To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.

Tragedy alters everything.

Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.