about Lum, an intersexed person living in the 1930’s, who went from relative to relative helping out, but without her own home.  During the time of writing the story, one day while I was showering, this other character appeared–Smiley, an African American man who sold antiques.  Well, Lum goes out for a ride and stops at Smiley’s house.  Turns out that stop added an interesting facet to Lum’s life.  But that’s not all–Smiley soon demanded that his own story be told, so I quit working on the 19th century novel and said, well, maybe this is a novella about Smiley.  It grew and then another character arrived at Smiley’s house, not the person I had planned to stop there.  Well, Harper, the new character gets Smiley involved in a scheme that has repercussions for the rest of the book which is now a novel.  Eventually I wove Lum into the Smiley novel and it became both of their stories.

Back to the 19th century novel–I knew a lot of what would happen.  Some of the plot is based on family history, and I had worked out a lot of the story in my head, but had written very little.  So now that Lum and Smiley are looking for a publisher, which is harder than finding valuable antiques in the back roads of Virginia, I’m back to the Civil War era.  I have all these characters, whites and African Americans, who have been residing in various parts of my brain over the year, then I go on a writing retreat for a week, and this young slave girl appears and is the unwitting device that advances the plot in an unexpected way.  Wow, I didn’t know THAT was going to happen!

Did I say pesky?  I mean, I love all those characters, especially the ones who lead me into unanticipated terrains.