Rachel Sklar

I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo.

In 2014, having children is complicated and daunting and fraught - as much as it's always been, but now we're talking about it. And the more we talk about it, the more of us will realize that we're not going through it alone. Far from it.

Less than two weeks before my 34th birthday, I bought pots. Most people were amazed that I did not previously own pots, but that was before I explained that I had never used my oven, and used my stovetop for my dishrack.

New York apartments are notoriously small, and my cute little studio is no exception - space is at a premium, which is one of the reasons that I only have a mini-fridge. Great for leftovers, cheese, and chilling Diet Coke.

It is a pet peeve of mine when people throw around arguments citing 'Fair Use' and yet fail to actually explain what a fair use argument actually is.

Emily Gannett is tireless. I know this because I have traded emails with her at 2 A.M. only to later wake blearily to a chipper morning missive sent south of 6 A.M. before her morning run.

There's a tendency, when the offspring of a famous person does something notable, to define them by their more-famous parent.

My weekends are oases of time and space, where I am able to draw a breath and dive into the stuff I couldn't get to that week - the great article I bookmarked, the friend whose emails I kept dropping, the blog post I'd meant to write on a subject that wasn't timely but was still important.

You actually can be passionate about things like making rational decisions based on a thorough airing of the facts, a reasonable and informed debate, a respect for the Constitution that includes, um, knowing about it.