One of the things I was taught when I attended a first aid class was to make sure, before I attempted to help anyone, that it was safe for me to do so. To make sure that I was not putting myself in danger by helping a person in distress—whether from an environmental factor like …
I haven’t had a really bad dream—a real nightmare—since I was seven or eight years old. Before that I had terrible nightmares. Not frequently, but regularly enough that I remembered them. They terrified me; I’d wake up sweating, shivering, and sometimes crying. These stopped abruptly after I had a dream that started out as a …
Or: Thoughts on the problem of works left unfinished. Recently my mother bought me a copy of Diana Wynne Jones’s final novel, The Islands of Chaldea. I haven’t read it yet, because every time I pick it up I start crying. Partly out of sadness because she is gone, and there will never be any …