When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.

In TV, you're a 'writer for hire.' That means you're trying to guess what your boss wants and delivering that story. There's a lot of spitballing. The big thing is 'breaking story,' which means coming up with a story. You do it by episode and put it all up on a board.

I always was missing that female brown queer perspective, and I think in 'Vida' we have that. A lot of things I wanted to touch on and deal with, I get to do here.

I went in for a meeting with Marta Fernandez, and she said, 'We are looking for a female millennial show. Have you heard of the term 'chipster'?' And I was like, 'Of course - Chicana hipster.'

Unless you're Gisele, you wake up some days and feel ugly. When that happens, I accept that I'm not perfect and it's OK; I can start over again tomorrow.

Research who your politicians are, even; know what they do, know who they're supported by legislatively, and know who is supporting them financially for their campaigns. Because ever since Citizens United, we've seen a massive growth in the amount of campaign contributions and corruption in politics as a result, and that has to change.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

The Black Lives Matter National Network and the movement at large are sophisticated. We're not easily won over by talking points and campaign trail pledges. We want to see meaningful collaboration and a genuine transformation of American democracy.