As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."

I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.

Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?