Music. Close your eyes and it's a rosebush blooming in time lapse so that it shoots and blossoms flow outward in a swift choreography of growth and collapse, twine and coil, release and fade. Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.

It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.

...they cupped their wings around their happiness and called it a world, though they both knew it was not a world, only a hiding place, which is a very different thing.

Be your own place of safety, she told herself, straightening. No crossbar in the world could protect her from what lay ahead, and neither could a tiny knife ticked in her boot - though there her tiny knife would most certainly remain - and neither could a man, not even Akiva. She had to be her own strength, complete unto herself.

Light coursed through Karou and darkness chased it-burning through her, chilling her, shimmer and shadow, ice and fire, blood and starlight, rushing, roaring, filling her.

The truth, she found, felt smooth, like a skipping stone in the palm of your hand.

...something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.