Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.

It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

The regional voice is the universal voice.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.