Yesterday at lunch, Reed said all racists and homophobes should just die and do the world a favor. I know I’m supposed to think that, too.
Why is it so complicated to love someone?

— Looking Glass Girl, Work in Progress

I’m a tenth of the way into my novel…

"All White People are Racist." It's actually something I agree with. …

My watch phrase has become "Disrupt the echo chamber." And the only way we can do that is by speaking kindly and respectfully to those with whom we disagree--and explaining precisely why we disagree. I spend what many friends see as way too much time doing this, but it is important to me. It's so good to see I am not alone.

I have not yet seen the new Netflix series, Bridgerton, but when you brought it up, I was intrigued. You didn’t like it — partly because of its hyper-sexual nature, which would probably make me squirm too. You also found jarring the presence of Black gentry, which to you seemed…

My autistic adult son is my truth-teller. And today’s truth makes me wonder, in my solar plexus, whether I am a monster.

I am explaining to him the origins of Halloween, a holiday he hates because of its preoccupation with horror. “Traditionally,” I say, in my best teacher-voice, “‘All Hallows’…

I’m in the final push for my novel draft, and Monday I lost my glasses.

I cannot read without my glasses — not books, not screens, not anything.

“Great,” I said. “Now I’ll be writing blind.”
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And I realized that —

• after plotting almost every scene all the way…

Remember when you were a kid writer, and you’d write about four friends who solve the mystery of the porcupines on the moon? Or when you were a teenage writer and you wrote about a maniacal doctor with a secret lab, who turned people into sad, electric ghosts?

And now…

Imagine a man. He wears a shirt with a confederate flag. He is not wearing a mask, because he woke up in a free country. He is walking home from a counter-protest against Black Lives Matter agitators who have come to his town. …