As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education.

Lonliness evaporated off of them like the steam off dry ice, and by morning it was just a cloud on the ceiling of the room, then gone with the light.

I can be most colorful and inventive when I am angry.

How could you deal with a creature as devious as woman.

San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It's a great setting for a horror story.

The medium obscured the message.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.