I carry a screwdriver in my car for the same reason. There’s no way to open my hood otherwise. (But then I also always have a screwdriver in the event of a battery-changing emergency).

I recently read this phrase in a comment: “commie libtard Hollyweird leftie.” For starters, we’re still calling people commies, Grandpa HUAC? And do right-wing lunatics *really* believe the wealthy and beautiful at the top of the entertainment industry want to overthrow capitalism? 

Where do they not work?

“My butthole was hacked!”

I don’t find it offensive as a parent, but I find it offensive as a way of thinking about dogs, who are not, you know, babies or toddlers or whatever. I feel the same about people who refer to their dogs as “puppies” their whole lives. Of course dogs have evolved to live peaceably with us, but they also have to…

So many people are paid to create buzz in publishing, including by getting ARCs to the top reviewers at Goodreads and Amazon. In my experience, amateur reviewers are so delighted to get free books they’re rarely very critical, and undoubtedly the rest of the buzz was purchased, too, just in different ways. 

I don’t know if the unhappiness was connected to the death of print journalism (as in “everyone was suffering”) but the people I knew who were in newspaper writing during the decline were universally miserable. 

Over the years I’ve had some amazing copyeditors, including one who sent me back my manuscript with a handwritten note saying, “I took the liberty of assuming that a great deal of what might otherwise be corrected is your voice, and so I left those things. I didn’t want you to spend the next three days writing STET on…

Ditto, pal. As you well know, this is a thrilling topic for so few.

I’ll be tooling about at the beginning of a sentence and think, “M-dash, I’m gonna need one more for my baby and a couple for the road, because I’m about to blow our minds.”

I write for a living, but words fail me when it comes to describing how much I love the Oxford comma, the semicolon, and my best friend, the m-dash. I’m going to punctuate my way into HEAVEN, Montoviro.

The way she runs from him, the child screaming in the background? Have mercy.

My face is your star.

There was a shooting inside the Wal-Mart close to me just a few days ago. The first article I read specified it had happened in the produce section, a detail I appreciated, and quoted a young woman (who helped keep the victim alive until ambulances arrived) as saying the bullet “had gone through him.” Two bystanders…

Thanks for this recommendation.

I loved this article. That’s all.

True sweetness. You said it.

I used to see him around New Orleans when I still had a place there, and this is a goofy thing to say but he sort of radiates goodness. Good humor, heart. There’s no way he shares Roseanne’s batshit politics.

She’ll be the first one to die when they reach the new planet. When they disembark from the spaceship, they’ll push her out in front — happens every time.

What is happening to the world?