And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

For me - showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively - well, that's what it's like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time.

Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.