I thought it was her wicked stepmother who poisoned her...' '...Turned out the wicked stepmother had an alibi.' '...Seems she was off poisoning someone else at the time. Chance in a million, really. It was just bad luck.

She was plump, with dyed red hair and a face so caked with cosmetics that the floor of the Amazon jungle probably saw more natural light.

I'm a ghost," said the small figure, then added, a little uncertainly, "Boo?

What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.

‎"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly." "really?" said Sarge. "what flavor?

...it was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that.

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.