I tell my kids that if you say something intending it to be a joke and nobody laughs… it probably wasn’t a joke and instead you said an asshole thing. We all do it sometimes.

I tell my kids that if you assign people roles like “bully” or “victim” then you probably aren’t looking at the whole picture: people are more complex than that.

I tell my kids that if you blame other people for your problems then you are deciding you don’t want to fix things.

I tell my kids that if you eat shitty food you will be in a shitty mood.

I tell my kids that if you yuck someone else’s yum they may end up not liking you and they won’t want to spend time with you. You don’t have to like everything that someone else likes, you do have to not be an asshole about it.

I’m to about 8% of my NaNoWriMo goal the day before the event starts. I’m not good at waiting. And my personal goal is more like 100,000 words, not 50,000. This book is not going to be small. These are the lessons and the stories I want my kids to hear from me if I die. That’s a lot of words.