Not hard to keep my chin up, just hard to keep from laughing, I know better than to take anything too seriously. Other than myself, but that’s a quiet matter not for polite company, you were raised better than that. Even wolves respect.

I am not about to deny it. We work hard to get where we get, never mind the sliding scale of damage and difficulty. Expectations warped, the web makes us believe we’re already famous, already what we’re supposed to be. Act natural. Be and believe in your someone else self, the trope you couldn’t imagine your way out of, as imaginative it may be. “Find what others want, and give it to them,” What Works, pads the penury.

Or hold your tongue in grit teeth and call it integrity. Ingenuity. Possession by a vision you’re not sure you want to see, much less attempt to explain and share. Then get rich in all sorts of things slowly. Life is not driven by plot.

I don’t want to be in a call center all my life. PhD candidates who can’t open PDFs, all some see, that raise in salary, more pennies for the debt how am I going to do this, ram a theory in a gap? shit, you tell me.

What am I supposed to do.

When I was a teen, there was no such thing as YA. You were a child, or you were an adult. Deal with it. I would go to Barnes & Noble, find the space in fiction where my name would fit and clear the shelves a foot, fuck it, two! three! four! for all my addictions, dissonance and grit, all the books I’d write and put on it. Someday. When the world goes away. When I sit my ass down and kill all the sleep in me. Trust myself to fail and succeed. When Bree wins the lottery. When all I really need is an inch, maybe three. Four, five. A half-foot of spines all lined up, caging nerve and fire.

Even three inches will take a lifetime, take and give my life away. But really, what’s the hurry? Slow plot or not, these characters got me got, all howl and growl, tenacity and wit.

I’ll never put me down.

I will never quit.