Literary Hell And The Power And Difficulty Of Creation

     I've been working on composing a novel for some time now.  It's taking forever mostly because pesky little things like earning a living keep getting in the way of writing.  I'm guessing the most successful writers already have written great money-making novels, which gives them a big enough nest egg which then allows them to sit at home in their underwear tap tap tapping away using million dollar words to form sentences into paragraphs and then using them end to end to write something that someone - anyone - might pay money to read.  It's a vicious cycle.
     I've shared the idea for my novel with enough people and received enough positive feedback - and to be honest, a couple blank stares - to be pretty sure I'm on the right track

with it.  Without giving away the plot line, it involves the power and vulnerability of one person who uses the best and worst of both of those qualities in an attempt to change the world.  Of course there's complications and roadblocks that get in his way like the mundane minutiae of domestic life, an eccentric neighbor, an underworld puppeteer who calls the shots from afar, an unrewarding job, and, oft times to the story's protagonist, a defective television satellite system who drives him ten sheets to the wind crazy.  
     However, the hero is not alone.  A beautiful and previously lost soul comes out of the ether to his side serving a dual purpose:  A much-needed aide for him while at the same time giving long-awaited and deserving justice to her.  Of course there are complications and plot twists and a triple-unseen never-saw-that-coming ending times three but what good story doesn't?  
     Not all have a triple-unseen ending?  Well, mine does.
     What I've found the most interesting about "the process" is that over time you begin to immerse yourself in the "lives" of your characters.  You begin to care about them.  You begin to sense their wants and needs.  They become real.  They transcend being the figments of your imagination.  You want things to turn out well for them.  You find yourself thinking of them like lost and/or current loves at random times of the day when you are nowhere near a keyboard.  They are simply alive.  And for that reason, you hesitate to initiate a plot line

where one of them would meet an untimely demise.  Not that I would let that literary form of puppy love get in the way of a good story, but I'm just saying.
     So for now the characters live vicariously through me and my whims, surviving in a petri dish of imagination under the protection of a steadily balding dome, all the while beginning to feel the power they have over me to control things, and to shape the story and their lives.  I kind of fear the moment of the tipping point where the outcome is no longer in my hands, and where the story will then begin to write itself.  The story will then turn out much better than it would have been had I maintained control, and allowing that to happen will once and for all prove that one's knees are not in fact the first thing to go.
     It's your ego.