Don’t flirt, have sex, or engage in emotional affairs with your friends’ significant others. This shouldn’t need to be said, but it needs to be said. That significant other is an asshole, and you don’t want to be involved with an asshole who’s used goods. If you want to be with an asshole, get a fresh asshole of your very own. They are abundant.

Living in a rural town really compelled me to start tweeting so much. Mostly, my Twitter usage is fueled by loneliness. I can go days without talking to another human being unless it's my mother, especially when I'm not teaching or on break.

So many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear.

I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane.

It is deeply unfair to task writers of color with unique responsibilities that we don't assign to all writers.

That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.