So glad you’re enjoying it, Sharon. We’ve just introduced this thesaurus at the blog and only have 3 entries so far. So if we do decide to publish this content, it will be quite a ways down the road. We’ll have to wait and see!

Thank you for your input, Ben. I’ve never gone through this personally, and first-hand experience is always going to be the most authentic, so thank you for sharing yours.

Thanks, Traci! I admit that it makes me a little nervous, writing some of them, because these are real experiences that real people have gone through. I don’t want to sensationalize them or misrepresent them. But the information can be really useful to writers, so I’m trying to be as sensitive as possible with them.

Hey, I figured I would add my story and thoughts quick as someone who has been through this sort of ordeal, it might give you a little something to think about.

My house burned down in 1993, I was a wee lad when that happened. We went on vacation and a train that had tracks behind our house started a grass fire that took out our home and several other homes.

The main thought we had was how lucky we were. First off, to not be home. Second off, we had recently gotten rid of all our pets. We had a dog that was a bit destructive and too much for us to handle. We also had a bunny that had been killed a year earlier. She was an outdoor bunny and some wild dogs had gotten into her cage. frown emoticon

It was tough because we lost pretty much everything. We had about 3 days worth of clothes on our back and lost everything else.

As a young child it did have some large impacts on my life. First off, almost everything was gone and for a while I was living with second hand belongings which, when you’re a child, isn’t the best thing because kids can be cruel about what you’re wearing and when you’re wearing old stuff and you’re clothes don’t fit right don’t match well, look old and ratty, you get made fun of.

It took the insurance company a while to sort through everything else and in the meantime we had to move with my grandparents and then we eventually moved into a house not too far from them.

This also required switching schools. I had a lot of good friends and I was really looking forward to a specific teacher I got along with really well for the 4th grade but then I had to go to an entirely different school with different people and it was a major thing for someone my age to have to completely transplant their lives (I feel really bad for military brats who are constantly on the move).

Then, there was the issue of the kids that lived around my grandparents. They were all a couple years older than e so I started hanging around an older crowd which wasn’t the best thing.