...reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't… — Stephen King

We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room....except we are together. We're close.

My mother knew I wanted to be a writer (with all those rejection slips hanging from the spike on my bedroom wall, how could she not?), but she encouraged me to get a teacher’s credential “so you’ll have something to fall back on.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.