back to ask nicola
old answers not yet archived
July 10th, 2001
Dear Nicola, I'm the reader from Italy... I lose your site,
so I didn't answer your answer... Melodrammatic: my error (english is very hard
to speak!!!!), "melodrammatico" it's italian everyday form for "too much
drammatic"... I think your book is great but: (chapter 1/11) Aud is a hard
bodyguard, then (chapter 12) she leaves Julia going away... lonely... why? In
italian, the Julia death scene is 16 pages long... too much, don't you think?
Why the agony? If a killer wants someone dead he shoots a bullet in face, right?
For Julia, it wasn't so...
Anyway a mine curiosity: you're european, what you think when you read your
books as "lesbian books"? How you can say a book has sexual preferences? You can
talk about a book is good or bad, it's a thriller, sci-fi and/or something else
but talking about sexual preference, well, it's too much funny!!!!
Bye,
Livio.
It's always tempting with questions like this to answer you point by point,
explaining my reasoning and showing you where I believe you have misread my work
but the fact of the matter is that this is how you perceive my novel, and either
it worked for you or it didn't. If I didn't do a good job of explaining in the
text why and how things happened and what it means, then what I do or don't say
here doesn't matter. I do agree with you, though, on the "lesbian book"
question: there's no such thing. In fact I wrote a whole rant about that a few
years ago; it's probably in the Ask Nicola archives somewhere. Fiction can have
thematic lesbian sensibilities, perhaps (this is arguable), but pointing to
something and calling it a Lesbian Novel is amusing rather than useful.
July 10th, 2001
HI I just finished The Blue Place. I loved
it! (I admit the ending made me sad) I can't wait to read
Ammonite! It was wonderful to read a book with a love story
with two women. I didn't know books like that existed. If you could suggest
other books like it I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks
If it's just the two-women-in-love stuff you're after, then there are any
number of books out there. There are so many, in fact, that you can subdivide
them into several genres: romance, coming out, mysteries, science fiction,
picaresque, urban angst, post-modern, regencies, even westerns.... Some are
better than others. If all this is new to you, I'd suggest picking up a couple
of the classics, such as Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller,
Ruby Fruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, or Oranges Are Not
the Only Fruit by Jeannette Winterson. All of these are first-love
novels, and necessarily about young women. If you're looking for something a bit
more sophisticated and set in years past--though still about first love--then
try Violette Leduc or Sarah Waters. If you want things a bit more acidic, then
there's Sarah Schulman and Florence King. For lesbian fiction in the south,
there's Blanche McCrary Boyd and Dorothy Allison. For crime fiction there's
Laurie King's series, which begins with Grave Talents, or J.M.
Redmond's, which includes The Intersection of Law and
Desire.
The problem, as I see it, with most of these novels is that they're largely
about being a lesbian. If one of the things you liked about The Blue
Place was that the fact that Aud is a dyke is unremarkable, then these
books might not be for you.
July 10th, 2001
Dear Nicola,
I have read ammonite and I'm delighted that I found such a
profound author. (right now I'm really sick so my head isn't all that clear;I
haf the flu.)I managed to scrounge up enough money in change to buy all your
other books. So that you become rich! <g>
As charles dicken said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times." From decade to decade that's how it is. One has to believe in what is
right, moral/ethical and good for himself. Whether an evironmentalist, a
Politician, or rarified octogenarian! That means to me a fair and just trial.
But, (sigh) in our system, our government one can err too far and the results
are officious, know-it-all diplomats. (Maybe I need to catch up on the news
again.) But, what do I know? How is it that you write with such lesbian power!
Wow, the dynamics are inconcievable!
Why, you could take feminism to the next level! Am I sounding trite,
Impracticable? I'm proud of you, Nicola and I respect you for who you are.
live well and prosper. haha! take care!
And thank you for churning out Great books! I look forward to future novels,
essays, and non-fiction novels
God Bless!
-Juan R
If I'm reading you correctly, you like my books because the characters are
true to themselves and they're not perfect--or if they are more or less perfect,
they have the grace to get themselves killed off before they become too tedious.
The biggest exception to this, of course, is Thenike in
Ammonite. Maybe I should write a sequel, just to remedy that
.
July 10th, 2001
From: George Pascual, ares1996@aol.com
Hi- When The Blue Place was first
published, I read a review in the Village Voice here in New York. I
knew then I had to read the book when it appeared in soft-cover.
I was impressed. In fact, I knew in advance that I would be. I'm also glad
that you're bringing Aud back in more books. I was hoping you would.
I've been meaning to write to you this way for a while. I'm sorry it took
this long. I wanted to tell you that I think you're a great author and that your
writing moves people. It moves ME. That's why I also wanted to tell you that you
should keep writing. We'd be very sad if you stopped.
Thanks
Don't worry: I'm not about to stop writing. In the long term it would be a
bit like stopping breathing; I don't think I could survive.
The death of my sister, though, is making me re-examine my writing. More
specifically, I've been coming to the conclusion that I don't write enough
fiction. I spend too much time thinking, trying to shape my fiction consciously,
and not enough time just doing. I'm tired of having a tight-faced, sharp-clawed
censor sitting on my shoulder whispering, "Oh, that's no good. Oh, no one will
like that. Oh, you won't be able to sell that," and so on. So I'm embarking on
an experiment: to just sit down and write, and save the thinking for when the
first draft is done. In this way, I hope to visit more interesting and possibly
adventurous places: emotional, stylistic, and thematic.
July 10th, 2001
Hello. I have, for a while, been trying to write a fantasy
fiction/adventure story. I enjoy writing very much but am having trouble
thinking of an appropriate plot or storyline. The ones I seem to come up with
have either no direction or,when I read over them again, I find that they simply
arent interesting enough. I have, so far, only come up with an opening few
paragraphs and I am completely stuck.
I was wondering if you might have some tips to help get me started?Much gratitude,
Rach.
I tried to write my first novel when I was twelve. I had one of those little
note pads you put by the phone that I carried around in my pocket, and during
class I'd whip it out and scribble in it, having the best time writing about a
girl (who, coincidentally, was about twelve) who discovers this little old shop
in a little old village where she buys something magical. I had read about ouija
boards and planchettes but had no idea what they were--I had this vague idea
that a planchette was made of wire and crystal and did spooky things. It sounded
cool, anyway, so I had my heroine buy one. Naturally, it took her to another
time and place--that looked extremely like Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire around
the fifteenth century. Once I'd finished describing the purchase of this thing,
then the general scariness of travelling through the void, then the beauty of
the abbey and its river (yep, some of my writing traits appeared early), I
hadn't a clue what to do or where to go. I had her run about a bit, do a few
things, but really it was make-work. I knew it. After filling about fifty of
these tiny pages I gave up. A few weeks later I threw it away.
What I learnt from this experience (although it took me about fifteen years
to figure it out) is that just because I want to write about something--the play
of light on a waterfall, how it feels to break your toe, the smell of freshly
cut grapefruit or the blood of your lover spilling in your hands--doesn't mean I
have a story to tell about it. If you're stuck on your fantasy novel, it may
well be that you just don't have a fantasy story to tell. Maybe you just want to
write about the fantasy world. Nothing wrong with that, but don't confuse the
two. I've talked before about the difference between plot and story. It sounds
to me as though you have an idea of background, and maybe a bit of plot, but
have absolutely no idea of the story: the tale of an inner journey, the lasting
changes wrought in someone's interior landscape by decisions made and,
therefore, options lost forever. Think about the people, not the adventure, and
see what happens.
July 10th, 2001
From: Kate, bacpac@xtra.co.nz
I have just finished reading the blue place
and enjoyed every page. It was an unputdownable for me and I now feel grief at
the loss of both Julia and Aud. My first question is: Are you going to write
more wonderful mysteries involving Aud?
The second is: Does Aud feature in any of your other publications: How do you
pronounce Hjordis, and, lastly, do you know where I might be able to get a copy
of Ammonite???. I've already driven amazon.com almost "round
the bend" ('scuse the pun)with my repeated requests and searches for
it.
The next installment in the journey of Aud, Stay (the
working title used to be Red Raw) is already written and will
appear from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in April 2002. I'm already noodling around
with ideas for the next Aud book. Actually, I don't really think of them as
separate books, just chapters in her story. It won't be a long story: five books
at most. I imagine I'll feel quite bereft when I'm done with her but it has to
end somewhere, and there are places I want to go as a writer where Aud can't
take me.
I pronounce Hjordis something like "huh YOR dis," with the initial "huh"
really compressed.
Ammonite is available from a variety of second-hand book
dealers (see previous answer). I still haven't decided whether or not to publish
it myself (in ebook and Print on Demand formats) or try to sell it to another
press for traditional publication. There are so many pros and cons on both sides
(and I've had a fair amount on my mind the last few months).
I'd be interested in getting readers' opinions on the matter: how many of you
use ebooks? How many would buy the novel direct from me via the website?
July 10th, 2001
From: Thornton, t_kimes@hotmail.com
This is a response to your response to the question about
readings in Seattle. Another good place to be seen is the University of
Washington's "University Bookstore" on "The Ave", as University Way, NE is
known...
Ubooks is a great bookshop and the science fiction buyer there, Duane
Wilkens, has been very kind to me and helpful to my career. I've done
appearances there for every single one of my books and hope to continue to do
so. Other book shops I'm thinking of working with next year when Stay comes out
are the Seattle Mystery Bookstore, Third Place Books, Elliott Bay, Borders (the
one on Fourth, downtown) and Bailey Coy. The latter does a fantastic job of
hand-selling my work for which I'm enormously grateful. I wish all booksellers
would take a leaf from their book.
July 10th, 2001
Hello again,
I do hope you can convince your fellow contributors to do a very local
roadshow for Bending the Landscape: Horror. If the Honey Bear
was still in business, I would've voted for that (close and cozy). The UW
Bookstore does a decent enough job hosting these events, but Elliot Bay does
have more charm. Wherever/whenever/whatever you decide, let me/us know, we'll be
there.
Thank you for good books.
Well, it's June, and Bending the Landscape: Horror has been
out two months and I haven't had a moment to think about readings or signings or
any other publicity for it. It's a shame, because there are some truly wonderful
stories in it that perhaps some readers are not hearing about, but I've been
flying back and forth and back and forth (and back and forth again) to the UK
because of my sister's illness and death. And now I have to go back yet again
next month for the University of Liverpool's "Celebration of British SF."
Sometimes life just has to come first.
July 10th, 2001
=Hi Nicola,
I've really enjoyed reading your work. I've read The Blue
Place and just finished Slow River. The thought
occurred to me as I was reading each novel - this would be great on film! I
wonder, has anyone approached you about making films out of any of your books?
My vote would be for The Blue Place - and I cast Jodie Foster
as Aud. She's not as tall, but I think she could really capture that character.
In any event, I'm looking forward to your next novel.
Like most writers, I've had option offers that everyone knows will never
actually come to anything from dreamers with far more imagination than talent.
Those don't really count. I was approached with a fairly serious offer for
Slow River a year or two ago from an independent filmmaker. The
problem was funding: she was unable to come up with enough money on the front
end to make me happy, and was unwilling to make the option agreement flexible
enough to ensure that if we went ahead on a small to medium budget (i.e.
anything between three and ten million dollars) I'd get compensated at the back
end. In other words: she didn't offer big enough bucks. It was a hard decision
for me: I would love to see something of mine through another creative person's
lens, and it was clear that this writer/director really, really identified with
the project and would have done a good job. However, it was also clear that
everyone but me would make money on the deal which didn't strike me as a smart
move.
I think Jodie Foster would do a great job in whatever movie she was in, and I
would be delighted if she ever appeared in anything I was connected with. I've
never pictured her as Aud, though. The only actor I have actively envisioned as
Aud is Meg Foster the way she was twenty or thirty years ago. When I was a kid I
saw an episode of "Cagney and Lacey" where Foster went after a lowlife character
with elbow strikes--and she was probably the first woman I saw on screen that I
believed doing that kind of physical stuff. Also, she has very pale eyes. The
most important characteristic of any actor who wanted to play Aud would be how
they moved: she would have to be capable of great stillness, of blinding speed,
of utterly believable ferocity. I would have to be able to look at her and know
she was capable of killing, mentally and physically. Personally I think it would
be a great part for any actor to take on, but there would be no room in it for
all those touches Hollywood stars love to hang onto even in their sternest
roles: she could keep her perfect hair, if it were short enough, and her
manicured nails (ditto), and her fine clothes if they were easy to move in, but
the bright red lip gloss, the high heels, and the sprayed on jeans would have to
go.
