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Other than the obvious holiday traditions, have you ever included any personal or family traditions/customs in your stories?

Not really. I should though, if for no other reasons than the fact that it would give my characters “extra” character.

Like how my Mom would always eat the ears off my chocolate bunnies before I even got the basket on Easter. The many conniving and evil and creative places she would hide my Easter basket, over the years (Because you couldn’t gather up any of the eggs you found until you acquired the basket; that was the rule. By my senior year in high school it would take me HOURS to find the damned thing, and there were times that I totally gave up.). Or how my Dad has to hang that one particular ornament on the tree every Christmas, and he swears it’s his favorite and there’s a whole story behind it that he’ll tell me when I’m older (I’m 44, and I still haven’t heard the story, so I wonder if it’s one of “those” stories.). There was father-daughter night once a week in middle school, but it didn’t extend into high school because of scheduling.

There were traditions that I would have liked to have started on my own, but they didn’t quite work out. Traditions and customs require consistency, and a desire to do it even if it isn’t the most convenient time.

It’s hard to maintain the desire to do something “extra” when you haven’t slept in past 7am for more than a year. It requires a lot of pre-planning in this house.

I even call myself “slacker pagan” because even though I mark my particular holidays in my calendar, I still just. Don’t.

Which, I suppose, could also be a kind of custom, in a weird, counter-culture kind of way.

Check out the Insecure Writer’s Support Group to see more writers dish about their concerns, their solutions to various problems, or just general cherophobia.