I always wished to be a better planner. It seems more elegant, while my trial and error process is more akin to someone scratching an awful case of poison oak.

It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.

My father deprived me of any truths about himself. He died without ever letting me know who he truly was. I only knew his facades, basically. And it breaks my heart that he never trusted me enough to tell me the truth.

Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.

I just thought it was important that people knew right from the jump that I've got problems. But in all seriousness, that's a huge part of my writing process.

Shamefulness is always a huge part of my characterizations. I like protagonists that reveal, either through "honesty" in their various thought processes or via their actions, perhaps telling us things they're not so keen on disclosing through their interactions with the outside world. Probably both during the duration of a novel.

I'm a semi-failed writer, but I'm a capital-F Failed musician.