Ironically, Writing A Novel Is Not A

There Are People We Treat Wrong And Later We're Prepared To Treat Other People Right. Perhaps This Sounds Mercenary, But I Feel Grateful For These Trial Relationships, And I Would Like To Think It All Evens Out - Surely, Unknowingly, I Have Served As Practice For Other People.

... Nothing Broke My Heart Like The Slow Death Of A Shared Joke That Had Once Seemed Genuinely Funny.

I Like It When Characters Are Some Combination Of Appealing And Maybe Flawed Or Self-interested. I Think In Terms Of Scenes, And What I Want A Scene To Achieve, And I Think That The Psychological Realism Arises From That.

Even More Than Getting Compliments On Social Media, What I Love Is When Some Random Stranger Says Something Very Funny Or Insightful About My Books, Often In 140 Characters Or Less! It's A Very Casual, Low-stakes, Non-burdensome Way Of Connecting That I Think Is Fun For Both The Writer And The Reader. And There Are A Lot Of Clever People Out There Who Have No Connection To Publishing.

I Think It's Significantly Easier To Be A Female Writer Today Than In The Early 1800's. That Said, It's Hard To Imagine Almost Anyone Who Knows Anything About Publishing Disagreeing With The Statement That Women Writers Today Are Often Taken Much Less Seriously Than Men Writers. But It's Hard To Quantify, And Even Define, What Being Taken Seriously Means.