It's just so hard to feel good, you know?" I do know. And more than that, it's just so incredibly hard to feel. (54)

The problem with being grounded is it gives you a whole lot of unavoidable time to think. NOt even pulling weeds can take away your ability to plot all the varied and wonderful things you might do to get even, or at least to make up, just get a smidgen for time lost to TV and yard work and house cleaning.

And at some point I would like to talk my publisher into doing an anthology of my poetry alongside some teen readers poetry. It would be fun, and really wonderful to get their stuff out there.

Disappointment Can do a couple things. It can drop you into a giant sucking sinkhole of depression, a place you have to fight to climb out of. Or it can trigger an epic mania to overcome the odds and transform failure into success. Say you swing as high as the chains will take you because you seek the thrill of flight, and on the up- kick, you lose your seat. Injury is likely. But if you worry about falling down, and never chance "up," the sky will remain forever out of reach.

Whatever has happened in someone's past, the future is theirs to shape. The first step is to find a way out.

Love without trust is nothing more than infatuation.

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, Crank, with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.