But things don't just fall apart. People break them.

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 should probably start with the blood.

The Waking Dark is about what happens when something awakens a towns darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world.

I used to be an obsessive outliner - figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.

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.

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.