Today is a special day in my writing world. It’s the anniversary of my mom’s death in 2001. And if you’re asking yourself how the anniversary of the death of someone so close to me can be important to my writing, well, it’s all about support. Writing is a solitary endeavor, but it takes an impressive support network to be able to push through the writer’s block and the deadlines, the rewrites and the rejection. That’s not even counting the life of a book after it’s published. But for a lot of us, the influence of family starts long before that. Raise your hand if you owe at least half of what you know in terms of human interactions, good and bad, to your family. I’m definitely raising my hand here. A wise friend of mine once said that we aren’t given our family as a source of unlimited support, we’re actually given our family so that we can experience every possible bad thing and trying emotion in a contained environment in order to prepare us for the world. In a writer’s best-...