The choice is yours, brother. Live a thrall or die a king. Do you dare to fly? Unless you take the leap, you’ll never know." - Euron Greyjoy

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

When I was a boy, I dreamt that I could fly, he announces. When I woke, I couldn't... or so the maester said. But what if he lied? What do you mean? Perhaps we can fly. All of us. How will we ever know unless we leap from some tall tower? No man ever truly knows what he can do unless he dares to leap. There is the window. Leap. What do you want? The world.

Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it.

I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business.

The gods made the earth for all men t' share. Only when the kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was all theirs. "My trees," they said, "you can't eat them apples. My stream, you can't fish here. My wood, you're not t' hunt. My earth, my water, my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I'll chop 'em off, but maybe if you kneel t' me I'll let you have a sniff." You call us thieves, but at least a thief has t' be brave and clever and quick. A kneeler only has t' kneel.

'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.