Meg Hapgood

Later I would see that my mother’s broken English was far more beautiful than my perfect one. She had a strong voice, writers would say. ‘I got no wave’ is so much more evocative than ‘My phone isn’t getting reception’.

‘Hell of a goofy dog,’ said Fat Charlie’s father. ‘Like that friend of Donald Duck’s. Hey, Goofy.’ And what once had been Best in Show suddenly slipped and shifted. For Fat Charlie, it was as if he saw the dog through his father’s eyes, and darned if it wasn’t a pretty goofy dog, all things considered. Almost rubbery. It didn’t take long for the

I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money. My professors came into focus, suddenly and sharply; it was as if before the grant I’d been looking at them through a blurred lens. My textbooks began to make sense, and I found myself doing more than the required reading.

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

Fat Charlie went back down to the end of the corridor, and knocked on the door. ‘What is it now?’ ‘I want to talk.’ The door clicked and swung open. Fat Charlie went inside. Spider was reclining, naked, in the hot tub. He was drinking something more or less the colour of electricity from a long, frosted glass. The huge picture windows were now wide

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.

Plus, I only informed him this research was off the record, and I hadn’t stated why. I planned to explain more when we met for lunch in Tokyo. I’d just need to be judicious in how I approached him and with what I shared. Somewhere behind me a baby cried, and with the captain’s announcement, the fasten seat belts light came on. My ears popped with

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