I hold my breath when I write. I hold my breath through a sentence or a paragraph. I exhale when it’s safely on paper.

I wrote this week. I had thoughts on my writing this week.

A lot of what my book seems to want to be about is finding your voice in dark times.

The events of this past week — shootings and letter bombs and unimaginable sorrows and increasingly dark times for the most vulnerable among us — provide too much real fodder for the work.

There are many feelings now — anger, dismay, fear. These feelings are a constant for some of us, stoked by the occasional (or not-so-occasional) event that for most people are just sad news stories.

I’m just sitting with that today until I exhale.