What Strange Places Our Lives

And I Grew Up On A Steady Diet Of Science Fiction, Especially Apocalyptic And Postapocalyptic Fiction.

It Was Possible, He Understood, For A Person's Life To Become Just A Long Series Of Mistakes, And That The End, When It Came, Was Just One More Mistake In A Chain Of Bad Choices. The Thing Was, Most Of These Mistakes Were Actually Borrowed From Other People. You Took Their Bad Ideas, And For Whatever Reason, Made Them Your Own.

If You Write A Good Action Sequence Well In A Novel, You're Already Writing It For Film, Because The Only Way To Do It Well Is To Use Some Of The Same Tricks. They're Rhetorical, Not Visual, But It's The Same Move.

One Of The Traps Or The Pitfalls Of Writing A Trilogy - Or A Triptych, Or Whatever Term You Want To Use - Is That The Second Book Can Be A Long Second Act To Get You From Book One To Book Three, Which Borrows All Of Its Energy From The First Book.

Kittredge Had Obviously Misjudged Her, But He Had Learned That Was The Way With Most People. The Story Was Never The Story, And It Surprised You, How Much Another Person Could Carry.