In This Moment That Blooms

It's More Like I Write Multiple First Drafts, Handwritten. So With My First Novel, I Wrote Whole Drafts From Different Points Of View. There Are Different Versions Of That Novel In A Drawer On Loose-leaf Sheets. I Won't Even Look At The First Draft While I'm Writing The Second, And I Won't Look At The Second Before Writing The Third.

I'm An Anxious Person In General, But Something About Being Pregnant And Awaiting The Release Of My First Book, The Monsters Of Templeton, Made Me Into An Insane Anxious Person. I Didn't Sleep At Night. I Ended Up Sleeping All Day. In A Strange Way I Felt Like The World Was Going To End. I Found Myself So Deeply Depressed At Times That I Started To Read About Happiness, And That Took Me Into Books About Idealism And Utopianism. Reading Books About People Who Tried To Build Utopian Societies Of Different Kinds Gave Me A Kind Of Lift.

A Lot Of My Work Comes From A Place Of Despair Or Fear. I Often Write In Order To Gain Some Sort Of Control Over Aspects Of My Life Or The World That Seem Too Dark To Look At Directly.

A Female Writer Does Definitely Get More Attention If She Writes About Male Characters. It's True. It's Considered Somehow More Literary, In The Same Way That It's More Literary To Write About Supposedly Male Subjects, Such As War. You're Considered More Seriously By The Literary Establishment.

It Seems To Me That If You Were To Take Almost Any Half-century In History, You'd Find A Grand Societal Tug-of-war Between The Community And The Individual.