July 10th, 2001
I'm a big fan who has enjoyed reading and collecting many of
your books. Is it possible to send books for your autograph? I would provide
pre-addressed labels, pre-paid shipping costs, reusable packaging and anything
else that would minimize your effort.
Thank you for your consideration,
Chip
Yes, I'm always happy to autograph books, as long as we're not talking about
more than a handful, and--as you say--the labels, postage and packing are
included in the parcel. No work for me = a good thing. Just make sure, next
time, that you don't turn the "anonymous" option on--otherwise I can't contact
you. If you do read this reply, please send your email address to Dave Slusher, who will forward it to
me.
July 10th, 2001
From beth, emorrock@yahoo.com
I have so far read the blue place and
Slow river and loved them both.. I have gone on quite a search
for Ammonite.. I'll tell you that's a hard book to find. But
I'm not giving up. My girlfriend and I enjoy your books. Why are they so hard to
find? Are they out of print so soon? On borders.com I noticed you have another
book comming out called Horror Could you explain what that book will be about..
I did notice it is a collection of stories. 1 more question are you going to be
writing another book for example like the blue place? Thank you
for your time..
Now one of your devoted fans...
~Elizabeth
Ammonite is not currently available new. However, as someone
pointed out in a recent Ask Nicola question, you can find used copies online at
a variety of places, such as http://www.amazon.com/ and http://www.abebooks.com/--not to mention the
larger independents like http://www.sff.net/people/Nicola/www.powells.com.
As to why so many of my books are so hard to find...well, it's to do with the
fact that publishing has become wholly taken up with the short-term bottom line
and, as a result, anything that isn't proving cost-effective to keep in print on
a six-monthly or yearly basis is just let go. I think this is a rather
short-sighted policy. For example, take Ammonite. It's sold
somewhere between thirty and thirty-five thousand copies in mass market and
there are still colleges wanting to know where they can get hold of three dozen
copies for various courses. Then there are all those individual readers, like
yourself, who would be happy to buy the book if it were available. Every time
another novel of mine, or a volume of Bending the Landscape,
comes out there is a fresh batch of readers wanting to find it. But as there has
been a delay in the release of my recent work (eighteen months for
BtL:H--I'm still not sure why--and even longer with my new
novel, though that's largely my fault) sales of Ammonite have
faltered. Randomhouse, the publisher, probably decided it wasn't worth their
while in the short term to keep the book in print. The rights have reverted to
me. I haven't got around to finding a new publisher yet. I've been toying with
the idea of doing it myself in e-book and print-on-demand formats but I just
haven't had the time in the last few months to do the research. As for my other
novels, Slow River is still going strong, as is The
Blue Place (Avon went back to press again late last year).
Stay (which had the working title Red Raw
until a couple of months ago) should be out sometime next year.
Stay picks up where The Blue Place left off.
However, as Aud is so different, that is, almost insane with grief, and as Aud's
difference dictates a difference in style, I hesitate to say that this second
novel is "another book about Aud." It is, of course, but it's important that
readers understand it won't just be a rehash of the first.
That covers the novels I've written so far. Bending the
Landscape, the anthology series I co-edit with Stephen Pagel, is
slightly different. Originally I dreamt it up as a single volume. I wanted short
stories from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and straight writers,
beginners and old hands, mainstream and genre, to write short fiction that bent
the World As We Know It out of true. That idea gradually metamorphosed into the
current concept: three volumes of short fiction with gay/lesbian characters,
written by gay and straight writers, divided into three separate volumes:
Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror. The Fantasy volume came out from a
publisher called White Wolf in 1997. It sold pretty well, but Stephen and I
decided for a variety of reasons to try place the other two volumes with another
publisher. The result was that we sold all three to Overlook Press. They
published the Science Fiction volume a couple of years ago, first in hardcover,
then, when that was almost sold out, in trade paperback format. That volume is
still in print, officially, but getting increasingly difficult to find in
hardcover. The trade paperback edition has now sold out and, for reasons I'm not
sure I quite understand, Overlook haven't gone back to press. The Fantasy
volume, meanwhile, has long since sold out. Overlook will be reissuing that in
hardcover sometime next year, and then in trade paperback. The Horror volume has
only just come out in hardcover, so it should be around for quite a while yet,
and then of course it will be reprinted in trade paperback format about a year
from now. What makes it all so confusing for the average reader (and
contributor, and editor) is that although Fantasy came out first, Science
Fiction second, and Horror third, Overlook has labelled the SF volume, Vol. 1,
the Horror Vol. 2, and Fantasy will be Vol.3.
January 20th, 2001
From Bob Grosse, RNGrosse@umich.edu
Could you explain why the Greek letter Lambda is associated
with gay and lesbian activities?
I can list some of the explanations given by associations and individuals in
the gay and lesbian community for why they use the lambda symbol but I can't
tell you why it began to be used in the first place.
General wisdom has it that the lambda (() was first used in 1970, in New
York, where the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) was organising a bunch of community
activities. The lambda was pretty soon recognised as a symbol for dykes and gay
boys (mainly the latter). It became the queer version of a funny handshake, a
sort of tribal recognition sign--the same way the labrys, or double-axe, did for
lesbian feminists a few years later. Although no one knows for sure why the GAA
adopted the lambda in the first place, there is a long list of
possibilities.
One set of people think it was because Spartan soldiers (bit of a tautology,
I know) carried the sign on their shields, and as most Spartan men didn't see
women that much, most of them had sex with other men. A more romantic version of
this has it being the Thebans of the Sacred Band--pairs of lovers, all of whom
were slaughtered by Alexander the Great's father, Philip the Second of Macedon
at some battle or other--who sport the letter on their shields. Others believe
that because lambda, the eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet, began as a
picture symbol of a pair of scales and subsequently took on the abstract meaning
of balance, it was used by the modern gay movement as an icon of justice.
Probably my favourites are from physics, where ( is used both as the symbol for
the wavelength of light, and, if I've got it right (I stopped studying physics
when I was sixteen), for the point where the specific heat curve of liquid
helium shows a sharp rise and abrupt fall in a very short temperature range.
This transition point looks a bit like a lower case lambda and so became known
as the lambda point, that is, the temperature below which liquid helium in
equilibrium with its vapour becomes superfluid. As a result of its appearance in
energy-theory equations, ( has taken on the symbolism of equilibrium, balance,
harmony, energy flow, synergy, etc. etc.
So, although no one can say with authority why the lambda was used in the
first place by the GAA, not many would argue with the notion that no matter its
origins, it has become an icon of the struggle towards unity and fair treatment
of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Those who use the symbol
tend to be non-profit gay and lesbian organisations fighting their corner of
such fields such as the law, medicine, arts, and so on. (Never noticed any for,
say, migrant farmworkers....) Those who look for the symbol's roots tend to find
most appealing those explanations that bolster their own beliefs. This is how
symbolism works. This is what its for. There is no universal truth about such
things.
Take, for example, the labrys. I started wearing a silver double-axe earring
(only one; to wear two was considered a bit, well, naff) in the early eighties.
At the time, I wore it because all the big bad dykes I knew wore it, it looked
great, and, hey, it was an axe, a weapon made to whack people's heads off, not
some sweet and pretty coloured flag, or a weird letter that looked like a prong,
or a pink triangle which meant, yep, people put people like me in concentration
camps. It made me feel fierce, elemental. The labrys earrings (and necklaces)
were almost always silver, occasionally white gold--if you had
money--occasionally fake silver, almost never gold or brass. Bronze would have
been okay. Women wore them on t-shirts, carved them on their hash pipes, had
them tattooed on their arms. After a year or so, I started trying to figure out
why women had started to wear labryses in the first place. I ran into all kinds
of woo crap: It's a sacred sign of the Gaea, the great Earth Goddess; it's the
ritual sceptre of the ancient matriarchies of Crete; it's the weapon of choice
of the women warriors of old; it's the emblem of amazon empires; and (according
to Mary Daly) it represents "our own Wild wisdom and wit, which cut through the
mazes of man-made mystification, breaking down the mind-bindings of
master-minded doublethink." In other words, a load of cobblers.
Symbolism is a kind of portable history, something we carry around to make us
feel better: more assured, more concrete, more complex, less superficial, less
alone, more connected, as though we belong. Twenty years ago, dykes--at least
where I lived--needed every bit of Feeling Better they could get. Some dealt
with this by getting stoned a lot; some went crazy; some relied on the belief
that the great goddess would protect them; some thought that if they carried
crystals around and projected nice energy, the world would be nice to them; some
learnt self-defence and fought back on a case-by-case basis; some formed
community organisations; some lobbied local and national and international
government; some did all of the above. Each group had their set of symbols: the
jewellery and/or tattoos, the clothes, the diet, the lifestyle, the friends, the
culture. The smaller the subculture, the more fiercely its members need to
belong. I think this might be where uniforms come from. At that time and in that
place, if you went into a gay club and saw a woman wearing men's clothes, with a
scar on her face, no jewellery but cufflinks, her hair slicked back, and the
tendency to light other women's cigarettes for them you knew a great deal about
her present life and priorities. You wouldn't want to talk about the impact of
patriarchy on language and the way language shapes our consciousness because her
world was one in which there was no luxury to spend thinking about things that
didn't relate directly and practically to survival. Similarly, if at the local
health food store you saw a woman with long hair, tofu and miso in her shopping
bag (a re-usable cloth bag hand-woven in Guatemala) wearing a tie-dyed dress
with an earth-mother figurine hanging around her neck, there would be no point
discussing with her the formation of a new women's self-defence cooperative or
direct action group because she would clutch her venus figurine, talk about your
violent energy, and suggest you should stop eating meat because your aura was
way, way too dark. On the other hand, if there was a grinning dyke with cool
haircut sitting at a trendy bar drinking a pint of real ale, wearing one
tasteful tattoo (if it was multi-coloured you knew she hadn't had it done with a
pin and ballpoint pen in prison) on her left shoulder blade, good teeth, a tiny
nose stud and a silver labrys, you could reasonably expect her to have an
intelligent conversation about l'ecriture feminine and post-modernist literary
theory but to bolt like a rabbit at the suggestion that she participate in
something like a civil disobedience action, or counselling over a phone
help-line a fourteen year-old woman who thought she might be a lesbian, because
that could get her arrested and worsen her employment prospects once her PhD
came through.
My point is that in the early eighties I would have been able to tell just by
looking at each of these women what their superficial priorities would be; they
wore their cultural signifiers in their ears, around their necks, at their
wrists. And then, of course, there is fashion--which is why I used the qualifier
"superficial" in the previous sentence.
So, there I was, wearing this labrys and aware that the explanations everyone
offered for wearing it was a load of woo crap. I sighed, reasoned that the
common theme of this wishful thinking was of a back-through-the-mists-of-time
connection to women having power over themselves, that I could live with that,
and that, hey, it still looked cool, and kept wearing it. After a while, as my
circle of friends, influence, family, joy, understanding, safety (whatever)
increased, I didn't need it. I stopped wearing it. But, for a while, it
helped.
January 20th, 2001
Oh, you don't have to post this on your "Ask Nicola" spot
since there aren't any questions (okay, except perhaps "what kind of
different--for you--fiction are you considering for the future?" for which I can
happily just wait and see). I just wanted to say that, of all the things you've
written that I've read (admittedly, only the 3 books) your answer to that "do
you have a girlfriend" question is my favorite (probably because it's real). I
think I'll reserve my jealousy and retching for someone less offensive than a
happy writer in Seattle...ok, maybe just the retching.
Anyway, I'm glad Aud's getting more time...though I fell in love with Magyar
and Letitia Dogias, Aud's the main character I enjoyed the most. It reminds me a
little of those good, dramatic "now what?" television show cliffhangers where
there's just no way the protagonist can get out of the hole (no need to be
offended by the tv analogy, I'm a big tv-watcher and I have no shame about
it...it's just the way I experience things anyway).
New writing. This is hard to explain. It's more a matter of voice and
attitude than of subject matter or form, I think. I've been toying with the idea
of trying something colder and more sinister--my first attempt was the framing
narrative for those three short stories that were in Realms of
Fantasy. Basically, I want to play, see what I can do. It's also a way to
prevent the horrors of creeping smugness that I think develops after a while in
most writers: the belief that we know what we're doing and have a real handle on
the way the world works. For me it's far too easy to fall into familiar
patterns. It's good to shake myself up a little every now and again. Even if I
end up going to back to what I was doing before, at least I know it's a
conscious choice, and not simple laziness.
