Glen Hirshberg

The ghosts that exert the most power in people__ lives-at least, the people I know__end to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody.

More than anything, Natalie wanted to move to the bed, take Sophie's hand, sit beside her.Lay her head against her shoulder. But she didn't dare. Or maybe just couldn't. Fear. Friendship. Desire. Regret. Remorse. Longing. Hunger. Terror. It was getting so hard to tell the difference between any of those things. If she'd ever been able to. If anyone really could.

The fever, I realized, had gone. Beneath my feet, the hardwood floor felt cool on my feet, the air gentle against my itching legs. This was just the world, after all. Big, thoroughly mapped place to sell joy or buy it, hunt company or flee it, trust yourself or your friends or your instincts, stretch the hours as much as you could, and one day vanish. ("Safety Clowns")

I__ a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office__ waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day.

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It__ the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.

Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the to light is, know what it will do to them. And they come anyway.

Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the light is, know what it will do to them. And come anyway.

...I__e never understood the logic that says a work doesn__ need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I__e also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer.