I'm not a gamer. But I am very aware of the escapism of drugs. In my mind those kind of do the same thing. They dull us to the aches and pains of our status quo.
The more we're doing to ensure we're following our joy and passion, that's when we really start to put the gas in our lives.
I always joke that every novel is really about the same thing: one person's struggle against society.
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.
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.
It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.
I never wanted/expected to write a memoir, but this life thing, it has a way of sideswiping our worlds, scaring us so thoroughly that our past lenses of contextualizing events don't work - they cease to matter.
My father deprived me of any truths about himself. He died without ever letting me know who he truly was. I only knew his facades, basically. And it breaks my heart that he never trusted me enough to tell me the truth.
Memoirs need confusion. It's the thing every human has in common. We are magnificently confused.
My musical sensibilities were formed around punk rock, that quintessential dilution of an art that's both ugly and lovely at the same time.
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.
I like art that trusts its audience, that's written for readers who like to work hard. I like art that knows its readers are up to the challenge of interacting with difficult material.
I'll never be the sort of author who sells that many copies. You'll never see a book of mine being sold on a table at Costco, between the extra-large jorts and a barrel of salsa. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I'll be indie till I die.
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.
If Dante was writing The Divine Comedy in 2013, he might very well have set part of it in the suburbs.
