Book notes

They say that editing a bad draft is far easier than composing on a blank page, and that’s true—I feel so confident in my writing just then. I keep finding turns of phrases that suit the text far better than Athena’s throwaway descriptions. I spot where the pacing sags, and I mercilessly cut out the meandering filler. I draw out the plot’s through

perhaps because you perceive a hint of Alabaster in its interstices like a curl of citrus rind added to a savory dish. He’s prepped it for you.

At another comm, whose people don’t even bother to warn them before aiming crossbows, it is Nassun who saves them. She does this by wrapping her arms around her father and setting her teeth in the earth and dragging every iota of life and heat and movement out of the whole comm until it is a gleaming frosted confection of ice-slivered slate walls

Most of the plots are planted heavily with grains and vegetables, and there are a number of people out working on them, since it’s a nice day and no one knows the Guardians are busily killing everyone in the admin building.

She was also quite tall for a little old lady,

In the concealed safe in his office – a walk-in room he was extremely proud of – on a shelf he had put up himself, and had recently needed to put up again when it fell down, was a leather vanity case,

New Scotland Yard was once an ordinary office block that was leased by the Met in the 1960s. Since then the interior of the senior offices had been refitted several times, most recently during the 1990s, easily the worst decade for institutional decor since the 1970s.

If I ask what I’m asking only of people who agree with me at the outset, with whom I already share a dream and a language, then there’s no point in asking at all.

It caught Hendrik and lifted him, gasping and struggling, over the side and out to sea. Another wave roared across the deck and Blackthorne locked one arm through the wheel and the water passed him by. Now Hendrik was fifty yards to port. The wash sucked him back alongside, then a giant comber threw him high above the ship, held him there for a