If I Had To Give Up My

Plot Comes First. The Plot Is The Archictecture Of Your Novel. You Wouldn't Build A House Without A Plan. If I Wrote Without A Plot, It Would Just Be A Pile Of Bricks. Characters Are Your Servants. They Must Serve Your Plot.

There Must Be Limits, Somewhere, To The Human Footprint On This Earth. When The Whole Of The World Is Reduced To Nothing But Human Product, We Will Have Lost The Map That Can Show Us How We Got Here, And Can Offer Our Spirits An Answer When We Ask Why. Surely We Are Capable Of Declaring Sacred Some Quarters That We Dare Not Enter Or Possess.

You See Mother, You Had No Life Of Your Own. They Have No Idea. One Has Only A Life Of One's Own.

Want Is A Thing That Unfurls Unbidden Like Fungus, Opening Large Upon Itself, Stopless, Filling The Sky. But Needs, From One Day To The Next, Are Few Enough To Fit In A Bucket, With Room Enough Left To Rattle Like Brittle Brush In A Dry Wind.

In Exchange For His First Taste Of Powdered Milk, Pascal Showed Me A Tree We Could Climb To Find A Bird's Nest. After We Handled And Examined The Pink-skinned Baby Birds, He Popped One Of Them Into His Mouth Like A Jujube. It Seemed To Please Him A Lot. He Offered A Baby Bird To Me, Pantomiming That I Should Eat It. I Understood Perfectly Well What He Meant, But I Refused. He Did Not Seem Disappointed To Have To Eat The Whole Brood Himself.