They’re not all a piece of cake, that’s for sure. But I think the one that stands out for me on an emotional level was a eulogy I had to write for Grant Wolves #4. (No spoilers here!)

I’m blessed in that I have yet to experience the loss of someone incredibly close to me, so the scene was hard to write in part because I hadn’t experienced that kind of grief myself. It was also difficult because it got me thinking about the people in my life that I love and how I could lose any of them at any moment.

I cried a little while I wrote it, but I think I got that emotional resonance on the page, too. It helped that the character’s last words—which I gave absolutely no thought to as “last words” when I wrote them—were particularly poignant.