Summer in Greenville was hot, and this is how authors steal from their lives.

 

Most of the characters in my current project are based on real people. Even secondary characters. I took a page out of Faulkner's book and when I developed the characters, I began stealing right out of my life. And I am starting right now, rewriting my notes from the beginning of the story to clarify things and also posting this photo, which shows three characters from my story. Oh, yes, they are fictionalized, one is a composite even, but I couldn't have chosen a better photo to explain two complex relationships and one that haunts much of the story.

The center child is me. And that boy is a child I grew up with. It was a long relationship of mutual love and hate. We sort of tormented each other. He also taught me how to kiss when I was a teenager. The other little girl is my sister. We look very happy here and we were. But somehow as the years went by, we lost each other. It's easy to do. But here we are, the three of us, not yet tangled, on a hot summer day in the Mississippi Delta, playing, our lives full of sweet nothings and pets.