"Do you like texting more or writing letters?" "Writing letters sounds more romantic." "And that's why we are texting." In which a boy and girl meet because of a stupid school project Credits: Cover: @sunswept

A young, schizophrenic writer is stifled by his own imagination as he attempts to go through life just as anybody else would, until he meets somebody he thought only existed in his head.

Love & Monsters is a story I worked on when I took my first novel writing class at UCLA. Since I lost my sister to suicide, I've been fascinated with exploring mental illness and providing any insight I can to eradicate the stigma. Love & Monsters follows Heather Bateman, a girl who has suffered from schizophrenia all her life but has only recently been diagnosed. She tries to socially recover from a very public mental breakdown with the help of her best friend Wren and a strange new boy who calls himself Nex.

Everyone is hiding from something; a secret, a lie. Mine just happens to be a curse, one bestowed upon me before my first birthday; a curse that says I'm supposed to die before I turn sixteen. But that isn't going to happen, because I have a plan. You see, it's impossible to prick your finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel if you're locked in a cell.

Nightingale is human - or would be, had it not been for the manner of her creation. Genetically engineered and grown to adulthood in a lab, she was created, not born. Why? For the sole purpose of the entertainment of rich men as one of the many Inamoratas in the bordello business . Beautiful, elegant, a superb dancer and an even better singer, she is the perfect lover for any man. Perfect, that is, except for her personality - the one thing you can't engineer.

Ella was beautiful. Ella was fast. Ella was gone. Ella was never coming back.