sometimes i get very frustrated with the writing process. one of my friends asked me what my problem was, claiming that getting ideas and writing them down was easy.

i explained to her that the problem isn’t coming up with ideas and stories and characters to write about: it’s writing those ideas and stories and characters in a way that feels fresh and new and raw. it’s about trying to make something beautiful and powerful out of something that anyone with an internet connection has probably glanced over a thousand times before; it's about making a reader stop to pay attention to the little tiny stings behind the words that make up the story you're telling.

We had Robert Kloss and Amber Sparks at the school this week to do a reading from The Desert Places, which was brilliant beyond all imagining.

"He fell down from the stars with eyes like the surface of them. In his eyes were the lives and deaths of worlds and on his lips was the blood inside of him, violet, inhuman. He was not human and I did not know what to do, because he looked like the night sky in the shape of a man reaching out for me. I did not know what to do, because I have always been in love with the space between the planets, distant stars, and spiralling galaxies."
-written while trying to envision the star husband, from Jane Mobley and Anna Vojech's version of the story, printed by Doubleday books in 1979.

there is nothing more frustrating to me than an abundance of scenes and three dimensional characters with no plot to string them together. long-form is witchcraft.

"crocodiles are easy. they try to kill and eat you. people are harder - sometimes they pretend to be your friend first." [steve irwin]