When all choice is taken from you, life becomes a game of survival.

When You Weren’t Looking The child became a woman, though she wasn’t ready to. Don’t ask how or why. Those questions are not important ones. Can’t you see you didn’t care enough to notice?

You can’t walk away from someone you love, leave them drowning in your desertion. If love has no more meaning than that, you can keep it. I don’t want it now or ever again. Don’t want to hear the word or wear its scars.

Eventually, it becomes a matter of scale. When the good outweighs the bad, you stay. When the bad is the only thing you notice anymore, you think about your future, or what's left of it, consider options.

No way to get away. No way to get away. Little change to sneak away... insanity.

Too much to take in, too much to purge. Why must every memory, once sweet, dead end in such ugliness?

In my books my characters experience things as they are. My books allow youth an honest look at important issues affecting them. As adults we want to believe things like sex abuse or drug use are not happening anymore, or happening less and less, but that's not the case and we need to acknowledge that. We can't make life prettier for youth, but we can arm them.