It's a beautiful aspect of narrative construction, hunting for the right images and metaphors to render our character's hearts/minds/souls as though they're ecosystems, full-fledged settings for a reader to inhabit like a place.

For the book to succeed, it has to have equal parts ugliness and beauty, counterpoints adding up to emotional complexity. To me, there's a dignity in letting your art be emotionally complex.

They say you have to get and stay sober for yourself, and of course I agree with that, but I've really appreciated the added stakes of having someone relying on me for survival. My daughter makes me want to do right. That doesn't mean I won't relapse again. It's happened to me before. But she adds a layer of love in my life that I've never known.

We have today and hopefully tomorrow to be the best version of ourselves.

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.

The question why, at least in my life, often leads to despair. Why did this happen to me? Why didn't someone who claimed to love me treat me with respect, compassion, kindness? Etc. These questions never have answers. They are an ocean, and you'll never swim to the other side. Eventually, you'll tire and die.

I'm a very tactile learner, so I need analog index cards, moving them all about, trying out various sequences for the book's architecture.