Robin Black

I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one's own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn't true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates.

There are often two conversations going on in a marriage. The one that you__e having and the one you__e not.

It's unexpectedly painful to have become a pronoun.

Life. It begins and begins and begins. An infinite number of times. It is all beginnings until the end comes. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we do not, but, at every moment, life begins again.

Diversity matters. Not only in what we look like, or what religion we practice, or in whom we love, but also in how we live our lives, including the order in which we go about things, the seasons in which we are able to create art. Those who are engaged in the arts should be the last to send any other message, because when artists endorse the traditional order of a society, it suggests that they have forgotten their own true role within it.

You cannot write the pages you love without writing the pages you hate. Nothing that you write is pointless, useless, or unnecessary. The product requires the process. The good days may be more enjoyable, but the tough ones are the ones they__e built upon.

Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art.

Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.

Do whatever you have to do, avoid whatever you need to avoid, protect yourself however you need to protect yourself in order to stay on course, write, send the work out, write more, send out more work. Because as wonderful as the rest of it may be, conferences, twitter, writing groups, and so on, if they are more than you can handle, that__ okay. But if you stop writing and stop sending your work into the world, that is not okay. That is giving up.

It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.