Sometimes it can be useful to read your bad reviews.

Some people just make me feel mentally endangered. Whatever dark stuff is going on in their head, it's coming at me and I need to escape.

Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.

I don't think fake people living in a fake house in a fake suburb are any less dismissible or believable than a fake psychic attending a fake school in a fake town. Nothing's inherently believable about any kind of fiction, because all of it's untrue.

If, at some future point, my face collapses around my eyes, I'd probably do something about it. My eyes are where I live, and if people couldn't see them, no one would know me.

The dreamed outcome of launching a psychic attack can make you feel small and petty. I think for that reason I'm going to refrain from launching any.

When my husband first read a draft, he said, "You spend too much time describing the characters' outfits." He was right. I removed much of the clothes talk, but quite a bit remained.