I have a sister, so I know-that relationship, it's all about fairness: you want your sibling to have exactly what you have-the same amount of toys, the same number of meatballs on your spaghetti, the same share of love. But being a mother is completely different. You want your child to have more than you ever did. You want to build a fire underneath her and watch her soar. It's bigger than words.

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

Read a ton. Take a workshop course so you learn to give and get criticism.

This is what it always comes down to, I realized. There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don't, and caught in the space between them are guns.

I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the're hiding.

Maybe the reason I've never died in this story is that I've never had something worth dying for before.