Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.