Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.

I thought I was your destination. Looks like I was just another stop on the line.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

I'm a stranger," pointed out Bod. "You're not," she said, definitely. "You're a little boy." And then she said, "And you're my friend. So you can't be a stranger.