There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large.

Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it's too late?

It was interesting the way a small hate could grow inside a big hate and take it over.

Skip meeting him? The butterflies, the pounding heart, the blushing? The part where you enter each other's magnetic fields for the first time, and it's like invisble lines of energy are drawing you together-

Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.

Cesky Krumlov, the little jewel box of a city in southern Bohemia.

The thing is, you throw brains and souls into an animal and stir, you don’t really know what you’re going to get.