I’m a writer, so I’m supposed to miserable, right? Otherwise, what would I have to write about? 

If the idea is simple, trust, I’m going to find a way to complicate it and try to make it look easy…

You can tell me to do it for me, do it for my health, but why? So I can live a longer life? Why live longer when all I have to look forward to is the derision and rejection of men and society?

She buys duct tape at the gas station, as the south-bound storm cell approaches (north wind blowing in her face). She decides to ask for help.

She knew this would be the last time her mother would ever install curtains for her in a new dwelling. She knew, because if Mom didn’t refuse to do it next time, she would refuse to let Mom offer. Mom knew it, too. That’s why she’s being so helpful and buying so many tiny things she knows her daughter will need and forget to provide for herself. This is the last time.

I am tired. I am done. There will be no more hustle. Ease is the only option…

I have every right to let my dreams die and get a job for a paycheck, but we all know that can’t happen, and we all know why. Adams knew why. And that was the reminder I needed to get me back to this laptop making word salads…

Writing the ultimate escape, imagination. Teaching, tantalizing, tremendous fiction! Creating a story from brain smoke and flickering pixels on a white screen, peeling narrative and prose from the ether …cash registers and “please hold” seems so trivial after such transportation.

What I love most about Neil Gaiman’s characters is that even the very bitterest of them have a soft belly and a quiet optimism. His stories always involve real danger, real consequences, and sometimes blood-curdling threats of fae-like violence, but there’s a sense that we’re just looking at one side of the coin…

Life can be merciless and unfair. In order to survive in human society, one must be aware and savvy to the malevolence that lurks around every corner and behind so many smiling faces…

It feels like the opposite of being divinely humbled; it’s like I’m a mangy dog being coaxed out from a sewer by a benevolent vet who wants to clean me up and help me learn to trust and be happy again. I snap my teeth at God’s hand and growl; God smiles and tries again…

The essential point of Manson’s book is not about tossing life out the window, but about seizing the day with the knowledge that it will bring suffering. The good news is, we can largely choose the suffering we would prefer to endure…

Sad but true, dwelling on my personal past for so long has done nothing but help me waste my precious time. In my writing work, I have set myself to sprawling epics that will never be finished, and that’s not fair to the people who will love my work, because they will never get it if I don’t publish something. I have to toss out the draft, so-to-speak. Cut the fat, and find the best way to tell the story now…

My whole life may be going to crap, but I’ve got pizza, so this can’t be rock bottom…

Apparently, I have been taking for granted just how much my day is thrown off by going to bed late and not getting the sleep I need…

These were not fantasy clothes I can only wish for. These were clothes that were my current size from stores I could afford. There’s something about a dream so simple that it’s entirely believable…

I juiced a lemon into my water, then put the drained halves into my smelly shoes. I don’t know, dude — it made sense at the time…

People and experiences are the only things that matter.

Creation is like a benevolent, artistic, and very rich uncle who can’t seem to just give a gift or directly offer help. He’s got to surprise you…

This is why having a deadline for art is especially helpful. Not the flexible kind, and not the kind where you subconsciously know that you can excuse yourself out of delivering. The real, actual deadlines where other people — or your reputation — are relying on your delivery…

Three colors available in this multipack of giant Mexican cookies. The brown one tastes vaguely like a donut I remember eating years ago…

Drive by at 23 miles an hour, and you’ll catch the neighbors dragging their toddler on a small sled over the mattress of snow on the sidewalks. She’s all bundled in a little pink snow suit like a bald monkey in bubble wrap — or a star fish, limp in the tropical surf…

I keep expecting to fall into a rhythm, but I know I haven’t found my Practice yet…

I don’t ever do this, but I just got done picking up Steve from the airport and the chamomile tea hasn’t kicked in quite yet. So I’m writing an open letter…

dark room around me curtain blocks the dawn postponing kiss of light off the dewdrops on the lawn – I’m really not that strong awake tho nothing can sustain my sight or blind weak for all my genius re-spin them or to wind – the dreams I left behind Photo by Michael B. Stuart on […]

Every time, I tell myself it’s the last time. But then I open YouTube just to lull myself to sleep and all of a sudden it’s 2 AM. And the next day, I am useless until 5 o’clock. (Because that’s when my migraines usually end – between 5 and 6 PM, like clockwork. Migraines are […]

“The spaceship has landed,” was the only way he could describe it…

The unintended result of this internal evolution is that I have become an entirely different person than I was previously…

The fireplace show is on TV and Loreena McKennitt is playing. There’s a peace in our home. More notably, a peace and happiness in our hearts. It’s been so long since my mother has sat at a kitchen table making Yuletide crafts, I think the last time may have been over 30 years ago. There […]

nothing means what it used to. friday. laundry day. december. not since we had to stay at home and walk around the block and take in vistas of the trees obscuring the power lines on the far end of the parking lot. there’s a sense all is stale. there’s a stillness like death (or maybe […]