Both Back When I Was Acting And

The Smell Of The Sea Swept Over The Wall And In Through The Empty Window-hole, Wide And Wild With A Million Intoxicating Secrets. I Don't Trust That Smell. It Hooks Us Somewhere Deeper Than Reason Or Civilization, In The Fragments Of Our Cells That Rocked In Oceans Before We Had Minds, And It Pulls Till We Follow Mindlessly As Rutting Animals....it Lures Us To Leap Off High Cliffs, Fling Ourselves On Towering Waves, Leaves Behind Everyone We Love And Face Into Thousands Of Miles Of Open Water For The Sake Of What Might Be On The Far Shore.

The Thing About Being A Mystery Writer, What Marks A Mystery Writer Out From A Chick Lit Author Or Historical Fiction Writer, Is That You Always Find A Mystery In Every Situation.

You Forget What It Was Like. You'd Swear On Your Life You Never Will, But Year By Year It Falls Away. How Your Temperature Ran Off The Mercury, Your Heart Galloped Flat-out And Never Needed To Rest, Everything Was Pitched On The Edge Of Shattering Glass. How Wanting Something Was Like Dying Of Thirst. How Your Skin Was Too Fine To Keep Out Any Of The Million Things Flooding By; Every Color Boiled Bright Enough To Scald You, Any Second Of Any Day Could Send You Soaring Or Rip You To Bloody Shreds.

For A Moment, I Felt As If The Universe Had Turned Upside Down And We Were Falling Softly Into An Enormous Black Bowl Of Stars, And I Knew, Beyond Any Doubt, That Everything Was Going To Be Alright.

Now That's A Concept That's Always Fascinated Me: The Real World. Only A Very Specific Subset Of People Use The Term, Have You Noticed? To Me, It Seems Self-evident That Everyone Lives In The Real World - We All Breathe Real Oxygen, Eat Real Food, The Earth Under Our Feet Feels Equally Solid To All Of Us. But Clearly These People Have A Far More Tightly Circumscribed Definition Of Reality, One That I Find Deeply Mysterious, And An Almost Pathologically Intense Need To Bring Others Into Line With That Definition.