Gardening is the best therapy in the world.
Stories aren't about things. Stories are things. Stories aren't about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.
Like skateboarders, writers live by rejection; like writers, any skater worth his salt must have the single-minded tenacity of a wiener dog.
The very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source material.
The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all.
Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.
Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane.
I'm not running away, I'm moving on.
When you fully commit, you will make it.
I'm 42 and the age of a guy who has kids, so I guess I'm playing right where I'm supposed to be. I'm comfortable with that, but in the same breath I'd do something edgy. If someone came to me and offered me an edgy and funny story, then I'd do it.