Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.

And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.

Most people write the same sentence over and over again. The same number of words-say, 8-10, or 10-12. The same sentence structure. Try to become stretchy-if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20 word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties. If you're generally a 20 word writer, make sure you throw in some threes, fivers and sevens, just to keep the reader from going crosseyed.

I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.

The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.