Bones Mend. Regret Stays With You Forever.

You Lack The Requisite Spine And Testicular Fortitude To Study Under Me.

I Decided To Dub The Room With The Good Chairs My Lutery. Or Perhaps My Performatory. I Would Need A While To Come Up With Something Suitably Pretentious.

The Thing That Helps Me Do A Good Job Is That I Don't Feel The Need To Explain Everything About The World To My Reader. I'm Not Writing A History Text On The Four Corners. I'm Telling A Story That's Set There. The Setting Belongs In The Background For The Most Part, And It's Easy For Fantasy Authors To Forget That. That's One Of The Unfortunate Parts Of Tolkien's Legacy, In My Opinion. Read The First Hundred Pages Of The Fellowship Of The Ring And You Start To Get Pissed, "shut Up About The Shire's Museums! Isn't The World Supposed To Be In Peril Or Something?"

Reading Aloud Sounds Like A Good Idea, But Honestly, It Doesn't Work Very Well. Good Dialogue In A Book Doesn't Actually Bear Much Resemblance To Real-life Dialogue. For Example, If You've Ever Seen A Word-for-word Transcript Of People Talking, It Doesn't Read Off The Page Very Well. The Trick Is To Make It *seem* Like It's Being Spoken, Not To Make It Speakable.

It Was Wise Enough To Know Itself, And Brave Enough To Be Itself, And Wild Enough To Change Itself While Somehow Staying Altogether True.