I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.

Teen fiction should be about teenagers - no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on.

I should probably start with the blood.

I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.

I try not to think too much about an audience when Im writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what Ive written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

I guess that's the secret. It would never have occurred to Lia to want to escape -- but then she gets kicked out. Best thing that ever happened to her? I'm not sure she would say yes, because obliviousness tends to be rather pleasant, but once you realized you've been bolivious, there's no turning back. You can't un-know what you know. You know?

I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.