AAAAH! Each of these questions is a whole post - me having characters who exist in the real world, naturally their spiritual lives are complicated! Who should I explore? Doing everybody would be prohibitive.

Let's do it! Cathy's beliefs. 1. Cathy was raised French Roman Catholic, so that affects her beliefs, but she has influence from the arts community (a little bit of the individualist, the iconoclast) and her belief of the esoteric is somewhat magical. Prayer is like probability magic, and her concept of the Madonna is akin to the Fae Queen. Has she had a radical shift? Not really. Now that she's in the US with a circle of not very spiritual friends, she's experiencing a slow fade. 2. It is similar to and different from my own. I'm interested in possibilities, less so certainties, so characters who are exploring are easy and characters who are rigid are challenging. Often I keep the rigidly religious characters on the sidelines to act as foils or plot devices for the more interesting characters who are learning and growing. 3. Nobody ever asks Cathy about her beliefs in a way she can understand. She's better off that way; she has no desire, nor ability, to explain it all. She listens to Maurice as he sorts out his grand conceptions, but she largely can't follow. 4. I think I was already open-minded, but writing for diverse characters with diverse worldviews helps me empathize more quickly with people whose beliefs intersect those of one of my characters. I have kind of a "been there, done that" thing going on. 5. I hope so. It seems likely that they'd try not to.

@Laura Cushing Is biting Monroe's common technique against non-zombies?

@Laura Cushing that's badass omg lol

@Kathryn Holmes even if that were true before, it can't possibly be true now! Everything you do in life from now on is beautiful. God doesn't care about the details. The universe is a very big place. We're happy to have you here and we're not judging, because we're all tiny specks in a big big universe too. No point in wasting our precious existence on anything but joy! That's what my comic, "Alien Romance," is about. Making do with less than ideal circumstances, finding joy in each other, and embracing life's small gifts. I'll also come after anyone who fails to appreciate that. I've had two people already misread my work and try to turn it into something sour, and I absolutely won't stand for that. Life is very short. Don't be sour. If the sweetness isn't readily apparent, dig for it. It's there! I promise!

@Laura Cushing Poor Monroe! That is quite an adjustment!

"When you were here by yourself," Ren asked idly, sprawled out on a bean bag chair, "did you think about me?" Maurice looked up. "Think about you how? When? You mean while I was in college?" He'd graduated from their hometown high school a year before Ren and won a full scholarship to the state university, but had failed to complete freshman year when Ren finally followed. "Yeah," Ren said. "You called me a few times, and we barely talked, and then you stopped. I thought you forgot about me 'cause you were off having a good time, but now I know you weren't, so why didn't you call me more?" Maurice didn't answer for a long time, and when he finally did, he sounded unsure. "You were done with me. Even before I left, all my senior year in fact, and your junior - you were hanging out with Heck and Pretzel and Doggy, working for your uncle, not talking to me except when you were shopping. I thought you moved on. People move on. I thought I was moving on too. Make all new friends. Maybe meet people who are more like..." His thought tapered off. "I didn't mo-- I didn't intend to move on," Ren insisted. "You were always my big brother. You never stopped being that to me. I rejected UPenn and UCLA just so I could go to school with you... because... I was scared I'd never see you again." Maurice shrugged. "You probably wouldn't've." "When you came home for Christmas that first year, and I saw you, you looked like you were dying," Ren said. Maurice shrugged again. Ren knew what he'd done, then; he'd suspected it before, especially after Maurice had finally told him the story about failing to adjust to campus life after growing up in farm country; about struggling to make friends and keep his grades up, and then giving up but lying to the folks back home about how badly he was doing. Ren often felt like a fish out of water here himself; if he didn't have his core group of friends who let him be himself, he'd be struggling too. "I'll never move on," he assured Maurice. "I'm probably gonna leave at some point, depending on where I get into med school. Call me. Call me a lot. I'll talk. If I don't, you can yell at me and remind me I said this." He grinned in an attempt to lighten the mood, and Maurice turned around and smirked at him.