October Novel Prep Challenge

Forgive me, but I'm going to use real people as examples:

Do they have an accurate mental picture of their appearance (how they see themselves versus how the world sees them)?
I know someone (in my family) who sees herself as fat, huge. She isn't. But she'll point at someone who wears a dress size at least 6 or 8 sizes larger than she is, and think she looks the same. This is a serious disconnect to how she looks to the rest of the world, which is slightly heavy but not obese.

Also, my high school geometry teacher always thought she was tall until she went to college. She had reached her full height by 5th grade, and that image stayed in her mind even though her classmates outgrew her. So when she went to college and met new people, she realized she was short- 5'1" and not "tall".

Why do they have their resources? How long have they had them, and how have they served the character over time? (ex. contacts, money, political power, fame, etc)?
Okay, my [dad] has a farm. It's been in his family since the 1870s. This is a huge part of his existence, growing up on the farm, getting his own farm, returning to the home farm, and being a farmer. He knows the entire neighborhood and they know him. It's not political power, but it is a social standing and money associated with that farm. Why does he have it? He has inherited it and he has worked hard to keep it running.

Another example, my cousin and uncle ran a beef jerky business for a while. It's my family's secret recipe that my grandfather used to make. Many of my family members worked at my grandfather's butcher shop. So this recipe is something they inherited, but it is also something that they had to work for to secure a place to create the jerky and to get it into stores (it was stocked at Trader Joe's, among others). Some types were extremely difficult to get, because they couldn't let someone bring ostrich meat in the back of a truck! So that changed over time, too.


Do they have any prominent sensory associations? (ex. the smell of their mother's perfume, the sound of ice cracking under their feet as a child)?
Here's an interesting thing for me: for most of my life, I haven't been able to smell anything. I realized as an adult that when I receive flowers, I bury my face in them and sniff deep, but I don't actually smell anything. I tell people they're beautiful, but I don't know how they smell. Until I was pregnant and Brandiwyn🎶 bought flowers for her house and I smelled them. That was an amazing day for me, so it's a prominent sensory association.

My daughter is afraid of loud noises. She covers her ears, runs to me, but she doesn't deal with this well. It's a sensory perception thing, and I remember as a child I could never stand the sound of sharpening knives. Still can't, so it is often done when we're not around. I can't explain why it is worse than other sounds, but it just IS. So I try not to vacuum around my daughter and shelter her from horrible fans here and there. Yet she yells much louder than these other noises and never notices.