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f4e0078
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How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all? Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands jus..
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reality
love
only-forward
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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f0a971e
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How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all? Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands jus..
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reality
love
only-forward
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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0eb0751
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When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ev..
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trauma
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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4e7576f
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You haven't seen untidiness until you've seen a room where gravity has failed twice in different directions.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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ce4c03e
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Hey presto: time travel. You don't need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers.
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growing-older
nostalgia
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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fb9b711
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It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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1a30f41
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and only when that happens do you realise just how much silence there really is. Silence between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in betweens and everything which isn't an answer.
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unspoken-words
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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bf49641
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You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chao..
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love
art
childhood
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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c61e879
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If people knew that I really am what I say I am,' he said, 'you know they'd never forgive me.' 'Don't worry,' I said, 'Your lack of a secret is safe with us.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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d0e11c8
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When you're a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you're left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you're just the same as everybody else.
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child
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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a764432
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There are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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00d489b
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You know when you've got nothing in particular to do, nothing to stay awake for? When your life is just routine and it doesn't feel like it belongs to you, how you feel tired and listless and everything seems like too much effort? Well, it's like that, but it's much worse, because everything is much worse these days. Everything that's bad is worse, believe me. There are whole Neighborhoods out there where no one has anything to do all their..
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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8bcf401
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Everything you've done, everything you've seen, everything you've become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring the whole of yourself with you, you'll never see the sun again,
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the-future
the-past
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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e8279f1
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I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference. ("Substitutions")"
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proofreading
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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b3cebbd
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The realest and scariest monsters are internal demons, the specters of regret and guilt and lack of fulfillment, awareness of the entropic end of love, or the first shivers occasioned by the realization of our own ageing, and the eventual inevitability of death.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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4f819ba
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I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides.
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religion
god
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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878ea62
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You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can't give yourself
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life
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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f9a351b
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When you meet someone you love, then you change for good. That's why the other person will never know or understand the earlier you, and why you can never change back. And why, when that person starts to go, you'll feel the tear deep in your heart long before your head has the slightest clue what's going on.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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a525313
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Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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a08209f
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Storyboarded by the West Coast's finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes--God.
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god
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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30e6ee7
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The angel we named God banned representations of himself, even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization--but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation, run by Young Turks who wouldn't respect the line management structure: They rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn't re..
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religion
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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b6666e7
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Everything feels like a badly designed computer game in which you fall into a pit that doesn't kill you but from which there's absolutely no escape. For a while you kick against the walls, but the walls get higher no matter how hard and fast you press all the buttons you can find. And sooner or later you'll realize there's one you haven't tried yet. The power switch.[...] So she began reaching for the button herself, but she never tried qui..
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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7e4843b
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Your story can change. Overnight.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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9b30b9b
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When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You're opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?
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taking-things-personally
objectivity
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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b783770
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The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss--an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.--is sure to be noticed. --Soren Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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d7dc37c
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know how much difference a night's sleep can make, that what seems ungovernable and world-breaking at one A.M. can be made to feel like someone else's dream if you put seven hours of unconsciousness between it and you. Tomorrow's not just another day, another person lives it--and every time you go to sleep, you say good-bye.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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aef7b85
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He couldn't make the thought go anywhere, and soon zoned out into watching the television screen. It showed a crazy-haired old gent tramping around an undistinguished patch of countryside. He couldn't remember selecting the channel, and with the sound off it really wasn't very interesting. Was it worth turning the sound up? Probably not. It increasingly seemed to him that television was being created for someone else. He was welcome to watc..
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tv
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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73a0a4c
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Being me is not a fate everyone would enjoy. There are risks, and frequent disappointments. I'm not all that keen on the arrangement myself, to be honest.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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fa0a8bb
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I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you're going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don't want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought.
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pain
relationships
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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5c40006
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My father used to claim that inanimate objects hate us and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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97a57f3
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All non-smokers seem to live in the belief that smokers have wandered naively through life, bereft of the knowledge that their habit is extremely bad for them.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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b547d40
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I was sixteen back then, and I was going to a party with my girlfriend and Earl. Earl was driving, and his new squeeze was in the passenger seat. I was in the back, holding hands with mine. That was such a big thing at that age, clasping the hand of someone you loved. A heady declaration, the closing of a circuit, the joining of two souls. When you get older you don't seem to do it so much. Your hands are generally busy with other things, a..
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love
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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39f8405
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Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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a0caaa6
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What they are is a small tablet about six inches square, which has a screen in it. As you walk it shows a scrolling digital map of the area you're in, telling you what each store you pass sells, who lives in what block, the whole works, updated by small beacons on every street corner. If you tap in a destination the screen shows you a red line to follow, and the tablet whispers at you to tell you when to make a turn.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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6b8a329
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I realised suddenly that I was thirty-four and not making a very good job of it.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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1b9dca0
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I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me. There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. ("Substitutions")"
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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6809d40
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She lost her fury. He'd had none. That's how you win, in the end.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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8f4f313
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Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too - reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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cdbae4c
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In the story, an old man tells his grandson that he has a fight going on inside him, and has done his whole life. Between two wolves. One is a bad wolf -a wolf consumed with anger, regret, resentment and sorrow. The other wolf is good, with a heart filled with kindness, compassion and hope. Even joy. The boy asks which wolf will win in the end. The old man looks at him very seriously and says: "The one you feed."
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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833fa50
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Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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b19ea3a
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Welcome to adulthood. Please leave your dreams at the door.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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c92adf0
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In the beginning was the word. So what do you do when the words won't come? When you don't know what happens next? You just keep typing.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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46932ee
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You can't have made-up things in made-up stories. But in real life, you can.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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3a853c0
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Hannah's dad had a habit of never walking home the same way twice, with the intention of giving her a sense of how it all fitted together. What he'd actually achieved was to fail to provide a dependable route. As she stood confused on the corner, turning in a circle, it struck Hannah this happened all the time - grown-ups trying to teach you things in the wrong way, way, that only made sense if you already knew what you were trying to lea..
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Michael Marshall Smith |