I'm also considering new avenues of publishing, such as ebooks and
print-on-demand, and whether or not I should incorporate and become, in effect,
my own publisher. If I did this, I think I might find it easier to write
differently about different things. We shall see.
January 20th, 2001
Hello Nicola
I wonder if you have any talks/signings scheduled for the Seattle area any
time soon?
I generally only do roadshow stuff when I have a new novel, or new edition of
a novel, out. I don't have anything scheduled for this year. However, when
Bending the Landscape: Horror comes out in two or three months
I'm hoping to persuade some of the local contributors to join me in a couple of
readings/signings/Q&A sessions in Seattle and environs. Maybe I should do a
quick poll of readers of this webpage who live in Seattle: what bookshops would
you prefer to visit for a reading or signing? Some possibilities include Bailey
Coy, Third Place, U Books, Borders, Mystery Bookshop, and Elliott Bay. I'm also
open to suggestions. You let me know, and I'll see what I can do. Right now I'm
thinking mid-April would be a good time. I'll certainly post information about
any signings or readings as soon as dates are set.
January 20th, 2001
From Adam Diamond, SecBanana@aol.com
Greetings again. Can't wait for Red Raw
& also am curious about Kelley's book, which you mentioned here several
months ago--any further info on that as yet?
My main question has to do with the process of writing. I've been writing
stories since I was around 8 or 9 years old, my earliest attempts featuring me
and my friends as characters. I've found over the years that I've fallen into a
pattern of frustrating fluctuation as far as my energy/motivation to write is
concerned. Sometimes it's "on", sometimes "off". The normal pattern seems to
feature a few months of intense inspiration and writing followed by a period of
equal or longer time in which nothing is going on--I can't even get myself to
stare at a page or computer screen long enough to lament the fact that I'm not
writing. I fear my muse is mercurial at best. I've read a lot of books, advice,
etc. from writers and writing teachers whose advice tends to boil down to "just
keep writing". While I can see the logic in this, it's hard not to feel a little
despair now and then during the down times. I sense all writers must go through
some version of this motivational drought, but there's a difference between
sensing and knowing. Does this, or something like this, ever happen to you? Do
you feel it's better to try to write through it or leave it alone for a while or
does it just depend on the situation? I'm not looking for a shortcut, just some
insight.
Respectfully,
Adam Diamond
Cincinnati, Ohio
Kelley mailed in the final draft of her novel, Solitaire,
yesterday. Still no news about the publishing schedule but we're still guessing
it will be around Spring 2002.
Speaking for myself, and only for myself, there are several reasons why I
might not write. The most obvious explanation is sheer laziness; writing is hard
work and there are times I just want to play: the sun is shining and the grass
is green, or I've finally found that book about Anglo-Saxon art I've been
searching for for months, or a friend emails me with an invitation to the pub.
Then there's the health-related explanation, which breaks down into two parts.
One, I'm too tired, ill, or brain-dead to do the work (this doesn't seem to
happen as often as it used to). Two, I want to write and I'm ready to write but
I have something I have to do the next day--a talk to a college group, or a
class to teach, or an early-morning interview, or travel to a friend's wedding
or whatever--and I know that if I use up energy working on a novel, I'll be too
tired to do whatever it is the day after so I make myself just laze about and
drink tea, play with Tivo (poor old me <g>). But these are the obvious
explanations. There are a couple of other, much more slippery reasons.
Occasionally I wake up in the morning full of plans to write thousands of
words of scintillating prose. I know roughly what I want to be working on, what
needs to be done, and...I just don't do it, I futz about doing things like
getting online and ego-surfing, or researching e-publishing, or catching up with
phone calls to my family in England, and just generally fritter the day away
while pretending to do something useful. This avoidance behaviour comes from a
weird, irrational (I hope), hard-to-define place that has something to do with a
fear of failure. I worry so much that what I write won't be good enough that I
don't write it at all; I try, in some peculiar way, to save it for another time
or place when I'll be able to do better. I'm just not sure what "it" is: the
idea, the talent, the work, the time, the energy, the final product, the
brilliant work of art, the risk. I'm not sure, either, what "good enough" is.
All I know is that I set up my own roadblocks to producing anything just in case
what I produce isn't as good as I had hoped. The flaw in the logic is obvious
and inescapable but, as I said, I already know this behaviour is irrational. The
only way around this one is, yes, to do the work: to sit and write something.
The thing is, it doesn't always have to be at the screen, working at something
you'd planned to work on. I often find that scribbling with a pencil on a legal
pad helps get me past this one, because I can fool myself into thinking my
thoughts are temporary, not the real writing--so it doesn't matter if it's not
good enough.
However, there are those times when there is a very good reason to not write:
when I am going through some huge internal change or have reached a significant
cross-road, either as a person or as a writer. This does not happen often.
Moving house, for example, doesn't really count--it's an upheaval, yes, but if
you're just moving to another part of the city, then although the time and
energy you have to devote to the logistics might cut into writing time for a
while or even obliterate for two or three days, it's not enough of a change to
knock you off track. (Or since, I'm just talking about myself, I suppose I
should say "knock me off track.") There again, when I moved from the UK to the
US, leaving behind all my family, every friend, my partner of ten years, my
house, my job, and free healthcare, to move in with Kelley to a very, very small
apartment without two cents to rub together, in a completely different culture,
I expected to not be able to get any real work done for a while. However, what
happened was that I had all these ideas and the sudden mental freedom to work,
and I wrote quite a lot. The time when I didn't write was a six-month period
about a year before the move, when I was wrestling internally with the question
of whether or not I should leave the UK (and missing Kelley, and grieving over
the death of my sister, discovering I had a chronic illness, and feeling like a
monster because I was contemplating leaving my partner). My mind was so taken up
with all this stuff, on the conscious and unconscious level, that there simply
wasn't room for anything else. When I started writing again, what I wanted to
write about had changed. If I'm changing--and I know I change as a writer when I
change as a person, and vice versa (that is, if it's even possible to separate
the two)--it's not always a good idea for me to start work on a new project,
because the initial shape of the work often moulds the finished work; I
sometimes find it hard to change a path once I start. Oh, I can change the
structure and the different ways to make a point or describe an event or
whatever, but I can't scour from my head the original shape and heft of the
piece, the goal I set out to achieve, the emotions and character changes I want
to describe. I'm willing to bet that there are many writers who can, but I'm not
one of them. Anyway, once the initial shape is set, that's it. If that initial
shape no longer makes sense to the new me, then I have to abandon it, because I
can't warp the new stuff to fit the old. Believe me, I've tried a couple of
times and the retrofit doesn't work. At least not to my satisfaction. Twice,
now, I've sold novellas then pulled them from publication because they were
chimeras, mutants, botched pieces. If I'd just left the ideas alone, I could
have worked on them a year or so later and produced something I'd be happy with.
Now I'm going to have to wait years before I can revisit them--and one is a
subject I'm desperate to work on.
My long fiction comes from deep inside and deals with people and issues that
matter to me in some way (though sometimes you'd be hard-pressed to tell). This
is not always the case for some of my shorter work, which may (some of the time,
not always) spring from the urge to play in a more left-brain kind of way and
doesn't need to plumb any depths. So if I'm stuck in the midst of a big change
and know the deep places are temporarily inaccessible or need to be left alone,
I can work on something else: short fiction, poetry (I know, that sounds
counter-intuitive, so sue me), some reviews or whatever. If I try work on one of
these and can't concentrate--and decide it's not just laziness, or health or any
of the other things I've already talked about--then the only other thing it
could be is that I'm bored and/or the well is temporarily dry (for me, often the
same thing). By this I mean I haven't been getting out enough lately, I haven't
had much of a life, haven't read stimulating articles, haven't talked to anyone
interesting or been anywhere new, and the store of curious tidbits in my head is
empty. So then I go out and party for a while, stock up on knotty and/or
hot-button issues, cool trivia, new music, and other cultural detritus such as
the names and tastes of new cocktails . The flip side of this is that
sometimes I can't concentrate because I haven't rested, really rested for a
while, and then I try to sit by a lake for an hour or two and let my mind fall
still.
The crucial aspect of all this as far as I'm concerned is honesty: learn to
tell when you're just making excuses and when you need to change something, be
truthful with yourself about whether you really are exhausted or whether you're
just feeling like goofing off for the afternoon. If you don't know where the
reluctance comes from, it's harder to fix it. And if you're not interested in
what you're working on, no one else will be, either.
January 5th, 2001
Do you have a girlfriend? (Thisis from a 19 year old lesbian
who's just, you know, curious.)
I do, in fact, have a girlfriend. We met in the summer of 1988 at the Clarion
writing workshop at MSU, in East Lansing, Michigan (see above). Her name is
Kelley Eskridge. She is talented, gorgeous, smart, strong, empathic, brave, and
kind. She's a great writer, a staunch supporter of my work and, oh yeah, cooks a
great Chicken Dijon. Did I mention her sense of humour, delight in learning, and
that she's a babe? Feel free to scowl with jealousy or retch at my smugness.
If anyone had suggested to me twenty years ago that I would live with and
love just one woman for more than a dozen years I would have laughed hard enough
to give myself an aneurism. The idea of monogamy was not only ridiculous, it was
offensive. What I'm finding, though, is that monogamy is very, very exciting.
What it does is force me to learn. This is not easy to explain.
One summer a couple of years ago (why do all these things happen to me in
summer?), after I finished The Blue Place, I started thinking
about Red Raw, and how I needed to dig deeper into Aud, and I
got cold feet: I didn't want to write a sequel, I told myself; sequels are
boring; sequels are what writers do when they run out of ideas; sequels are for
Has Beens. I got all twisted up. What was the point of being a writer if I
couldn't be brilliant all the time? I've spent my whole life picking up
things--singing, martial arts, sex, drinking, academic study, track, team
sports--and then dropping them when I got bored, when I'd proved to myself that
I could do it...and (it dawned upon me that summer, slowly and unpleasantly)
when I realised I couldn't be the best there ever was at whatever it was I had
been fooling with. It also occurred to me that there was no way I could ever be
the best in the world at writing: apart from anything else, what standard could
I use to judge myself? Awards? Sales? Critical acclaim? Number of fans? Personal
sneaking feelings of adequacy/inadequacy/superiority? If I kept changing genres
and styles all the time, how could I tell if I was getting any better? What did
"better" mean, anyway? (Oh, I had a fun time that summer.) After a few weeks of
angst (angst, believe it or not, is not something I've spent a lot of time
dealing with in my life, and I sincerely hope I won't be spending a lot of time
there in the future) I reached the tentative and unwelcome conclusion that one
of the reasons I kept trying things and dropping them was that I was always
living half in the future, on my own bow wave; I was always looking for the
fastest ship, the next port, the most colourful bazaar. But here I was: living
with a wonderful woman, in a great city, doing a job and living a life that I
loved. Of all the things it would be possible for me to change, there wasn't a
single major thing that I wanted to be different.
This came as a bit of a shock. Change has been a constant in my life. Until
that summer I had never lived in one place for longer than three years, never
done one thing for longer than that, never been without some kind of impossible
dream or ridiculous challenge. Yet here I was, living exactly the life I wanted.
I had no clue what to do with it. I sat around and pondered the situation (drank
a lot of beer, had many thoughtful silences, stroked the cat a lot while I
stared into the middle distance). Then I understood that what I had to do
was...well, just more of what I was doing: go further, dig deeper, risk more;
commit further, become more strongly attached; leave myself more open to
criticism, more exposed, and more vulnerable. (Oh, right, that sounded like
fun....) So this is what I've tried to do. I don't know how much of it I can do
with Aud, but in addition to a few more books about her, I'm planning to work on
some pretty different (for me) fiction. Scary stuff but, with any luck, worth
it.
This is what monogamy is like, too, in a way. It's like sailing around the
world on a two-person yacht. You get to know every inch, every mood, every
idiosyncrasy and weak spot of the vessel, you can venture into wilder and wilder
seas, explore every interesting bit of coastline, every cove and deep sea
trench, because you trust the deck under your feet and the rope under your
hands. You can ask more of the other half of your crew, and you can give more.
I've learnt so much about how and who I am and I've put my entire life in
Kelley's hands. I know, every day, that she puts hers in mine. It's worth it.
Kelley is worth it. I smile a lot.
