Sunday January 19, 2014  I co-led a Minnesota Speculative Writers discussion on "Writing characters with minds different from mine."

Possible topics announced:  "Synesthesia"  Margaret Taylor (co-leader) and I talked about our personal experiences, with audience discussion. We don't have the same set of synesthesias, though there's overlap.

"Help! I'm a man and I need to write about my woman protagonist falling in love."
"I need to write a character who's a psion. What's a good way to do this?"
"My character is an alien who can see radio waves. What's a good way to do this?"

Each of which could take up an hour and a half of discussion on its own.

Also discussed:  Face blindness.  Eidetic memory.  Different kinds of memory.  Writing the opposite gender in general.  Writing characters with different sexual orientations or preferences.

My synesthesias include:  Sound to visual/tactile patterns.  Sight to touch.  Tickertape:  When I hear people talk, or I think in words, I see it written out.  (Never twice in a row in the same font, which I suspect is a bit unusual.)  Sound to touch.  Thinking in tactile/visual/kinesthetic diagrams.