20 minutes later: a girl on Himmel Street. She looks up. She speaks in whisper. 'The sky is soft today, Max. The clouds are so soft and sad, and...' She looks away and crosses her arms. She thinks of her papa going to war and grabs her jacket at each side of her body. 'And it's cold, Max. It's so cold.

Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.

That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.

I stood there and stared, into the sky and at the city around me. I stood, hands at my side, and I saw what had happened to me and who I was and the way things would always be for me. Truth. There was no more wishing, or wondering. I knew who I was, and what I would always do. I believed it, as my teeth touched and my eyes were overrun.

There are two magic acts I want to pull off when I write. One is creating a feeling that when you're inside a book, you believe everything you're reading even when you know it's not true. And the second is an extension of that, which is you know it's not true, you know it's not real, but you believe it anyway. And it's that believing of the story that isn't real that attracted me to writing and storytelling in general.

Only hearts... They're in the inside of the inside of me.

It's not the place, I think. It's the people. We'd have all been the same anywhere else.