January 5th, 2001
I would like to say Thank you, Thank you, Thank you for the
books that you have written. My favorite book is Ammonite I
have read it many many times over and it is looking worse for wear! It has been
dunked in the tub when the cat decided to say hello to me at 1:00 am, that was
the first reading and I coulden't put it down to go to sleep!!! They kept me
awake wondering what was happening to them. The Blue Place is
my next choice, I love the characters and was very upset when she died, Have
wondered over the years how Aud will, if she will, get over it!!! Having loved
for such a short time and opening up,,, then pooof!!! Slow
River was very upsetting for me to read so that one I only read once!
Very well written though. When will you write a sequel to
Ammonite???? It is such a fascinating story line and the
peoples in it are so real. It could go in so many interesting directions in
their future. Keep up the great work that you are doing.
Personal Stuff
Have you tried Chi Gong for your MS? It is easier on your
body than other traditional Oriental body movements. And the visulisation with
the chakra system could help along with it. I use a video called Discovering Chi
and it seems to help me on my bad days. I don't have MS but I have allergys
which interfire with my lungs and sinus, very bad infections with both.(mold,
mildew and me living in the rainy Northwest!!) The DR. wanted to roter router my
sinuses!!,, which would help in the short term but they would have to do it over
and over. My immune system is shot because of ALL of the antibiotices and other
stuff that I have been taking over the years. Everytime a cold,flu whatever
comes around me, my immune system falls over and dies< gives a token fight
for a few days then quits!! Don't give up on the natural stuff just pick and
choose on the right ones for you and your body. A few years ago the Dr. told me
that I had just about used up all of the spectrums of antobiotices ! out there
and he didn't know what else to do for me. Well that is when I started trying
other options. Chi Gong is easy on the joints also, mine don't move that well
(stiff,etc.) I am very clutzy to put it nicely. Well enjoy sitting out in the
sunshine (great year for that)and digging in the garden. Remember to take it one
day at a time and ENJOY!! Peace to you. Becky
Yes, it has been a great year in Seattle for sunshine--a great, great summer
(lots of people complained, but I like it being cooler than usual--there was
still a fair amount of sun) and, so far, a fine autumn and winter. Until today,
when it started to rain mid-afternoon and even now, about eleven at night, it
shows no sign of stopping. Ah, well. The beauty of Seattle is that if you don't
like the weather, just wait fifteen minutes. (Of course, you could say the same
about service in some of the hipper restaurants <g>.)
I tried Chi Gong, complete with making my own herbal pills and doing the
breathing/meditation thing, in 1990, in Georgia. I liked the
breathing/meditation and still do it occasionally but it didn't do much to help.
Wish it did. It would be a lot more pleasant than having vile chemicals pumped
into me on a regular basis. Actually, I'm lucky in that apart from a variety of
autoimmune diseases I've been pretty healthy the last ten years or so--except
when I travel. I tell you, all I have to do is look at a plane and I come down
with some respiratory infection or other. Tuh.
MS is no longer my adversary, it's an irritating little dog that follows me
around everywhere and demands to be fed and watered and walked--it's mine, I'm
responsible and can't get rid of it, but as soon as it shuts up, I try forget it
and get on with something else, something a lot more fun. I'm not inclined to
spent more time on it than I have to.
Sorry to hear about your copy of Ammonite ending up in the
tub. Pretty soon technology will make it possible to pay a couple of extra bucks
and get a book in a waterproof paper version. (Some are already available in
this format. One example: Aqua Erotica, edited by Mary Anne
Mohanraj.) Then there are the various ebook reading devices, which you can stick
in a ziplock bag for bath-time reading. The format I'm looking forward to,
though, is the E-Ink paper (electrophorectic ink) first developed at MIT. I have
no idea how waterproof it is, or when it will be commercially available for
books (it's already in prototype for things like indoor billboards that can be
changed simultaneously all over the country, via pager) but it sounds like a
cool idea. Meanwhile, I'm still investigating either getting another publisher
to reissue Ammonite in trade paper format, or putting it
online, or forming my own press, with Kelley. As soon as I make up my mind, one
way or another, I'll post something in the News section. As for a sequel...see
my answer to the question below.
January 5th, 2001
Hi Nicola--like many others, I had been looking for
Ammonite, and then another reader pointed some of us to a
website that sells used books and several copies of Ammonite
were available. The website is http://dogbert.abebooks.com/ and there
were still copies of Ammonite there, last time I checked. It's
worth checking it out even for that one teacher trying to teach your book
(though there may not be enough copies).
Anyway, I liked Ammonite. You may have already answered this
question somewhere else, but I'll ask anyway: do you think you'd do a follow-up
to Ammonite? There isn't one already that I don't know about,
is there? That whole possibility of Company attempting to reclaim Jeep the
planet one way or another and then the Jeep people finding a way to fight back
left me wanting more.
Regardless, I'm looking forward to Red Raw.
Two or three years ago I finally realised that I would probably never say
"never" again, so I won't say that I never intend to write Ammonite II:
The Return but it looks unlikely for the near future. Right now I'm
dealing with editorial revisions for Red Raw, plotting out a
third Aud book, and deep into research for a historical novel...and I still want
to find time to work on a couple of short story ideas I've been mulling for at
least the past year, not to mention some non-fiction I'd like to tackle. In a
pefect world, with as many hours in the day as I needed--or in a terrible world
where I no longer had any new challenges or ideas that appealed to me--then,
yes, maybe I'd start thinking about Jeep, and Marghe, and Thenike, and Danner,
and all the others, and maybe I'd do something about it. It's always possible.
January 5th, 2001
I am a student. I am studing gerontology and at the end of
my course i should present a disertacion. my topic that i have decided to do is
day hospitals, but i have some difficulties to find the method and the
methodologie that can be usefull to me. can yuo do it for me. thank you.
As of January 2001, my consulting rate is $150 an hour. (Kelley, who has just
read this, says this is too cheap. For you I should charge seventeen zillion
dollars an hour and it still wouldn't be enough.)
January 5th, 2001
This is more in the nature of fan mail rather than a
question. I happened across Ammonite quite by chance. I was at
the local library looking for a paperback to read on a long trip, and thought
Ammonite showed promise. The quality of both the writing and
the imagining far exceeded my expectations, so, when I found Slow
River and The Blue Place at a booksellers two weeks
later at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, I was delighted. They have both
been very enjoyable reading, so much so that I found myself wishing that they
were both longer books.
For many years I have been associated with Elsie Publishing, the publishers
of Lesbian Connection, the news magazine for, by, and about lesbians. As part of
our activities, we maintain a free lending library for lesbians, in East
Lansing, Michigan, where we are located. When I found that our library did not
contain copies of your books, I purchased copies of them, except for
Ammonite, of course, and donated them forthwith. It pleases me
to know that local dykes who may not have heard of your work will have access to
your fine writing. I look forward to finding more of your work soon.
I wish I'd heard of Elsie Publishing, and Lesbian Connection, in 1988--which
is when I first arrived in East Lansing for the six week Clarion writing
workshop, held at Michigan State University. It was my first time in a foreign
country on my own; I was poor, and young, and vegetarian; judging from first
appearances, I thought I was the only dyke within a hundred mile radius. In
other words, I was in dire need of a friendly native guide.
I arrived at the tiny, tidy East Lansing airport late one Saturday afternoon
at the end of June to 105 degree heat and no public transport that I could find.
I had to take a taxi to the MSU campus--the driver drove at ninety miles an
hour, all four windows open (no air conditioning), one finger on the wheel, and
turned round to talk to me in the backseat all the way. (He had this nephew
called Bill, in the army, in Inga-land, who lived near a place called Big
Ben--did I know him?)Actually, the fun started before that, at Kennedy airport,
when the INS took one look at my passport photo, in which I had long hair (it
was taken when I was eighteen) at then at me, with very, very short hair (I was
twenty-seven) and said, "What happened?" At the time, I didn't know that if you
were lesbian or gay, you weren't allowed to enter the country. So despite the
fact that I had a big old silver labrys hanging off one ear, jeans with
suspenders, big leather boots and practically zero hair, I just laughed in his
face and said, "I fucking grew up, what do you think happened?" And he,
bemused--or probably thinking I had nothing to hide, otherwise why would I be
trying to pick a fight with the one person who could deny me entry--waved me
through. Anyway, there I was, a day early for my workshop (it was cheaper to fly
on Saturday) in East Lansing, tired, hungry, jet-lagged, and not knowing a soul.
Naturally, my first thought was: Where can I get a pint? I found my dorm room
(my first experience of such a thing; it had no air conditioning; everyone on my
floor seemed to be very pleasant, very whitebread, very married, and about as
much like me as a herd of armadillos) unpacked (I had one Adidas bag and a small
backpack--it took about four minutes) and set out to find fellow workshop
participants. I found four. Great, I thought, and asked where I might find the
bar. "Ah," they said, "unfortunately the campus is dry." Okay, I said, so it's
not raining, and, gosh, that's very nice, but where the fuck is the bar? "No,"
they said, "you don't understand. It's dry." At this point I decided that the IQ
of the average American was about 48. But, hey, I though, no point getting
pissed off, they're foreigners, so I tried again, as politely as I could. After
I'd asked the question in as many ways as I could come up with (and after I'd
begun to think that there was something seriously wrong with these people) I
finally worked out that what they meant was that there was no bar on campus. It
took me a while to digest this. (I think someone from England would be less
shocked at discovering naked nuns rolling in honey in the university quadrangle
than at finding out there was no bar.) However, once I'd come to terms with the
fact that I couldn't buy a pint, that I was stranded without public transport
many miles from anything and that America really was a peculiar country, I
decided that the best thing to do was to just go eat something and reassess. So
off I went to the cafeteria. And found that although I'd paid for three meals a
day for six weeks, even though I'd called ahead, two months before, and been
assured that they could handle my food requirements, there was not a thing there
I found edible. (I was a v. strict vegetarian, and allergic to things like
cheese and yoghurt.) At this point I gave up and went to bed. The next day, I
woke feeling more optimistic. Okay, I thought, I can't go to a pub but I can go
find a supermarket and buy some beer; even in 105 degrees I can walk a couple of
miles. So I find the four Clarion students who are already there, and ask them
where the nearest supermarket with beer might be. "Oh," they said cheerfully,
"it's Sunday." Okay, fine, Sunday, I said, but where's the nearest supermarket
where I can buy beer? "No," they said, "you don't understand. It's Sunday."
After several tense minutes where I consider just throwing them, then myself out
of the window in despair, I finally figure out that not only does MSU not have a
bar, but you can't buy alcohol on Sundays. I could, of course, have walked a few
miles to the nearest restaurant, bought a meal, and had a beer, but there was
one problem: I only had about ten dollars to my name. I didn't have a credit
card (as I've said, I was pretty poor) and the funds I'd brought, although they
were travellers' cheques were, unfortunately, in sterling rather than dollars. I
felt quite, ah, doleful. And that was just the first eighteen hours.
Things improved rapidly, of course: it was only a couple of hours later that
Kelley arrived, at which point I understood that the whole Clarion experience
(and my life, but that took me longer to work out) had suddenly--dramatically
and permanently--improved. An hour after that, the first week's instructor
arrived bearing beer, and the next day I found a bank and cashed in some
travellers' cheques. It took longer to get decent food: I ended up having to
march into the back kitchen, grab some chef by his lapel, haul him out to the
cafeteria and shove his face up close to each cheesy or meaty dish and say, "Can
I eat that? No. Can I eat this? No. How about this? I don't think so...." (I
tried being polite, tried having a nice chat with two chefs and the food manager
on previous days, but it reached the point where, after five days, I was
actually getting faint with hunger, and that's when I get mean). It also took
several weeks before I was no longer treated like a four-legged stork wherever I
went (wish I had a dollar for every time that summer I got called "sir," or for
everytime a jaw hit the floor, for example when I walked into a barber shop and
asked them to cut my hair: I mean, what's so weird about that?). I would have
given my eyeteeth to talk to someone who didn't constantly wonder if my hair and
nails were so short because I'd had chemo or been tortured by some evil
communist regime--or who had even heard the word "tofu" before. Besides, I was
young and, er, healthy, and...well, when some teenage Texan cheerleader babe you
bump into at two in the morning in the laundromat, whose bust size is greater
than her IQ (who has a fetish about the word "schedule" and who--when you
obligingly repeat it a few times in your English accent, "shed-yull,"--gets all
hot and bothered and...oh, never mind) starts to seem worth seeing again, you
know you are in deep, deep trouble and in need of another perspective. What I'm
saying is that it would have been nice to know there were people in town with
whom I could have sat down, talked, had a beer and a decent meal, maybe played
pool or whatever. But, hey, you never know when I might be in town. One of these
days, eh?
