Some books are cold. Fresh and chill and cold, like ice on a lukewarm day, like a gust of breathy December air laying its cheek against yours. Like Jack Frost’s sweet numb kisses on your literary lips. The cold revitalizes you, clears the cobwebs from the dim corners of your mind, brings gasping color back into the pale canvas of your skin. It nips at you, makes you tingle, lets loose pins and needles to skitter not unpleasantly across your nerves. Philosophy and theology, Huxley and Thoreau and Orwell and cold massive icebergs of passionate ideology. The metaphysical equivalent of standing on a pure, colorless tundra: severe and brilliant and anxious and astounding. A bit numbing, after a while. The light can hurt your eyes.

Some books are hot, hot as fever, hot as scarlet, hot as the thumpthumpthump of the flighty bird trapped between your rib-bones. Like drugs, shot straight into your bloodstream, alighting your nervous system in flames. Your fingers quiver, your skin flushes, your very bones seem to shake. Hot as the quick of your breath. A searing touch, a blazing, scorching idea that leaves you gasping, burned, desperate for the next page, the final resolution, the denouement and relief. Think Bradbury, Poe, the pieces of spilled ink and earnestness that aspiring proseists let loose like unraveling balls of thread. The best ones leave everlasting impressions seared into the tips of your sensitive fingers.

And then some books are warm. Familiar, even when you’ve never seen them before. They slip past your lips and slide down your throat, like honey, hot chocolate in December with lights twinkling in the eaves, and coil at the bottom of your stomach. Loose, light, comfortable. There’s something about them that just seems to fit, like they were made especially for you, existing only to fill in that missing puzzle piece in your aching chest, a lifelong lover in ink and pulp. Different for everyone, of course.

She writes like oil on water, like nothing anybody’s ever seen—or felt—before. Her eyes sparkle with the language in her head. She keeps words in her pocket like others might keep stars (cradled in the palm of her hand, they shine just as brightly), and these she strings together on metal, in thin delicate phrases made of silver—silver, yes, the purest element. Brighter than gold, and more thoughtful. Every piece is a love letter, a homage to the power of expression, the vitality of art, the miracle of human consciousness interwoven with the vast cosmic threads of the universe. She loves like a nebula, and each sentence is a constellation. She loves me.

Do you know what it’s like, to be loved by a writer? It’s incredible. It’s cold and hot and warm all at once. And sometimes, it’s nothing but the goosebumps on your skin.

She loves me because I can write books that are like ice, that are like fever, that are like honey and hot chocolate. I love her because she writes books that are like metal, like silver. Shiny and precious and willing to bend, but never to break. Their temperature depends on that of he who holds them.