Lately,

I've been focused on short stories.

Reading: Floating Like the Dead by Yasuko Thanh; Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner, and Like Life by Lorrie Moore. Each book is teaching me something new. I'm laughing a lot as well.

In my own work, I'm rewriting and restructuring. Trying to find out how to make a story work. Realizing that writing a story takes a lot of work and admitting that I need to push myself harder. Some things I'm trying to work on: Dialogue, making a story enjoyable to read, pacing.

The biggest: Trying to write the sort of stuff that I would like to read. Maybe it's so obvious that I didn't notice it before. But it is vital.

I keep returning to this interview with Michael Robbins. He talks about writing the first poem that he thought was good: "I was 35 years old, had written hundreds of poems, and was only now beginning to feel like I knew what I was doing. More important, I knew what I wanted to do. I knew the sorts of poems I wanted to write and how to write them."

It takes work, seriously!