Well, the purchase that has influenced me over the last six months is the Apple pencil. I do so much of my artwork by hand and now there is a device that draws and feels like a real pencil that I can use electronically. It’s changed the way I work.

We’ve already got it. It’s the Frisbees, for sure. I was hanging out with my two brothers and my dad. We decided to drive up the coast and my two brothers and me, we’ve played Frisbee golf our whole lives so we love it, and my dad, not so much. But we got a bunch of discs and then we went really high up on Highway 1 and threw them out into the ocean.

I hate to plug my other podcast, but on episode two I went out and interviewed this guy that is a master of pens. He knows more about pens than we do about anything else on earth. He recommended three pens that have the absolute best rollerball pen, the best fountain pen – and these are all $4.00 pens. ... I swapped out my entire stock of pens at my desk with these cheap little $3.00 to $4.00 pens and they’re amazing.

Easy, easy. An electric toothbrush. I got the Oral-B iO. This changes your life. I mean you can’t go back. You can’t go back.

There are many times for three months in a row I wrote every day, but there are also many times for three months in a row I didn't write a word. What I found is I make an appointment with myself and I don't look at each day, I look at the calendar ahead.

What I’ve really learned in my 43 years is that the body does not lie; the body actually tells you what’s right and wrong. If you get a sinking feeling in your stomach or a heavy heart about something, you shouldn’t do it; and if you get a lifting, light feeling in your body, you should.

My mother would have been proud of my hike. I would love for my own children to have such adventures someday. I hope they do. I hope the word that comes to them when they see a photograph of me in twenty years is go.

The way I often find what I’m going to write next is by writing.

I think it would be this thing that I learned when I was writing my first book. It would be surrender to your own mediocrity, which sounds kind of sad, right?

But a running theme has been how many men have said something along the lines of, “Wow, I was so surprised I loved your book, because I’m a man.” These men mean no harm—I don’t take those comments personally—and yet the fact that they were surprised that they loved a book by and about a woman is an indication of the sexism women writers are up against every time they write.