I try to force myself to go all the way through to the end. I feel like big changes at the roots are much better than lots of small changes at the branches. I definitely feel like every writer has their strengths and weaknesses, and I feel my strength is that I’m really flexible. I’m open to—not to doing anything, but to considering anything. So yeah, in this book, the protagonist, Arlo, came along fairly late. The structure totally changed. To me, it’s all about cutting and structure. I think pretty analytically. So if I can just get past the first draft, and start to think like a teacher of my own work, that’s helpful for me.

Working in 3D environments allows me to have a lot more latitude in how I create my projects, but it actually creates a much harder editing process. Since entire scenes are scripted and key-framed you can endlessly revisit and modify everything. In a sort of post-photographic sense, it’s like having a perpetual decisive moment. I’m working with virtual cameras and lighting quite often, and it is a major challenge to pare down the process to best fit the goals of the project.

I actually really love editing poetry. It’s my favorite part. I love how you can change just one word and it suddenly elevates the line or even the whole poem. When I’m writing poetry, I’m looking and reading through and I’m really interrogating each word and trying to figure out: Is this the best word? Is this exactly what I’m trying to say at this moment? And I do a lot of reading aloud because cadence and rhythm are really important to me. I try to feel where the lines are sitting or where the stresses are, where the hits and the rhythm are. I also like to use those read-aloud functions on the computer because I feel like if it can still sound somewhat bearable with this monotone voice reading it, then that’s probably going to be alright—it’s the final test.

It was devastating. That’s really the only word. I was looking for another one. It was devastating on a number of levels, but mostly because I had to confront the fact that I had hurt this person so much that they would say that to me. That was the devastating thing. The rewriting was … once again, I’m not sure if “therapeutic” is the word, but it did feel something like a penance.