Luck is not as random as you think. Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.

Frost grows on the window glass, forming whorl patterns of lovely translucent geometry. Breathe on the glass, and you give frost more ammunition. Now it can build castles and cities and whole ice continents with your breath’s vapor. In a few blinks you can almost see the winter fairies moving in . . . But first, you hear the crackle of their wings.

I've always been creative verbally, had a flair, my teachers said - wrote great expository essays in elementary school, scribbled little poems, embraced all writing assignments. And all along I read voraciously - first in Russian and then, after we left the USSR, in English, and even Spanish.

Luck is not as random as you think. Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.

The satisfaction of short fiction does not come close to the rich pleasure I get as a writer in the long deep immersion in the same long work and its growing complexity. I suppose you might say I love to wallow in my characters and imaginary worlds. I love to play with the whole necklace, not just one glittering stone.

The act of sharing with readers was at first too much of an intimate thing. But it evolved into an intense necessity to share.

We often engage the defense mechanism of tunnel vision, just to keep ourselves focused on our daily lives. This makes us terribly jaded in our perception of what is really around us.