Here’s my test. I have to draw stares when I’m reading on a park bench, the airport, a waiting room—laughing out loud—and not care. Bust a gut laughing, as they say.

He worried his mother would have too much pride to take his pension, but wrote to his sister, "She might as well have it. I know plenty mothers getting it who has twenty dollars to mother's one." 

When my grandmother died a few years ago, she left behind her own mother's trunk, filled with photographs (some of them dating from the mid 1800s), stacks of old postcards, a few tragic telegrams, and a letter signed by J. Edgar Hoover about my missing great-aunt, who'd run off to California.  

I’ve written before about the poignancy of regret in “I Want to Live!,” a story that manages to weave the nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer’s ideas around a bantam rooster named Mr. Barnes. 

No one wants to kiss when she is hungry, according to Dorothy Dix.

It takes guts to play God.  And yet, the omniscient point of view is enormously fluid and rewarding.

When I remember how ferocious revising can be– that it’s tearing down, peeling away, sanding, brushing off, discovering–I can get the real work done. It’s a comfort to know revision is re-visioning, casting a new light on your draft, seeing new connections.