oh, she waltzed with the dead—

(on days when everything else is slipping through your fingers, you can wrap yourself inside of this anger. this will keep you warm at night, help you drift off to sleep, with the certainty that no matter what happens, it will still be there when you wake up.)

your son is sitting at the dining room table wearing your hatred on his shoulders, who is going to be the first to tell him it is finally time to take it off?

Sometimes you don't want to share a story with others. Sometimes you do want to share it, but no one clicks on the title. So why bother writing it down if the only person you can guarantee will read it is you?

You need to get it out of your head. It just keeps replaying in your imagination on a loop and the only way to get it unstuck is to pin it down on paper.

You need to figure out what the story is. You have a lot of disjointed scenes or lines that you know are connected but you can't quite figure out how.

There's something in the story that's important to you, and you don't want to lose that thing by forgetting it. Future you might find that thing important too.

You want to be able to go back to the story again and again. Maybe to make adjustments over time. Maybe just to revisit a story that gives you the emotional release you need in that moment.

You want to be able to use text-to-speech to read the story aloud to you. Maybe it's a bedtime story. Maybe it's keeping you company while you do errands and chores.

You want to find out whether you can write a story (because not everyone can).

You want to be able to have almost the same story, but a little bit different, and you want to have it 15 times with slight variations. Then you can go through your own personal menu picking exactly the combination of beats that will satisfy you most on this reading.

You enjoy the process of finding just the right words or phrases or scenes to paint the pictures you want to shape the scene.

You want to find the exact rhythm and syllables and structure to make a sentence really sing.

TYWIN: Perhaps Highgarden has a high tolerance for unnatural behavior.

OLENNA: I wouldn't say that. True, we don't tie ourselves in knots over a discreet bit of buggery, but brothers and sisters- where I come from, that stain would be very difficult to wash out.