Dancy can hear rain beginning to fall on the tar-paper roof of the cabin. Fat summer raindrops, and it’s the sweetest sound, almost, sweet as the end… - Caitlín R. Kiernan

At some point, I stopped and made the following note to myself: I have never finished a story. I'm beginning to see that now. I don't think that there's ever a point where a story or novel is just exactly right. There are only finer and lesser degrees of refinement, and even those are probably subjective. You might think it's perfect for a time, but read it a year or five years later, and you'll see you were mistaken. There's always something I can make better, every time I read one of my stories. Usually there are dozens of somethings. And I once thought this wasn't true, that a story reached a certain point and beyond that point you were only changing things, making them different, not making them better. Indeed, I thought, beyond a point, you risk screwing it all up. I don't think that anymore. You risk screwing it all up right from the start, and no story is ever as perfect as it can be. Perfection is always one or two polishes away from the writer.

Hay un tirafondo de vía incrustado en mi ojo izquierdo y gremlins correteando en mi cráneo mientras golpean cacerolas y sartenes. Goblins de cráneo

I was thinking, earlier, how there's this stigma attached to "writing for money" and how odd that is, as though writing is akin to sex (another "creative" act?) and writing for money is akin to prostitution in the minds of so many people. Whoring with adjectives, so to speak. Do I give good prose? Look up the definition of "hack." So, there must be the perception that writing, like the priesthood, comes with some higher purpose in tow. Getting paid well somehow sullies the purer cause. I've heard writers dismiss something or another that they've written by explaining, "Oh, yes, I know that sucked, but I only wrote it because they paid me so much money." And then we might even forgive them a piece of crap, because we have a sensible explanation. That wasn't a real orgasm. I was only faking the plot. Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner in Hollywood.