A pause came between them, and it was so full of Akiva that Karou imagined she could smell him.
The sooner you learn to finish things, and as a matter of course finish your creative endeavors, the better. It took me a long time to learn that.
When you are young, hone your craft and write shorter pieces instead of novels, because it’s really hard to finish a novel.
There’s a long pause. But it’s not a bad pause, because Mik is looking at me like I’m the treasure from the high shelf that someone’s just taken down and put into his hands. I find I don’t mind being looked at like this. I don’t mind it at all.
Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.
During my second draft pass on my last book I made 20,000 words happen in a week, which is practically supernatural for me, and it would never have been possible without three nights in a hotel in my own city.
I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.
They were tower stairs, a tight corkscrew down. The spiraling descent made Karou dizzy: down, around, down, around, hypnotic, until it seemed as if she were caught in a purgatory of stairs and would go down like this forever.
As for Ellai, she told her sister what had passed, and Nitid wept, and her tears fell to earth and became chimaera, children of regret...
In all that was to happen, there would be that feeling of inevitability and rightness, and the sense that the universe was conspiring in it. It would be easy.
A bruxis. That was the one wish more powerful than a gavriel, and its trade value was singular: The only way to purchase one was with one’s own teeth. All of them, self-extracted.
You mean he came to your school? The scandalous rodent-loaf!
We only get to be one person; we don’t even get to choose that person. By the time we get ahold of ourselves, we are pieces already in play.
You just mingled saliva with the most beautiful boy ever to tread the hallways of Saint Pock’s. Saliva. There’s DNA in saliva. You’re like carrying his cells in your mouth like one of those weird frogs that incubates its eggs in its cheeks.
I’ve always imagined that one day the path of your life would unroll at your feet and carry you away from us. As it should, as it must. But I am glad that day is not today.
Cats and ghosts both partook of the saucers of milk and that was okay. They consumed different parts of it: the cats its substance, the ghosts its essence, and none went to waste.
Creatures with no dreams of their own can do naught but destroy the dreams of others.
Kizzy wanted it all so bad her soul leaned half out of her body hungering after it, and that was what drove the goblins wild, her soul hanging out there like an untucked shirt.
The thing is, you throw brains and souls into an animal and stir, you don’t really know what you’re going to get.
I miss sunrise even more. The green scent of dawn in the forest? The color blushing back into the world, different every day.