I’ve started drafting on yellow legal pads. It’s been a good change. When I’m working on a new story, I have the bad habit of revising too soon, touching up sentences until they feel just right, and writing perfect paragraphs only to delete them a week later. It’s easy to do that when I’m typing, but writing by hand keeps me moving forward.

It reminds me of that classic saying about writing: “Kill your darlings.” It’s harder to kill your darlings when you’ve given them names, read them bedtime stories and invested in their college funds. Better to neglect them. Write by hand.

Luckily, I have bad handwriting. That used to bother me. (If you’re one of those people whose handwriting has looked like its own official font since you were six years old, I hate you). But I’ve found the bright side: you can’t obsessively revise something you can barely read.

It’s all about perspective, people.

I finished drafting a novel that will most likely sit untouched until the spring. Right now I’m working on a story that tries to answer the following question: what would a positive climate future look like for mankind one-hundred or so years in the future? It isn’t hard to imagine how things could go wrong — but how might they go right? What if our response to climate change could make us a more unified and humane society? The idea was inspired by an environmental justice class that I just finished taking, and its protagonist is a twelve-year old boy living in a hyper-dense futuristic city. It’s creeping along in a way that implies it may be more than just a short story.