I love Austin. I got so drunk there two years ago I went online in the morning and looked up the recovery steps for AA.

How do you know you are talking to a real photographer without seeing her work? When she says things like I want my ashes strewn when the light is perfect.

If your digestion is an issue for you, maybe you could look at the three things you crave most, the three things you eat most, and avoid them for a week just to see if you feel any better. 

On Saturday I get to give a talk at Oleg Lougheed’s Hear Me Now conference in Austin on finding the courage to tell your story. So I’ve been thinking about the importance of courage.

It’s so easy to judge yourself before you create. You get to stay safe if you are silent.

It’s almost like you are dead.

This is what a lot of people call writer’s block. What I’ve learned in the last couple of years is to focus on what is pushing on the block instead of on the block itself. The block is inert, but something behind it is dying to push through. It’s what I call opportunity.

It’s easy to write what you hear other people say, to write what you think other people want to hear, to write what you have read before, to write what you think may earn you love. That’s writing, but there is a hollowness to it, no guts, no blood. 

Do you have any tall, beautiful, wildly creative magical fairies in your life? I didn’t until I met Laura. She is funny and kind and strange in the best sense of the word.

You can do this anywhere there is a tree within sight. You can be in bed looking out the window. You can be out on a walk. You can be lying in a hammock. This is a kind of energetic dialysis.

Before I stopped drinking coffee, I walked around feeling as if someone had punched me behind the eyes. Like my brain had little arms that kept whacking the dark side of my orbs. I thought it was fatigue, allergies, a possible need for glasses. I never thought: caffeine.

You, also, are a wonderful writer because you are a wonderful person. If you write what is true about yourself, your heart, your life experiences, your writing sings. 

What if in the moment after a child is born, the mother reaches out and touches the child and, in that moment, all the stars in the universe gather and the child knows itself as an I?