January 5th, 2001
From Bob Parker, rparker@ridgenet.net
Hi Nicola,
It was great to hear there is a
Bending the Landscape - Horror, on the way. I read the other
two and the writing is excellent. In case there are any other 50+ year old male
heterosexuals out there wondering if these books are "suitable" for them- yes,
go buy them. The stories touch on basic human emotions and really are good.
Anyway, when might I be looking for the book? Thanks, Bob
Ah, well, for once I actually know enough about a publishing topic to be
specific: Bending the Landscape: Horror will be published by
Overlook on 29 March 2001 as a hardcover that costs $26. (Yee-ha! Can't tell you
how much of a kick it is to be able to give an exact answer. Yay!) You can
pre-order it on amazon.com or your local independent bookshop.
We have a great set of stories lined up, both from past contributors to
previous BtL volumes (L. Timmel Duchamp, Holly Wade Matter, Simon Sheppard,
Carrie Richerson, Mark W. Tiedemann, Keith Hartman, Kathleen O'Malley, Mark
McLaughlin, Ellen Klages, Leslie What) and from BtL newcomers (Barbara Hambly,
A.J. Potter, Alexis Glynn Latner, Gary Bowen, Brian Hopkins & James Van
Pelt, Alexi Smart, Cynthia Ward, Kraig Blackwelder), many of whom will be known
to readers from their other work.
Putting together a volume of horror stories was interesting; I had to spend
some time mulling what a "horror story" is, and some more time guessing what it
might mean to other readers. I think we've come up with an interesting and
varied collection: some quiet fiction, some shocking, some triumphant, some
wrenching, some tense, some playful in a threatening kind of way. I'm proud of
it. Several contributors are from the Northwest, so it might well be that we can
arrange some kind of left coast get-together and publicity scrum. If and when
that happens, I'll certainly post advance notice in the News section.
November 14, 2000
When is Red Raw hitting bookstores?
The Blue Place is the first thing of yours I've read, though
I've been aware of you for some years (and sf/f is my first love in
reading...)...now I guess I'll check out your other stuff, but I'm really glad
you aren't leaving Aud Torvingen in twisting in the fictional
wind!
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday have made an offer for the hardcover, and I've
accepted. Vintage will do the paperback.
The Talese imprint of Doubleday concentrates on "quality fiction" (two from
their list, Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Kneale's
The English Passenger were on this year's Booker
shortlist--Atwood won) and publish only about twelve books a year. I don't yet
have a sense of their rhythms and timing (my other books have been with big
commercial publishers who usually take eighteen months or more to get a book
out) but my best guess would be a Spring '02 publication. As always, when I know
anything definite, I'll post something.
I have to say I'm terribly pleased that I'll be working with Nan A. Talese.
Each book and each author gets time and attention. I'm hoping this will
translate to a wider audience. It also means that Aud has a home for a while--no
more wondering where she'll go next. I spent a happy hour this morning making
notes for her Further Adventures. I think in the next installment she might have
a brush with the film industry. She might also have some fun....
November 14, 2000
Hi Nicola. This may be the wrong forum. I'm a professor at
Western Washington University and i teach a course called "Writing in the
Context of Alternative Realities". I used Ammonite last year in
the course quite successfully, but i find today, the first day of school, copies
of the book are nowhere to be found. I have a complete course worked out with sf
and utopian novesl speaking to each other, and would hate to let it go. Any
suggestions where I maight locate copies? In the next twoo weeks? Thanks
Ammonite is officially out of print. It gives me a pang to
say that but there's not much I can do about it. I'm currently investigating two
e-publishers and, with luck, the book will be available again in a few months,
possibly even with a Print on Demand option. (I still believe that a nice trade
paperback would sell reasonably well but I have yet to be able to persuade a
publisher of this.) However, as some reading this will no doubt know by now, I
don't give up easily <g>.
Meanwhile, there are several out-of-print or hard-to-find book services out
there willing to help you out. Or try individual bookshops online, such as
Powell's and University Books here in Seattle. If all else fails, I have a box
of books in my basement. Somewhere.
November 14, 2000
Hi i'm looking for someone to write a book for me! Do you
know somebody?
No.
November 14, 2000
I have to do an object speech and it just has to be on that
object not talking something inculding that object, my object is a diploma, but
it's a kind of "Diploma". I got it from my best friend from Romania when I left
and it says on it: For a super friend, for her attitude and from a good friend.
Well my question is if you could tell me what I could talk about in the intro,
body and conlcusion and how should I write it pls answer these quickly cause I
need it. Thanks a lot.
Tell you what, you come here and clean my house (the oven, in particular,
needs a good going-over, and it's about time the basement freezer was defrosted
and scrubbed out), rake the leaves, and then run a few errands, and I'll tell
you what to talk about. Deal?
November 14, 2000
From Quanda Anderson, enigma1013@netzero.net
Dear Ms. Griffith,
I don't exactly have a question for you, but I just wanted to tell you that
your assessment of Seattle culture is right on. I've not lived in Washington for
eight years, and I still miss the good food, the ease of walking, the reserve of
the people, the almost... British... approach to humor (depending on where you
are, that is-- I went to a Catholic high school in Tacoma for two years and,
even today, my sense of the laughable is described as "dry" or "British"-- not
necessarily the same thing, but who am I to say?). I have lived in Texas for the
last eight years (with time off to go to college in Massachusetts and a short
stint in upstate New York) and I am still given culture shock when dealing with
Texans-- the almost xenophobic self-centeredness (with both state and self, mind
you,) the wish to know everything personal about you at once, the severe
invasions of 'personal space' without bothering to think "Hey, she might not
want me to touch her." Ah, well. ::grinning::
I do very much love your books. The news that Ammonite was
out of print nearly made me fall from my chair! I'm glad to know that there
might be a chance of a trade paperback for that work, though-- I've introduced
several of my friends to your work, beginning with A, and they have devoured
SR and TBP as well--we all pounced on your
descriptive imagery as our favorite aspects of you books. Not that your stories
aren't well-written... but there's nothing like getting that feeling of
*transport* from the winds on Jeep, or Lore's reaction to Spanner's aphrodisiac,
or any of a dozen other little things.
Thank you so much for your exsquisitely atmospheric work-- I will wait
patiently for more of your wonderful offerings. Oh, and as for people that can't
see the humor in TBP: it's there, definitely. I think I laughed
almost as much as I caught my breath at Aud's descriptions of necessary
violence, or woodworking.
Sincerely yours, Quanda Anderson
Generally speaking I leave only a fraction of the original descriptions in
the final book. A case in point: Red Raw begins with Aud in the
Pisgah National Forest. The first draft was about twelve luscious pages of trees
and sunlight and beetles and birds, the smell of the dirt, the rustle of leaves,
but that's now down to about three pages, and may shrink further. Such scenes
are delicious to imagine, exciting to write, and satisfying to read out loud;
it's absolutely no fun to cut them to the bone, but I know self-indulgence when
I see it (and smell it, and taste it <g>). It's just that I love going to
these places, to the forests and the lakes and mountains; it's a cheap way to go
on holiday.
September 14, 2000
From Daniel Mann, djmann88@yahoo.com
Although I would say you writing actually improved when you
released Blue Place, I would warn against approaching the
detective novel too closely, it relies heavily on formula, and virtually all
purely detective novels are badly written pulp.(a pulp which is in demand).
While all your books are excellent, I find it interesting that Blue
place didnt have the problems most other books have when they try to
include 'action', such as a loss of emotion and character based critical thought
surrounding the action sequences, or a trivialising of such events after they
occur.
My question as follows:
In the media we often hear stories of how
so-&-so followed his or her idol of 30 years ago and became, say, a rockstar
or an astronaut. Although I have an extreme attitude problem, as a nice young
man should I continue to near idolise cool authors such as yourself (and pat
cadigan, nancy kress ...) more than any nike sportsMAN or black NFL or NBL
player. My friends all tell me this is 'wrong', but wont elaborate, especially
considering I only appreciate what you have written and done, I really dont
wan't to be in your shoes. Whats up with this? No-one wants to discuss it. Most
people who are willing to discuss it blame gender differences, and an inability
of society to deal with gender and sexual sterotypes. Personally, I blame
society's self hate(and self-abnegation) that makes people mimic and emulate
thier 'idols', rather than just trying to understand and improve on what they
like.
what do you think? (BTW, as you guessed I'm not a newly lesbian, I am a 6ft
fellow with waist length blonde hair Aussie surfer (yes! a cliche), who is
studying for a Phd in Mech Engineering)
I wouldn't dream of suggesting that you stop admiring me. What sane and
reasonable person would want to turn down that kind of attention? Admiration,
though, is only valuable if the admirer is also reasonably sane--which, on the
available evidence, you seem to be. For instance, you understand that it's
eminently possible to separate out the traits and achievements you admire and/or
want to emulate from those for which you don't give a fig; just because you
appreciate my work doesn't mean you have to want to be a dyke--which is good,
because that might prove a tad difficult for a six-foot surfer boy. (Not
impossible, of course, just not easy <g>.)
I believe, as you seem to, that wanting to be one's idol is a sign of a lack:
of knowledge, experience, or self-esteem. It's not a coincidence that many teens
experience some kind of hero-worship; it's a way of trying on experiences, of
imagining how it might be to front a band, open a movie, or carve a trail down
an extreme slope. When you're that young it's hard to see that character is a
composite, a gradual accretion of all the things done, people met, and decisions
made. Those who continue the idolisation into adulthood are simply seeking an
excuse to not deal with the real world.
September 14, 2000
Dear Nicola, i have 10 questions and i hope you dont mind
answering them.
1) Why do you think so many science fiction writers choose
to write about aliens from Mars?
2) How do you think the temperature on Pluto
compares with the temperature on Mercury? Why are they different?
3) Which
planet is second farthest from the sun?
4) Name Earth's two nearest
planet.
5) Would it take longer to fly to Saturn or Neptune? Why?
6) Which
planet had visible rings?
7) Which planet is the largest?
8) What are the
possibilities that aliens may have visited us from the other galaxies?
9)
What would they need to do if they wanted to make the trip?
10)In" Star Trek
",when the spaceship travels at Warp speed, how much time will it take the
Enterprise to travel from Earth to the Sun?
i hope u can send me all the answers as soon as possible, but i want you to
know that if you dont know all the answers plz do not go to any trouble for it
to look everywhere, do as it i seasy for you
Thank
You
-Sania
I am wracked with guilt at not having immediately called all my colleagues to
determine the scientific answers to your questions. What happened was I got
really twisted up at the thought that I might be polling a non- representational
subset of the population and so spent three days writing code in an attempt to
come up with a statistically normed sample--not moving except to dial up Kozmo
for a supply of Jolt and pop-tarts. But, in the end, as you've probably guessed,
I failed and so, despite your very generous offer to forgive me, I think I'll
just go kill myself.
September 14, 2000
From Adam Diamond, SecBanana@aol.com
Nicola,
I've read all three of your novels to date and am eagerly awaiting
Red Raw. In addition, I've found your responses to posts here
greatly rewarding. Let me just say that you're giving me hope as a writer, as a
thinker, as a person.
I'm straight and male and I only mention this because of a comment you made
in an earlier post: "There are a lot more straight readers in the world than gay
ones, and I want my work to resonate with as many people as possible." Let me
assure you in no uncertain terms: it does.
My question is a simple one: are you familiar with Emma Bull's novel Bone
Dance? It's got an interesting take on gender which, if you haven't yet read it,
I don't want to give away here as it really alters the experience of reading the
book. On a related note, though, do you ever find yourself consciously altering
your writing in order to downplay issues of gender and sexuality? Because there
is such a variety of media stimuli pushing a specific style/form of dealing with
these issues, I find I must sometimes think hard about what I am saying in my
writing, even if (and sometimes especially because) these issues are not the
primary focus.
With respect,
Adam Diamond
I am familiar with Bull's Bone Dance which I read when it
first came out (ten years ago?) and thoroughly enjoyed. I've enjoyed all the
work of hers that I've come across...but I can't help feeling she hasn't found
her metier yet. Don't get me wrong, I don't think there's anything lacking in
her work so far, it's just that I sometimes think I see something more
glimmering under the surface; I'd love to see that rise.
