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-

My tiny scary friend is coming

The sooner you learn to finish things, and as a matter of course finish your creative endeavors, the better. It took me a long time to learn that.

Her courage was a guise. She wondered if courage always was, or if there were those who truly felt no fear.

Then there were things-- epic, terrible things-- that he didn't tell her but skirted around, like caressing the edges of a wound, hesitant, testing for pain.

One world on its own is a strange enough seethe of coiling, unknowable veins of intention and chance, but two? Where two worlds mingle breath through rips in the sky, the strange becomes stranger, and many things may come to pass that few imaginations could encompass.

You have only to begin, Lir. Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.