It's not prowess if you watch 5 hours of TV a day. It's just how you choose to spend your time.

One of my favorite artists on Deviantart.

I do this so you cannot help but hear. A wise man views a moonless night with fear.

I don't feel beholden to follow the real world at all. The important thing is to know WHY things turned out the way they did. You need to understand the reasons for events, or at least be able to make reasonable guesses about them.

I knelt and opened up my lute case. Moving the lute aside, I pressed the lid of the secret compartment and twisted it open. I slid Threpe's sealed letter inside, where it joined the hollow horn with Nina's drawing and a small sack of dried apple I had stowed there. There was nothing special about the dried apple, but in my opinion if you have a secret compartment in your lute case and don't use it to hide things, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with you.

Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woefully small targets.

You want to publish with a publisher because a publisher knows how to publish a book. And you don't. You really don't.