When I'm actually writing, no, I don't downplay issues of gender and
sexuality. So much of my writing is done at the subterranean level, before I
ever set fingers to keyboard, that those issues are all resolved by the time I
sit down and type "Chapter One." However, in both Slow River
and The Blue Place I came across paragraphs in the first draft
that made me really uncomfortable, and when I sat down to try work out why, I
realised that it had to do with my characters' perceptions of sex and gender
(particularly prejudice relating to same) and my portrayal of the fictional
society's attitudes. For example, in The Blue Place, there was
a throw-away paragraph where Aud and Julia discuss the fact that in Norway they
could legally get married. I deleted it because it would have pointed up the
fact that in the US, two women can't get married, and I really didn't want the
idea of discrimination, of women or lesbians being second class citizens, to
enter the reader's mind; that wasn't what the book was about. Aud is
self-directed, almost (she thinks) untouched by cultural assumptions; she
believes herself to be an utterly free agent. To rub the reader's nose in the
fact that she isn't (and can't be-- no social being can) would have destroyed
the delicate balance I was trying to build. As Aud grows, learns, and matures it
will be interesting to see whether or not I need to maintain this balance.
The book I'm researching at the moment, an historical novel about Hild of
Whitby, which I want to be as close to what is know to be known as possible, is
a different kettle of fish. I don't yet know enough about her to know whether
she was a dyke, a straight girl, or neither...and I'm coming to the conclusion
that such definitions would, at that time, have been rather meaningless. The
whole early seventh-century Anglo-Saxon view of marriage was not like ours; the
primary human bonds were of kin/clan/tribe, not marriage. It's quite
discomfiting to realise I'm setting out to write a huge novel about a woman to
whom it mattered more whether or not she liked her uncle than who she humped. I
am very much a product of my culture: the most important person in my life is
Kelley, my partner. The idea that my parents and/or sisters and/or aunts and
uncles would be given my highest allegiance, while Kelley would be of clearly
secondary status, is a really difficult one for me to grasp. It matters to me
who Hild has sex with-- were they kind? mean? young? old? It's not just about
gender--but it probably was of less consequence to her because the backbone, the
cornerstone of her being would have been her kin group.
I'm beginning to understand that it might be awhile before I can write this
book. I had hoped it would be my next project, but I think I have a long way to
go before I can really get inside Hild's head. Some of this may be due to the
fact that I've never tried to write about a real person before, but some of it
is that Hild is really, really alien to me. So many historical novels pretend to
be about historical figures, but they're really about twentieth- or
twenty-first-century people in old-fashioned clothes. I don't want to make that
mistake. I want to understand what I'm doing before I begin.
September 14, 2000
I read The Blue Place in italian and I was
shocked: why the so much melodrammatic - tragedy - don't cry for me Aud - Oliver
& Jennifer' Love Story (etcetera) - last pages? I think you
're the new Donald Westlake, but last pages, I think, ruined the book... Good
job, anyway.
Melodramatic: "...characterized by sensationalism and spurious pathos." (OED)
Definitions can be very subjective. The way I see it, if you felt that I as a
writer had done my job in describing truly Aud and Julia, if you understood how
and why Julia's death occurred and believed how Aud felt about it, then the
pathos elicited would not be spurious. The emotions felt by you, as a reader,
would have been earned; the book would not be a melodrama. However, if the
emotions or events did not ring true for you, then the pathos at the end would
be false. It would mean I had not quite done my job. I would be interested to
hear what, exactly, did not work for you--what events or emotions felt
untrue.
September 14, 2000
I've read and thoroughly enjoyed Slow River
and The Blue Place, but so far I haven't been able to track
down a copy of Ammonite. Amazon tells me that it's out of print
and since all of the online booksellers use the same distribution warehouse I'm
assuming the rest don't have it either. Any ideas?
Ammonite is, indeed, out of print. It had a great run for a
mass-market paperback original that never got any publicity. Up until a few
months ago it was selling a reasonably steady number of copies per month, but
not enough for Del Rey to feel it was cost effective for them to keep it in
print. I have since reacquired the rights. It's my feeling that when my new book
hits the shelves--I hope to able to announce some news about that in a week or
two--if Ammonite were rereleased in trade paperback format, it
would do quite well: Slow River is still selling briskly, and
The Blue Place recently went back to press. For some reason,
the trade paper format seems to work well for my novels.
However, until it's republished, Ammonite is only going to
be available in one of two ways. One, from booksellers such as University Books
here in Seattle who ordered many copies as soon as they realised Del Rey were
going out of stock. Two, from secondhand booksellers such as Powell's (who have
an excellent inventory, see http://www.powells.com/). The minute it gets
back into print, I'll post something in the News section.
September 14, 2000
Both of us enjoyed your one page essay in
Nature (402,585). The future is happenning.
Yes. This stuff is happening all around us. Years ago, I did some research
about how/when/if it would ever be possible for two women to have children
together. The initial answer was that it would never be possible (you need both
ovum and spermatozoon to create a new being with unique genetic makeup). But
then I started following odd trails and it seemed to me that if you have more
money than god, a great ob/gyn (great in attitude, skill, and access to cutting
edge tech.), very good health and a lot of patience, there would be a way to do
it. It's a bit convoluted, and in some ways morally dubious, and involves both
women having their ova fertilised in vitro, using donated sperm, then creating a
third embryo from the gametes of the first two, and bringing that to term. You
would, in effect, be giving birth to your own grandchildren. Or you could try
create a chimera--but only if the two women were very similar in appearance,
otherwise the poor child would have patchy skin and hair colour, and end up
looking a bit like a tortoiseshell cat. Another, much less expensive, tricky,
and morally ambiguous alternative would be to have one partner donate the egg,
and the other carry it. The child would have no shared genetic material but both
women would have contributed to its birth. But, yep, the future is here. Has
been for years <g>.
September 14, 2000
I just finished reading your short stories in Realms
Of Fantasy. (I loved them, and their open endings. (I've been reading L.
Timmel Duchamp essays too, btw.))
My question is: these were "Lessons In What Matters, #1, #4, and #7". Will we
be seeing any more of those lessons penned by you?
Oh, and some time ago I dug up a copy of Pulphouse that had
Kelley's story, "Somewhere Down The Diamond Back Road", printed in it. Tell her
I'm looking forward to reading Solitaire. (I wonder when her
page http://www.sff.net/people/kelley/ will be ready. It seems to hae been under
construction for a few years now...)
My best wishes to both of you.
Kelley and I have both recently registered our domain names. At some point
we'll figure out what to do with them. Kelley tells me that she intends to have
a basic website up and running before her novel, Solitaire,
comes out. However, as we're not yet sure of the publication date, this means we
don't know when the website will go up. My guess would be late next year. The
day it goes up, I'll post something to the News section.
The "What Matters" series came about by accident. When I wrote The
Blue Place I got carried away with writing a story-in-a-story about a
troll and the havoc it wreaks upon a family in ninth-century Norway. For the
sake of internal balance, I had to cut the story down, from about thirty pages
to about five. After the book came out, I realised I really liked those cut
pages. I decided to turn them into a stand-alone piece. But I couldn't find a
way to begin or end the narrative because in my mind it was still all tangled up
with Aud. So I invented a mysterious narrator, who I ended up liking so much I
had to find something else to do with her/him/it (I'm giving away no clues .
So I dug a couple of old stories out of storage, did a bit of rewriting, stuck
the same framing device around both of them, and sold all three to Realms
of Fantasy. I numbered them 1,4, and 7 to give myself plenty of room to
add others as and when the mood takes me. In a perfect world, I'd write stories
occasionally, and frame them all with the same narrator, then sell the
collection to a publisher who will know what to do with it.
For those that missed "Troll Story" in RoF, it will be
republished in October in a collection of ghost stories called Ghost
Writing, edited by Roger Weingarten, whose other contributors include
T. C. Boyle, John Updike, Robert Coover, Alice Munro and others whose names I
forget.
September 14, 2000
From Rob Fish, rfish@netscape.com
Nicola, thank you for sharing your imagination, your worlds
with us. Your characters are astonishingly real. I have throughly enjoyed your
work, and I look forward to your future writing (Red Raw? Any
news yet regarding publication?). As mentioned by another poster, I too read
only a few pages at a time to prolong each story's feel and universe as long as
possible. Best of luck in your future work, and again, thank you so much for
sharing it with us. -Rob
No definite news about publication of Red Raw. However, even
as I write, wheels are turning; my agent just had lunch with an editor who is
very interested in the book. There are one or two questions to resolve, but I'm
hoping I'll have some concrete news to report within the next couple of weeks.
However, the one thing I know for sure about publishing is that nothing is real,
nothing is certain until the contracts are signed, sealed, and delivered, so
that's all I want to say at this stage.
May 31, 2000
From Brad, bradrp@netzero.net
I have read and thoroughly enjoyed both Bending the
Landscape compilations. I was thrilled to see that the work of Gay and
Lesbian science fiction and fantasy writers is being showcased in such a way. As
a gay writer of genre fiction I was wondering how such speicalized opportunities
are publicized. Where do I look for calls for submissions for alternate
sexuality genre fiction? I don't see a lot of it in mainstream
magazines.
For Bending the Landscape the call for submissions went out
to writers' organisations, such as SFWA (the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers
of America), as well as to a lot of genre-market email lists. A websearch will
show you a variety of these (Market Maven, Scavengers, etc.), as well as
pointers to print versions. There are also LGBT newsletters with substantial
call-for-submissions sections. Two I can think of off the top of my head are
Q*ink! (http://www.mongooseontheloose.com/qink/cfs.html),
which is a newsletter, website, and chatroom for writers, and Puckerup
(contact tristan@puckerup.com) ,
which is a newsletter for the kinkily-inclined. All the usual lesbian and gay
literary journals (e.g. Lambda Book Report, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and so
on) also have cfs columns. However, if your primary focus is SF/F rather than
LGBT, then just write the best fiction you can and submit it to the mainstream
genre magazines, such as Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's, Analog, and
F&SF. It seems to me that the genre is extremely open to fiction with
LGBT content. I've never had any problems; if your work is good enough, someone
will buy it.
May 31, 2000
From Silvia Lacayo, sillary@hotmail.com
Yo Nicola, I don't really have a question, just some
comments, praise, stuff like that. First off, I read the Blue
Place and just finished Slow River, both of which were
very kick-ass. It's funny because I've never liked reading and sci-fi even less.
Anyway, I loved them. One day I suddenly was curious about lesbians and sci-fi
(I wondered "do those two ever get combined?" ha ha, was I surprised). But I
couldn't find books at the store, and then I was reading the Xena Alt newsgroup
and saw your post and I was like "I must be trippin' because I've been looking
for her books, what a coincidence." So I visited your link. Finally I caved in
and did a little online shopping. Anyway, then I come to this page to find out
you watch Buffy too. Well, I have to say I like your taste in tv shows.
On the Blue Place: I have to admit I was feeling a little
sad that I couldn't relate or whatever to art and Europe but then I thought
"whatever, Aud is kinda like Xena and Julia is kind of like Gabrielle" and the
writing about plants and things...I never think about those but then I started
to when you said Americans are lucky because Europe doesn't get such a display
of nature.
On Slow River: I loved all the science talk. Even though I
couldn't understand it. It's way cool anyway. I even considered lending the book
to my brother (he's studying chemical engineering) but then there's the pesky
lesbian issue, about which he wouldn't be happy. Oh well.
I'm starting an Octavia Butler book but then I'll see if I can find
Ammonite at the lib or something.
Thanks for your writing! Damn, you're very creative. Keep making stuff up
because it's very good.
There are a lot of SF/lesbian books and anthologies out there. Circlet Press,
for example, does nothing but publish erotic SF/F. But, hey, I'm glad you liked
my stuff. Have you read any of the Bending the Landscape
anthologies? Ammonite has just gone out of print (sigh) but you
could probably find it either by searching speciality bookshops (e.g.
gay/lesbian/feminist, or SF/F) which may have a few left in stock, or by
checking out Powell's (http://www.powells.com/) for second-hand
copies.
If only the Creation people would make the Xena/Gabby thing maintext instead
of subtext I'd be lining up to do a novelisation for them....
May 31, 2000
Last year I started a paper on sexual abuse in 20th century
literature. I read five or six books--including Slow River--and
found that all the instances of abuse were cases of rape where the child was
forced to do something against his or her will. This bothered me because having
been a psychology major before I switched to English I know two things about
sexual abuse. One: Actual forcible rape of a child is quite rare. Children are
usually tricked or enticed into having sex. Two: Most victims of sexual abuse
actually wish they were raped because at least then they could have the comfort
of having said no. Anyway, I was wondering why you and others writers only write
about rapes. Is it because you can't imagine being a child and being fooled like
that? Or is that you're afraid of going into the mind of a person who is being
fooled?
