If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.

It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.