Here's the thing about luck...you don't know if it's good or bad until you have some perspective.

Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips.

At midnight the wind in the tress can sound like the ocean. The moonlight can make a road appear as endless as the sea.

I read Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," all of Shirley Jackson's books, which I loved.

I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.

I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.

When I write for teens, I feel I can cut through everything and get to the bare bones. I can get straight into the emotional world of the character.