On first reading that comes across as a "When did you stop beating your
wife?" question, which I usually interpret as more of a hostile position
statement than a genuine inquiry. It also appears to rely upon a horde of
assumptions, such as the nature and definition of rape, child and adult
psychological development, the nature of coercion, the uses and mechanisms of
fiction and of reality, the lumping together in one mental and emotional sack
the motivation of all writers, and so on. However, as I'm in a benevolent mood,
and as sexual abuse is a rather emotional subject, I'll respond.
It was important to both Lore's psychological unfolding and to the plot of
Slow River that her understanding of her family dynamic be all
wrong. This would not have been possible if Lore had seen the face or heard the
voice of her abuser: it's hard to imagine a character with no voice and no face
enticing a child (frightening her, yes, coercing her, definitely). Is my
imagination lacking on this point? Very possibly.
As for being fooled--we're all fooled all the time as children, and again as
adults. It would require very little imagination to picture how it might feel to
be a seven-year-old tricked into having sex (it wouldn't feel good, but it
wouldn't be difficult). But that would have led to a certain amount of
self-hatred on Lore's part, and I didn't want that to be an overt part of her
character. In other words, I manipulated reality to suit my fictional needs. I'm
a writer; it's what I do.
May 31, 2000
I've just spent the last three hours reading every question
and answer on this web site, which I've thoroughly enjoyed. I've read
Slow River and The Blue Place and will be
reading Ammonite as soon as I can get hold of a copy. Of the
two, I preferred The Blue Place because it seemed more of a
character study than Slow River. I picked up Blue
Place because you wrote it, but I must say I was quite taken by the
picture on the cover -- despite your reservations about it. Perhaps the woman
isn't old enough or tough enough for Aud, but the point comes across, I think.
It's so refreshing to be able to read about a heroic, though certainly
imperfect, lesbian character, to go deeply into her head. Certainly as a reader,
if a story is good enough, the personal identity of the character isn't so
important, but it's a definite pleasure to come across someone like Aud. I know
I'm enjoying a book when I want to read it as fast as possible so I can find out
what happens, but I know I love a book when I slow down -- to prolong the
pleasure, to savor the experience. There were plenty of times during The
Blue Place when I forced myself to stop, to reread, so it wouldn't be
over so quickly. And that's the highest compliment I can pay you. Thank you, and
I look forward to the sequel.
Well, that's put a slow, wide smile on my face, thank you. Red
Raw is more of the same but better I think: deeper, stronger, a little
more mature. Aud still beats the crap out of people, but at least she sighs
first <g>.
I'm pleased, too, that you enjoyed all the old Ask Nicola. I keep meaning to
go back and take a look and see how it holds up, but there's always something
more interesting to do....
May 13, 2000
From Wah, suilung@hotmail.com
hello Ms.Griffith
I've been following your writing since
Ammonite was first published and have become an admirer of your
writing. The first book is incredible and can't be compared to Slow
River and the Blue Place which have a different
style/mood than your first novel(I'm hoping for a sequel/short story about
Company and the world that you created.)As for your 2nd and 3rd book they were
different but quite impressive-I am looking forward to next novel-when will it
be out?
Congrats on a fabulous first book and con't writing
success.
I believe that the difference between Ammonite and my later
novels is quantitative rather than qualitative, and it's something I've been
thinking about in the few weeks since I finished Red Raw. When
I finish a writing project, I can't rest until I decide what I will write next.
At any one time, I have ideas for half a dozen novels (and as many short stories
and essays and editing projects) circling overhead. I watch them all, and
wonder--which will run out of fuel, and crash and burn, before I can get to it.
It can be hard to choose. This time, instead of thinking about the story, that
is, the product, I've been thinking about the writing itself and how it feels,
that is, the process.
Essentially, I've been asking myself why I write. The obvious answer is that
I write because it feels good. So then I started thinking about what bits of
what novels felt better better than others to write, and why. I was startled to
find that what really gives me a buzz is a sense of exploration. I remember very
clearly writing Ammonite, discovering along with Marghe how a
whole alien planet looked and smelt and tasted; what different populations did
to support themselves; the multitude of strange flora and fauna that might grow
in various conditions; how those same conditions would affect people.... And
then I remembered how it felt to describe Lore, in Slow River,
putting together a plan to clean up the Aral Sea using really, really cool
science and technology; how it might feel to breathe liquid; what it would be
like to be young and injured and alone in the future. And in The Blue
Place walking with Aud on the glacier, and thinking about the building
of stave churches, and how to make a rocking chair. In Red Raw,
sending Aud off into the Pisgah National Forest, and watching her
rebuild a log cabin. There is nothing like getting inside a person, first, and a
whole culture, second, and exploring a place or a time through their
eyes--discovering how the world felt and smelt and tasted, what dreams and
beliefs and meals they shared, to what extent what they saw and wore and needed
was or was not alien. But here's the interesting part: in each case, the place
or attitude or skill was something unfamiliar to me. I don't know one end of
drawknife from another; I've never been to Norway or Pisgah; the workings of
sewage plants, alien viruses and the politics of the rich and famous are a
mystery to me. And that's the point: I write to discover the new. I love making
stuff up.
After I finished Red Raw I realised that although I'm eager
to find out what happens to Aud next, to some extent I know her and how her mind
works. What I want to play with now is someone, in some culture, some time and
place, I haven't been able to visit--that no one has--and it dawned on me that
it might be time to write that big old seventh century historical novel I've
been muttering about for years. So right now I'm reading about Celts and
Anglo-Saxons, the church, early middle ages farming methods, ancient
Scandinavian myth, the evolving role of women in North European temporal and
spiritual arenas, and so on. I'm happy as a clam. I have grandiose visions for
this novel: the same kind of exploration on the geological and gender scale as
Ammonite, the same personal growth and class struggle in
Slow River, the same physical exhilaration and sense of
personal power as The Blue Place, and the same hard lessons
learnt and new strength found as Red Raw. I am very
excited! Of course, books always twist under my hand and grow into something
unexpected, but, hey, I don't care, I haven't been as excited about a book
since...well, since the last time I started one <g>.
May 13, 2000
From Michelle Hampton, hampjm@earthlink.com
Although this isn't a question, I thought you might find it
interesting to look at this page reference at http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/superbug991228.html.
The article content regards the use of altered bacteria for removal of toxic
waste.
It's amazing how much the fiction eventually looks like reality.
Happy
Holidays to you and yours.
I based most of the bioremediation in Slow River on waste
water research being reported in 1993. Some of the research was theoretical,
some practical but extremely small scale; some was just, well, wild speculation.
For fictional purposes, I assumed that not only would the wild slivers of
speculative science prove to be true, but that everything would scale up, and
theory would translate to practice, without any glitches. One of the reasons I
love fiction is that you can do this without some government agency breathing
down your neck and recalling its grant, or millions of people dying because you
forgot to multiply by two, or colleagues at other research and educational
institutions railing against your bad science and hopeless optimism. Fiction is
definitely more fun.
There was a fair amount of wish fulfillment going on, too. I am, frankly,
quite frightened about what is happening in the world with regard to pollution
and depletion of natural resources. Water is going to be the most precious and
fought-over commodity of the twenty-first century. The huge and terrible things
that have been done to our lakes and rivers and seas are going to demand some
equally huge and heroic response--either in the form of tiny microbes and even
smaller nanobots, or massive public engineering works.
Europe and North America are going to have to lead the way--our cultures have
reached a place (a certain technological expertise, sufficient ready capital,
low population growth, reasonable urban infrastructure and so on) from which
it's possible to take a breath, look around, and assess likely developments.
Other cultures, such as China, aren't there yet: they are still forging ahead
with Big Projects, trying to drag their country into the industrial (never mind
the information) age. The Three Gorges Dam project, for example, makes me feel
ill--but to shout and stamp my feet and say, "No! They shouldn't be allowed to
do that!" would be hypocritical. After all, it's no worse that what happened in
Tennessee and to the Colorado (and so on and so forth) last century. But, ah,
I'm disappointed; I'd hoped that by the time China had the money and expertise
for such massive projects, technology and our understanding of the natural world
would have progressed to the point that human needs could be catered to without
destroying whole ecosystems. A huge percentage of the world's population live in
China and India; this century many of them are going to start demanding what we
in the West already have: phones and cars, more clothes than we can wear and
more food than we can eat, vitamins we don't really need and entertainment most
of us don't want, big houses we heat in winter while wearing t-shirts and cool
in summer while wearing sweaters. Who in their right minds would want to give up
toothpaste and electricity and disposable tampons and plastic wrap? Not me,
certainly. So why should anyone else, no matter where they live? Which means
things are going to get a lot worse and for a long time before they get better.
I really hope there are a million people working on bioremediation right now.
We're going to need it.
May 13, 2000
I'm actually trying to send mail to Kelley Eskridge-- after
browsing the web for about an hour, this is as close an email address as I have
been able to find! I had the pleasure of reading "Eye of the Storm," and was
wondering if Ms. Eskridge had published (or is planning to) a full novel, and if
there were a collection of her short stories... If you'd be willing to pass this
on to her, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks,
I've already passed your email along to Kelley who will respond to you
privately, but let me take this opportunity to refer readers to Kelley's
bibliography which can be found in an earlier Ask Nicola answer. Kelley hasn't
written any short fiction since "The Eye of the Storm" (in Sirens and
Other Demon Lovers, ed. Ellen Datlow) because she's been busy with her
novel, Solitaire. So busy, in fact, that I've been a book
widow, stuck on my own every evening for weeks while Kelley whacks away at her
keyboard in her basement office. Sniff. But Solitaire is now
finished, and will be published by Harpercollins/Eos, probably next summer. I'll
post a notice to the News section as soon as we have a firm
date.
Solitaire is a really good piece of work, treating
a couple of subjects not often dealt with in science fiction--and the middle
section is a writing tour de force.
As for a collection of her
short fiction, she has no plans at this time, other than the three-way
collaboration I've mentioned more than once, Women and Other
Aliens, which, believe it or not, is actually progressing. More on that
at a later date.
May 13, 2000
I came across Slow River via a
collaborative book recommender (http://www.alexlit.com)/) and was
immediately fascinated. Now that I've stumbled across this site, some of your
interviews have sparked a whole mess of questions in my head. Since your
comments helped get these rocks rolling, I thought I'd ask you, too:
After reading the history of mind/body dualism in "Writing from the Body," I
was suddenly reminded of the Terry Bisson short story "They're Made Out of Meat"
(http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html).
I've enjoyed the humor of it without really connecting it to the idea that flesh
is what holds minds back. Now I wonder if the story functions as a satire, or at
least a pointed reminder that the human mind is far from ethereal.
The intro to your interview with January Magazine (http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/griffith.html)
quotes you as saying about Ammonite, "I'm the author, I'm a lesbian. My
protagonist is a lesbian, and she has a lesbian love affair. [But] it's no more
a book about being lesbian than [William Gibson's] Neuromancer is a book about
coming to terms with one's heterosexuality." That statement is not only a nice,
crisp way of getting your point across, but it also raises the question of what
books there are about "coming to terms with one's heterosexuality"--not the mass
of coming-of-age stories, but a real examination of what it means to be het.
Maybe not a question you're curious about, but I always wonder about what it's
like to be someone whose experiences differ from mine.
You mention (on http://www.sff.net/people/nicola/an_archive6.htp)
that you "subscribe to the Nike school of philosophy: Just Do It. If you sit
around and fret about it, you're not getting on with your life. [...] People
look for the magic bullet (a no-diet, no-exercise way to lose weight; a no-study
way to get a degree; a no-sweat way to become a black belt) but there isn't one.
If you're a lesbian, go fall in love (or just have sex with, depending on your
personality) a woman, and get on with enjoying your life." I know your emphasis
in this was that there's no way to accomplish something other than to get
started on it, but I wonder what it has to say to a bisexual in a long-term
monogamous relationship (purely hypothetical situation, of course). I don't
think that my nature is adequately described by my outward actions alone. I
suspect that for many people, inconfidence and ambivalence are in fact part of
who they are, not just impediments towards becoming themselves. I'm not saying
this is admirable or flattering, just common.
Thank you for your wonderful and thought-provoking writing, both in your
books and here on your site!
