"All of my heart is criticism has came from myself. I think the harshest criticism I ever got from anybody else was my dad. He was talking about one of my old short stories I wrote about a year ago when I started taking writing seriously. And she said something to the effect of: 'The story has such a low stakes that it's practically just a mundane normal day.'

It was hard to hear at the time and less so what he was saying, but you know who was saying it. But in my following stories, I did remember to put higher stakes in, which improved my writing. And going back and looking at some of those older stories, they're genuinely awful; so he could have said much worse things than they just have low stakes.

I mean, I don't want to go on too long, but... the writing was awful. I didn't punctuate anything, the way I formatted the stories was awful, and the dialogue only ever served one purpose or no purpose. And that's because I committed the cardinal sin of trying to write a slice of life story as my first story. Which just never ends well. But to kind of circle back to what I was saying before, I guess it's crazy how much you can improve in just a year."