chess board

I've had to leave my story on simmer for a bit while I did some moving around of my own. Since doing so, I've decided my characters would move with me. That way I could write about the locale I was living in. Having to do that has changed my story around too. I shall now have to discard large portions of already written material and rethink plot lines.
I realize that this is what I have done in my own life. I move to a new place, new job, always taking my children along with me, of course. Doing so, I not only changed the "plot" in my own life, but in theirs as well.
Of course my children were not one dimensional characters in an outline, but young people trying to decide who they were and what they would grow to be and how they fit into life.
As it turns out, they became fabulous adults. Maybe because of the moving around or in spite of it. I think maybe a mixture of both.
I can move my characters around like pieces on a chess board and there they will be, just as they are now, forever. When I moved my children around, they made the experience uniquely their own. They were able to make where they were, secondary to who they were.
This book, it turns out, is teaching me much more about real life than the fictional one I am creating.