But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.

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.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.