You have an audience that is fairly well grounded in the real world. You serve them and yourself best by making everything as real as possible.

Never before had she seen such creatures, though they looked much live very large, very shaggy white goats. Thin black horns punctuated the top of their long faces. You look like a collection of grandfathers, she thought, amused.

Sandry: "There has to be something we can do." Lark: "We're mages. We do what we can, but some problems are too big to fix." Sandry: "Then I wish I weren't a mage. What good is magic, if you can't use it to help people.

I told Ersken, "Lately it's been like living on the knife's edge, never knowing which side I'll fall off on" Ersken clapped me on the shoulder as we stepped into the street. "Cheer up, Beka. Maybe you were going to fall off that razor's edge before, but not today," he said, as good humored as always. "Today we're doing to jump.

When it was her own doing, she was always tempted to skip a day, or just glance down, then get back to the ground. Kel had to force herself to keep her vow.

What people tell me they take away from my books is that they can shape their lives, they can achieve their own dreams. And certainly that's what I want them to take away.

Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong.