I grow green beans in my garden. The one thing I know about harvesting them is that you need to train your eyes to see the beans. At first it all looks like leaves, until you see one bean and then another and another. If you want clarity, too, you have to look hard. You have to look under things and look from different angles. You'll see what you need to when you do that. A hundred beans, suddenly.

A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and let go?

Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the Queen of Everything, I thought it was a book for adults.

You've got to say what you mean and mean what you say...Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.

You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost.

Just that, is one of those uncommon moments, those times when you don't wish for something else, for even one thing to be different; when you have no other needs or worries, where your insides are calm, and everything you were ever restless about, anything that had ever given you angst, is quieted to stillness. No steel ball in your chest, no breathless fear. No blue numbness of nearly passing out, no nagging doubts of the backstage mind. All of that, forgotten. It is just rightness, so rare.

If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?