I set out to find five perfect gifts that you could conceivably give to anyone on your list. The gifts had to be tried-and-true: they needed to be things that I had given to others (that, importantly, were loved and cherished by their recipients); they needed to be things that I personally have used, tried, and loved; and they couldn’t be too crazily expensive. After combing through my receipts and my texts and my house and my gift-giving notes from the past fifteen years, I found five gifts that have stood the test of time.

I tend to separate my writing process into several distinct phases.

The first is the creative and generative stage, or what I like to call the “I’m actually writing” phase. This is when I have some incomplete idea of a story in my head, and I’m trying to get it down on paper…

My weakness is obsession. I am constantly finding new things I want to learn about, do, try, understand, make sense of, or figure out, and then spending every moment of my free time reading, writing, listening, working, and learning everything about them. I’ve always been this way.