The true warrior isn't immune to fear. She fights in spite of it.

Write with abandon and no constraints for first draft. Cut brutally and save in separate files on second draft. Add conflict; don't be afraid to make your characters suffer. Read what you love. Write what you love. Love.

What shall we do, all of us? All of us oassionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?

Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose.

But be careful; sand is already broken but glass breaks. The shoes are for dancing, not running away.

You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew.

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.