Long week. Long month. Long life.

And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.

If I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?

Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.

It was psychological trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood.

I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.

It just goes to show, if you try to ruin someone's life, it only gets better. You just don't get to be a part of it.