"Oh My God," I blurted, grabbing onto Phin as we faced the open bedroom door. "It's the axe murderer." "I doubt he would knock," she said, but she was whispering, too, and didn't move away from me.

That was easy for him to say when his cell phone was rounding third base. If anyone got a home run tonight, I didn't want it to be Verizon Wireless.

When your family is twice as weird as normal, you have to be twice as polite to authority, because authority hates weird.

"Oh My God," I blurted, grabbing onto Phin as we faced the open bedroom door. "It's the axe murderer." "I doubt he would knock," she said, but she was whispering, too, and didn't move away from me.

Focus, Amy. Just because he looked great in the saddle did not mean he wasn't an axe murderer.

I was the designated grown up in a family that operated in different reality than the rest of the world.

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.