Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

I always, at least back then, struggled with emotion in writing. I felt like I could do odd, unusual things, but there wouldn't be enough feeling in them, and maybe if there's a progression at all to anything that I've done it's that I've always wanted to have a high - an almost overwhelming - degree of feeling in what I write.

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

I don't like real places, but I don't like imagined ones either. I feel like I'm looking for some mixture and it's very hard for me to say because I like to use real place names because there's an uncanny feeling to them, but at the same time I don't ever really try to make them plausible. Sometimes I like to use them as a way to hide in plain sight a little bit, because to me a very exotic or imagined setting has a lot of weight and a lot of burden to it, and it doesn't suit me, but a real place seems to have its own weird legacy, so I don't know what the choice is?

People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover.

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.