There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.

View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.

(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

I write because I want to have more than one life.

I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin