It’s so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself.
All of my stories, they don’t come from my high school experience, but they’re definitely based on things that happened to me in high school, or things that happened to friends of mine, or things that I wish had happened to me.
You knew the truth all along, Colie. That’s all matters. You knew.
It’s the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.
If someone is really close with you, your getting upset or them getting upset is okay, and they don’t change because of it. It’s just part of the relationship. It happens. You deal with it.
I think I’m too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.
Like it takes so little not only to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.
I was just stock in the middle, vague and undefined.
I think when you’re a beginning author with any publishing company, there’s only so much they can put behind you.
There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to keep looking back.
I was so scared about being discovered, but nobody came. Nobody heard. In my own ears, though, my sobs sounded primal and scary, like something I would have turned off if I’d been able to.
We laughed ourselves silly, taking back our shared past, gently, piece by piece.
My first signing was at my hometown independent bookstore and everyone in the world came. It was so nice. My family was there, my parents, everybody I worked with, all my friends. So I had this great first reading with a like hundred people there.
It was great. Freedom even the imagined kind always is.
It’s funny how someone’s perception of you can be formed without you even knowing it.
Some writers pick a topic and write around that, but I like to include it all.
Home wasn’t a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together.
Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore.
I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone. As long as I didn’t say it aloud, it wasn’t real.
For two hours I’d felt myself stretching tighter and tighter, like a rubber band pulled to the point of snapping. And now, I could feel the smaller, weaker part of myself beginning to fray, tiny bits giving way before the big break.