The Fading Distinction Between My Life and the Story

I wonder if all writers get so submerged in their plots that they forget something they wrote didn't really happen. That happens to me, and novels I'm reading on the side start to blur into my plot, as well. Someone receives sheet music in Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) and my characters discover sheet music in the bottom of a trunk, for example. After a while, I have trouble distinguising between the two. Who found what music?

Cindi and I have had repeated and sometimes spine-tingling coincidences all along the way and I wish I could remember them all. When we were working on the gemstone idea, for example, and Cindi chose the chrysoprase. We later learned that the stone is said to be associated with her astrological sign (Libra) and my birthstone (May) and neither one of us had ever heard of it before. (We now both own charms containing chrysoprase stones.)

Last week I spent a couple of days working out a favorite scene in which our main character and her guy friend find a trunk of old instruments. They carefully take them out and gently play a couple of them. They decide to refurbish them. Later, our heroine time travels back in time and becomes a young woman who receives a marriage proposal after which her betrothed plays her a love song on a violin. Back in the present, she learns that it wasn't her imagination--that a young woman actually did receive a proposal and that the old violin in their trunk is one and the same.

Carrie Cartee, original owner of the Weber
piano purchased in 1877. She told the man
who was about to refurbish it that it was the
right thing to do.

The next day, the Idaho Statesman ran a story about a young woman in 1877 who purchased a piano in NYC and had it shipped to Boise--part of the way by covered wagon. She played the piano for many years, wearing indentations in the ivory the size of her small hands, but recently, it has been in storage. Now, it is about to be refurbished. The man doing the refurbishing says (see link to article below) about the young woman who owned the piano in 1877, "Carrie told me it was the right thing to do." The story goes on to say, Working on the piano, especially in the dark, quiet recesses...lets him experience something akin to time travel, he said--like "Back to the Future"....

Now, I understand that to the average person that's not such a remarkable coincidence, but I had just struggled through the writing process. I had gone mentally into not only the present day world of the novel, but also the 1914 world of the novel. I was barely digging my way back to the present that foggy morning I sat inhaling my strong coffee and blinking the sleep out of my eyes to read piano repairman's version of what the piano--and it's owner--said to him. And I was there.

Whether I write in the morning before school or at night, I later walk around still in the plot, like an actor who stays in character after the curtain. So I guess in only makes sense that the past and the present and the fact and the fiction start to run together.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2014/10/24/3445489_new-life-for-old-idaho-treasure.html?rh=1