Yonic. Look it up.

There are two small, neat holes in my bedroom ceiling. And we all know what that means.

Obviously my poor ceiling, at some point in the past, fell victim to the wily ceiling vampire, most dangerous of the architectural undead, which shuffles in, deep in the night, to drink the plaster of the living, before escaping into the twilight with a whuffling of great pink insulation wings.

No more shall my once happy-go-lucky ceiling romp carelessly atop its walls! No, it’s doomed to crouch sullenly in the corner of the apartment, listening fearfully for that familiar lathe-and-drywall creak on the stairs, wondering if tonight the ceiling vampire comes back to…finish the job.

Or possibly there was a light fixture there at some point in the past, and those are the holes where the screws were removed, but c’mon! Where’s the fun of that?

And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will save them.

As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.

And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.