My mind is filled with cataclysm and apocalypse. I wish for earthquakes, eruptions, flood.

What's amazing to me is how many of the issues facing women in the ancient world still linger today. Take Odysseus' wife, Penelope, a brilliant, resourceful woman who ends up in a terrible situation: in her husband's absence, she is being held hostage in her own home by men who claim to be courting her. She tries to make them leave, but because she's a woman they refuse, blaming their bad behavior on her desirability.

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

Perhaps it is the greatest grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.

. . .nothing could eclipse the stain of his dirty, mortal mediocrity.

The very dull truth is that writing love scenes is the same as writing other scenes - your job is to be fully engaged in the character's experience. What does this mean to them? How are they changed by it, or not? I remember being a little nervous, as I am when writing any high-stakes, intense scene (death, sex, grief, joy).

I shift, an infinitesimal movement, towards him. It is like the leap from a waterfall. I do not know, until then, what I am going to do.