The best of it is, God is with us.
I write in Times New Roman, 12 point, and arrange the margins so that the screen looks like a page from a book. This spurs me on to make the writing as perfect as I can make it.
Sometimes, I like to imagine the perfect reader - the reader who not just understands what I am about, but soaks up every word as if it were written for them. I have been fortunate in that I have got to meet such readers now and again.
"Night sky was black and then there was blood, morning crack of light on the edge of the earth. " The ideal first sentence contains within it an intimation of the whole book 'Red Sky in Morning'. That's what I was hoping for.
I particularly like the catchphrase of Leonardo Da Vinci: Ostinato Rigore! (Which means, pretty much, Relentless Rigor).
While I read almost all my newspapers online, I'm not a big fan of e-books because I like to see what I've read and remember it. Books are a way of making memory physical.
I need my trusty Mac laptop to write. I can't work with anything else. I'm used to the feel of the keys. I also like, more than anything else, Apple's Pages.
I scan the room. Catherine is writing quickly, her light brown hair falling over her face. She is left-handed, and because she writes in pencil her left arm is silver from wrist to elbow.
Once, when she was six years old, she had fallen from a tree, flat on her stomach. She could still recall that sickening interval before breath came back into her body. Now, as she looked at him, she felt the same way she had felt then, breathless, stunned, nauseated.
Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that's unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't 'too soon. ' It's much too late.
Watching 'Girls' has just given me renewed courage.