She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. The web model is just so much more complicated, and involves this third party of advertisers, and all these other sources of revenue that are sort of provisional, but haven't been proven yet.

The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.

Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco.

Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.