The air was heavy with the smell of leather and dust, of old parchment and binding glue. It smelled of secrets.

All stories are true,” Skarpi said. “But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.” He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. “More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.

The thing that helps me do a good job is that I don't feel the need to explain everything about the world to my reader. I'm not writing a history text on the Four Corners. I'm telling a story that's set there. The setting belongs in the background for the most part, and it's easy for fantasy authors to forget that. That's one of the unfortunate parts of Tolkien's legacy, in my opinion. Read the first hundred pages of the Fellowship of the Ring and you start to get pissed, "Shut up about the Shire's museums! Isn't the world supposed to be in peril or something?"

Writing from a teen's perspective is easy as pie. At least I've actually been a teen. I've never been a woman, or an ethnic minority, or a weary old man. If anything, writing from the perspective of a child is probably easier for me. When I was a kid everyone thought I was so clever and precocious. Now that I'm adult, everyone thinks that I'm kinda odd and childish.

What I'd love more than anything is for Worldbuilders to continue to grow and become entangled in all the different corners of the geek community.

She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important.

Reading aloud sounds like a good idea, but honestly, it doesn't work very well. Good dialogue in a book doesn't actually bear much resemblance to real-life dialogue. For example, if you've ever seen a word-for-word transcript of people talking, it doesn't read off the page very well. The trick is to make it *seem* like it's being spoken, not to make it speakable.