Julia was as happy as Betsy was, almost. One nice thing about Julia was that she rejoiced in other people's luck.

it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.

She tried to act as though it were nothing to go to the library alone. But her happiness betrayed her. Her smile could not be restrained, and it spread from her tightly pressed mouth, to her round cheeks, almost to the hair ribbons tied in perky bows over her ears.

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.

I am Orafoura, but you can call me Jarod Kintz. I__ fairly proud to proclaim that Dora J. Arod has me on her short list of __orld__ worst writers._ The list couldn__ get any shorter, because I__ the only name on it. I should tell her to stop calling it a list, and change the title to __orld__ worst writer._ If you__e wondering why I rate all my work one star, it__ because the rating system doesn__ have a zero star option, or better yet, go into negative numbers.

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth__ ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.