I finished this book a few days ago, and the only positive thing I can remember about it is the series of quotations from Cynthia Ozick's Writers at Work interview. I found this book vague, rambling, and filled with cloying "poetic" observations that made me want to scream and cover the page with red ink.A far, far superior book is Anne Lamott's modern classic _Bird By Bird_, not only for dealing with envy but for just about every other topic covered in _Writing Past Dark_. When I finished reading _Bird By Bird_ I wanted to kiss it; when I finished reading _Writing Past Dark_, I wanted to throw it across the room.