What readers might not know is that when authors are writing their books, they can (and should) get totally wrapped up in the characters and the story. So much so that they sometimes break into tears and have to walk away from their computers for a while.

That’s what happened to me about half-way through the writing of Breadcrumbs and Bombs. The scene was so intense, so sad, that I broke into tears and had to keep wiping my face dry as I typed. When I finished the scene, I left the room and went to our family room to talk to my husband and recover. I won’t tell you what happened in that scene, but if you’ve read the book, you might be able to guess which scene it was. It was a scene in the Sudetenland near the end of the war. I had a similar intense emotional reaction, to a lesser degree, a few other times in that same book.

It’s not the first book I’ve written that has done that to me. In my book, The Handyman, there were several spots where this same thing happened. Sometimes because the scene was sad, but also once because the scene was happy.

In my time travel book, Inherit the Past, again I had a scene that brought tears to my eyes. It was when someone made a confession. In fact, in nearly all of my books, I have one or more scenes that do that to me.

I’ve heard writing instructors say that to really bond the readers to your characters and get them to feel the sorrow or joy, to cry along with the characters, the writer needs to really feel the emotion, too. I hope that’s true, and I hope I’ve done my job bringing emotions to my stories. To me, that’s what writing is all about.