Bisson is a sly, sly writer, but in the case of "They're Made Out of Meat" I
think his point is pretty obvious: we are our bodies, and no matter how many
stories some of us read about jacking into the machine, no matter how many of us
dream about uploading ourselves into a virtual world, the only way to know, feel
and understand the universe is through the flesh, because the flesh is us and we
are our flesh. He's saying There is nothing else and at the same time
acknowledging that there are people out there who genuinely find the body
distasteful, so distasteful that they are alienated from themselves. In the
hands of writers like Bisson, science fiction does a wonderful job of making the
metaphor concrete.
A few years ago, a lesbian feminist poet and fiction writer called Jan
Clausen fell in love with a man. Her memoir, Apples and
Oranges, published in January 1999 by Houghton Mifflin, is subtitled
"My Journey to Sexual Identity." It's the kind of title that catches my
attention. I decided I would buy it, until I read the reviews, which imply it's
less an exploration of how she feels about who she and who she's attracted to
than a consideration of what and how others think of her. But now I've just read
your question, and thought about the whole thing again, and started wondering
what personal sexual identity is, exactly. It's a bit like gender: not something
we think or care about except in terms of how others treat us. I never go
around thinking, "I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl," or "I'm a dyke, I'm a
dyke, I'm a dyke." I think, "I'm me, I'm me, I'm me." Except, for example, when
it's two in the morning, one winter in 1983 in a rough northern city, and I'm
drunk and staggering down a deserted street, humming happily to myself, only to
look up and see eight men, equally drunk, staggering up the road on a collision
course, wolf-whistling. Then I think about the fact that I'm a woman and a dyke,
because I know that's how they'll see and treat me: as an object of contempt--as
an apparently vulnerable object of contempt. At times like this you have
to think in gender and sexuality terms in order to understand what might happen
and to mitigate the potential result. (Which in this instance I did by stopping,
pointing at the biggest, saying, "Okay, you first. Would you rather I broke your
right leg or your left leg?" and giving him a beatific smile. They all reared
back in bleary surprise, then we swapped a few "Fucking dyke!" and "Drunken
arseholes!" and tottered on our separate ways.)
Writing about being a teenager and realising one is a dyke (or gay man, or
bisexual, or transsexual, or whatever) has usually been cast in terms of
suddenly finding out one is different. That's what all the coming out books are
about (and why they get so mind-numbingly boring after you've read three or
four). If we try to think of "coming to terms with being heterosexual" in the
same terms, it doesn't make sense: what is there to come to terms with?
It would become writing about being a sexual human being, taking the first steps
along the path to adulthood, in other words, a coming of age novel. As you point
out, there are plenty of those.
It seems to me that--here in urban North America, anyway--society is reaching
the point where being gay and being straight aren't much different. If you're a
dyke, you can still have a job, gain some measure of legal protection (if you
can afford the lawyers for the wills and health care directives and powers of
attorney, etc. etc, and are willing to fight the government on little things
like immigration issues and prison visiting...) have kids, buy a house with your
partner and so on. You still get old or get sick, get promoted or win the
lottery, have to decide where to go on holiday or what kind of shoes to buy.
Lust is the same, whether felt for a boy or a girl, and so is love. Some things,
though, are different: the kind of sex you have can vary at least a little
depending on what does or doesn't dangle; the kind of conversations you have
will vary, depending on whether you're both speaking the same variety of
gendered language.... What I'm trying to say is that the social and political
differences are growing less and less, certainly if you have money and live in a
city, but perhaps the personal and relational differences still exist. But are
those differences of another order of magnitude than, say, those of nationality,
mother tongue, religion, class, or personality type? I don't know. It's an
interesting thing to think about; maybe someone is writing about it right
now.
I agree with your assertion that for some people ambivalence is part of who
they are. I don't believe we have to make up our minds definitely about
everything; I believe it's possible to hold several conflicting ideas in one's
head at any one time. I do this frequently--either because I can't resolve the
apparent dilemma, or there's no reason to, or I'm simply waiting for more
information. Life doesn't have to be a series of yes/no, on/off, black/white
propositions. You were right in assuming that my comments pertained to achieving
goals; you can't get anywhere unless you begin. However, I'm a little confused
about your hypothetical bisexual in a monogamous relationship and how that
example might relate to my comment. If someone is committed to a long-term
monogamous relationship, then I assume they are happy (otherwise why commit?).
So what is there to fret about? Being bisexual doesn't mean you have to have sex
with both sexes to be happy; it simply means you are capable of loving/lusting
after both sexes, that what's important to you is the person, not their
biological sex. Bisexuality isn't ambivalence, it's inclusiveness. I don't think
it's any harder for a bisexual to commit to one person than it is for a gay or
straight person. My point in that AN reply (if I recall correctly: it's been a
while) was that if you are unhappy, then do something, don't just complain or
fret or worry or talk about it; think about it, then take action; happiness
takes work. I was not implying for a second that a) it's a bad thing to weigh
choices for a while, or b) having made a choice one can't change one's mind.
Sometimes the only way to learn is by making the wrong choices.
Inexpert and amateur therapists have led many people to assume that if we
think about a problem long enough to understand it, then that problem will
miraculously vanish. I don't believe this is true. Just because I understand
something doesn't make that something better. For example, if I realise I'm
angry, that sudden knowledge doesn't make the anger go away, it means that I
have to work out why I'm angry. Once I've thought about the anger enough to
understand what's causing it then I have to do something to change those
circumstances. Although the thinking and then the understanding are necessary
precursors, it's the doing that effects change and makes the anger go away. The
doing, of course, just to confuse the issue, could be as simple as trying to
remember to think about something differently <g>.
May 13, 2000
From Garry Garrett, gsgarrett2@fuse.net
So, it appears you're "coming back" at least in the
direction of SF as evidenced by, what was it?, 2-3 stories coming out in
Realms of Fantasy this year. Is it to soon to say, "welcome back"?
Anyway, which way do you think you're headed? Were I to venture a guess, based
on your comments about the strong Seattle SF contingent (LeQuin, McIntyre, et.
al.) I'd say the "peer" pressure or maybe the comradarie might have its effects.
Although it's against my religion (really, though, it's a time and priority
thing) I'll have to pick up these issues of Realms.
Congratulations on your short in Nature, quite an honor in my
opinion! To be published next to the worlds greatest works of Science is
something. I wrote you earlier on your handling of the "technical" aspects of
futuristic bioremediation in Slow River. I think the staff at
Nature must think likewise.
On MS-Don't really know much about the biochem. though I would like to
comment on the motivations of the pharmaceutical industry. To keep it on the
positive let's just say I see considerable hope for the future. Consider the
Human Genome Project. Johnson & Johnson, recently reported a very short
development time (18 mo.s) from inception to clinicals based primarily on the
use of genomic data. This holds much hope for many. Even so-called "orphan
drugs" (I don't know if MS falls in this category) then might have a greater
likelyhood of being developed since the development costs will be lower. We are
looking at an unprecedented boom in medicine. Also, consider AIDS research.
Political pressure has come to bear on increased funding of research on this
disease. Those who claims not enough money is being spent, I think, have
blinders on. I see the literature, I follow, companies and a lot is being done.
Regardless, the fringe benefits on AIDS research will be successful treatments,
even cures, for other viral illness, even the common cold (I don't mean to
compare AIDS and the cold so don't think it.)
See you in Chicago this summer?
Thanks and best wishes,
Garry Garrett
My three short stories, "Troll Story," "Libby Thomas's Chemistry Set" and
"Princess Fat Grits" all appear in the June 2000 issue of Realms of
Fantasy (which will probably be on sale until the end of May and vanish
after that). They're not my usual fare. The troll story is an expansion of the
story in The Blue Place; the other two are fairly short, and
meant to be lightly ironic--not unlike the Nature piece. I'll look
forward to hearing what readers make of them. This does not herald a Triumphant
Return to SF because a) I don't feel as though I've been away, really, and b) I
think my next project is going to be a big historical novel set in the north of
Britain in the seventh century, rather than science fiction.
The novel I'm contemplating won't be fantasy per se but will have some
of the feel of that genre because of the mindset of the people of that time. For
those who have read Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy--and I'm thinking here
particularly of Fire from Heaven--what I'm aiming for is the
kind of mythopoeic thinking Alexander and his contemporaries were prone to. It
will be interesting to view the world through that particular lens.
Drugs for the treatment of MS do come under the aegis of the government's
"orphan drug" provisions. This is both a good and a bad thing--but I don't
particularly want to get into a discussion of the pros and cons of capitalism
here. I do agree that the progress being made in biotechnology is phenomenal,
but I don't see any really useful MS therapies on the horizon. The more we learn
of the immune system, the more complicated it seems; it's like the web
multiplied to the third power; insanely interconnected and complex. If any
miraculous therapies appear, well and good; meanwhile I'll just keep living my
life.
I won't be in Chicago this summer. With luck I won't be anywhere this
summer except my own back garden, drinking tea and reading about Anglo-Saxons.
Bliss.
May 13, 2000
ms. griffith,i am now a huge fan of your work since having
read ammonite, slow river, and my favorite,
the blue place. i have also seen that you are considering
giving up writing for a short time. that would be a terrible loss for me as well
as countless other fans. is this horrid rumor true? one final thing, when do you
expect your next novel to be released? thank you and keep dishing out those
great stories for me, you are a great talent.
Where on earth did you hear that? I could no more give up writing that I
could talking. It's part of who I am. I always take a bit of a breather between
projects--I have to, not only because I get so tired, but because my writing
well fills slowly --but deliberately giving it up? Never.
As for my next book, it is Red Raw, another Aud novel, and
although I don't yet have a firm contract with a publisher, I'm hoping it will
be published some time next year.
May 13, 2000
I am a grandmother of a 16 yr.old grand daughter that i have
been raising for 6 years. and i really want to know some signs because i feel
maybe she has thoughts of lesbian.I amso worried--not if she chooses to be
--only for what it seems to be doing to her. She will not talk to me about
anything,I have a son who is gay and i have no problem when a person is gay. i
do not love them less-- i just totally accept something that i cannot change.I
need some help and don't know who to turn to for advise or help without her
knowing--i just want to prepare and help her the best way i can--Thank
You
This is hard to answer without more information. For example, what does
thinking she might be a lesbian seem to be doing to her--how is she behaving? If
you haven't talked to her about this, how do you know that this is what's going
on? I'm also curious as to why you don't want her to know that you're asking for
help. With nothing to go on, I can't really offer you any insight. Perhaps there
are some organisations in your area that could help. In the phone book there's
probably a listing for the local chapter of P-FLAG (Parents and Friends of
Lesbians and Gays), which would give you some support, as well as your
grand-daughter. Check to see if there's a gay or lesbian community centre
advertised, too--though the best place to find this might be in your local
alternative newspaper.
There are as many different ways to react to the sudden realisation you're a
dyke as there are people: delight, horror, confusion, acceptance with a little
anxiety about friends and family will react, relief, anger...etc. etc. My own
reaction (I was thirteen) was, "Oh. I see. Huh. Well, I'll have to keep
that under my hat for a couple of years." I was at an all-girls Catholic
convent school which, in the north of England in the early seventies, was not
the best place to discover you're not straight. When I was sixteen, I was old
enough--and legal enough--to do what I liked. That's when I officially came
out.
"Came out" seems like such an antiquated concept to me today, but even given
the changes of the last twenty-five years, I imagine there are many young men
and women for whom it's still a frightening step. I remember the first time I
ever said "lesbian" out loud. It took me hours to get the word out: "lesbian"
seemed so...alien. And then last week I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
(where Willow tells Buffy that things are, like, complicated because she sort
of, um, feels stuff for Tara) and realised that for a whole new generation there
will now be an easier way to tell your best friend you're a dyke; you could do
it over lunch: "I'm, like, more on the Willow side of the equation. Pass the
salt." Or, as Faith (who is the Evil, Wicked face of Slayerdom) might say in the
same situation: "I don't drive stick anymore." Thanks to such TV programming,
being a dyke doesn't carry the same stigma that it used to--it still isn't easy,
but nothing is when you're a teenager.
If she won't talk to you, perhaps it might help to approach the problem from
the other side: you do the talking, about how you feel about her, what your
worries are, how you don't care if she's gay or not. Perhaps if you don't demand
answers she will at least listen. Perhaps hearing how much you love her, and
that you accept her just the way she is, will help her feel brave enough to talk
to you. I wish I had a magic solution, but perhaps all you can do is make things
as easy for her as possible, and then wait.
April 16, 2000
From Doree Huneven, dhuneven@aol.com
Dear Nicola,
I just finished reading "The Blue Place,"
and I |