The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

It was as if, before she`d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she`d been before.

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.