At least one thing was consistent about her life: It just kept on getting more complicated.

She looked at David closely, and the feeling was still there. She could see that his forehead was too high, that a small scar cut a white stroke through his eyebrow. And his smile was pretty crooked, really. But it was as if something had changed inside Tally's head, something that had turned his face pretty to her.

She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable. Tally Youngblood was a weed. And, unlike the orchids, she wasn't even a pretty one.

We needed to become world-famous soon, while there was still that kind of world to be famous in.

When the term "machine gun" enters common parlance, the word "machine" becomes much more sinister.

I've learned a lot about stage-managing for illustration. Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image. I've also learned to making big-scale design decisions early.

It's amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.