Hemmingway Moments and Heated Ones

Every writer has a weird thing. Most writers have several. I have 2: 1) If a story is truly from my heart, I will hear the voices of my characters in conversation with one another before the plot of the story is even conceived; and 2) It doesn't happen every time (like maybe 1/6 characters), but sometimes I physically fall in love with my characters in the sense that I feel a literal, physiological bond with them (not romantic love). 

Last October, my computer crashed, and while I was able to recover most everything, there were a few documents that had not been backed up, one of which was a little series of children's science-based fiction that I had been working on. I have no one to blame but myself, and I did. I think I actually mourned this character several months. I remember my husband asking me if I could just rewrite it. I could not, and I was not sure why that was, exactly. Feeling silly and like a total weirdo about my sadness, I think I went into a long writer's slump. I have written new material since then, but the experience has not been the same since.

Life has happened all around me since then, and I have enjoyed every moment of it. I think I signed up for this class to see if it could pull my writer brain back to normal-land. It may be working. Reading and hearing about other folks' experience writing fiction, I have realized my experience is not uncommon. My mini-Hemmingway moment, in fact, now seems very typical :) 

On another note, it has been 106 degrees Fahrenheit here in NE Kansas, and little h and I have been doing some very early morning runs (in which we experience the low of 86 degrees) to escape the heat. We have 60 new bottles of sunscreen on our counter, and we fully expect to make use of all of them this summer, despite the extreme weather.