If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.

It's finished. Everything went past, without me.

That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.