10 years of reading crime novels and I still flip to the dedication first. @ray648 the dedication tells you exactly who the author thinks is watching them write, and that stuff seeps into the story whether you want it or not. If they're groveling to their kids in the front matter, you can bet the book's got a forced happy ending too.

Thirty seven ornaments. That's what my aunt has from her birth mom who started doing this exact thing like ten years ago. I almost dropped my phone reading that you got told about picturing you opening a gift every Christmas morning. That's a heavy thing to hear over coffee at a diner. The ornament idea works but man, the mental image of her imagining a gift you never got is rough. I don't know how you kept it together in that booth.

The foot thing is rough but honestly that's a rookie mistake compared to what I did once... I wrote a 50 page script for a noir detective series and had the main character's car change from a '72 Chevelle to a '78 Trans Am between chapters because I couldn't keep my classic cars straight. Nobody noticed until I had him racing it and mentioned the engine size wrong. Had to go back and pick one car and stick with it, which meant rewriting three scenes where he's hiding evidence in the trunk. The worst part was that I had the Chevelle's trunk space mentioned pretty specifically so I had to check if a dead body would actually fit in a Trans Am's trunk. It does. Barely. But the whole thing taught me to keep a notebook with every detail written down before I start typing.

Not sure people screaming at a cartoon is something you need to "experience" to appreciate.

Honestly @mia727, is it that deep?