They had battled and bloodied one another, they had kept secrets, broken hearts, lied, betrayed, exiled, they had walked away, said goodbye and sworn it was forever, and somehow, every time, they had mended, they had forgiven, they had survived. Some mistakes could never be fixed - some, but not all. Some people can't be driven away, no matter how hard you try. Some friendships won't break.

For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.

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 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.

In dreams you can become everything you're not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite.

I should probably start with the blood.