Air and Water can just swirl around being swirly, and Fire is just kind of aggressive, but my gut feeling is that Earth needs to work for a living. Earth has stuff to be doing. Earth is busy. Earth is solid and responsible and works hard. Earth is reliable. Earth is the designated driver of the elements and will always come over and feed the cat when you're out of town.

Air and Water can just swirl around being swirly, and Fire is just kind of aggressive, but my gut feeling is that Earth needs to work for a living. Earth has stuff to be doing. Earth is busy. Earth is solid and responsible and works hard. Earth is reliable. Earth is the designated driver of the elements and will always come over and feed the cat when you're out of town.

If I may bend your ear for a moment, I like Terry Pratchett. I like footnotes. I like footnotes even when they are not as entertaining as a Pratchett footnote, even when they are in the middle of a book on evolutionary biology and briefly explain the Red Queen hypothesis or the fate of the Stephen's Island Wren or how many bunnies can dance on the back of Australia. Footnotes fill me with a very mild glee. The endnote simply does not compare.

Once upon a time there was a girl who discovered that if she played a certain tune on a jade flute, she could summon up jade gnomes, a peculiar, harmless, but rather creepy looking spirit of the underground. The fact is that many of us have talents like this, but generally never discover them due to lack of opportunity, since one can go one's entire life without playing a jade flute, or discovering that one can speak the language of ground sloths, or turning fruitcake into solid tungsten by singing Sinatra tunes to it under a quarter moon.

Every now and again, a painting will get away from my control and take over. Sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's a giant drooling hairy thing with pointy teeth. You know how it is.

I really wish there had been a way to phrase this as 'A thunder of worms.' Because I like that phrase. That's a phrase with soul. Worm thunder on the horizon, all is right with the cosmos.

The minute I sit down and think 'Okay, this must be KID SAFE!' my Muse develops Tourrette's and goes to lunch with Clive Barker, and my mind plunges into the gutter and I draw an appalling blank on anything that is not violent, gory, profanity laden, or depraved. So I think the only way I can ever do kid's books if I plan not to do kid's books. If that makes any sense.