From: Mary (mpardo@nc.rr.com)

Not a question, just thanks for that truly enchanting "first book." Do you still draw? (a question, after all). I've been teaching about "art" comics in my Freshman Seminar (I'm an art historian specializing in the Renaissance, but I find that the best comics tap into a really deep historical current of visual/verbal invention--from such classics as the Krazy Kat and Little Nemo dailies to Spiegelman's Maus and its diverse progeny), and it occurs to me that you could devise a knockout graphic novel. Few drawings could compete with the sensory pungency of your descriptive writing, but the "mixed" medium of the experimental comic is wonderfully suited to telling stories in which the mechanisms of representation are laid bare yet lose none of their power to persuade. As in Italo Calvino's writing (which, like Paul Klee's drawing, seems to straddle pictorial and verbal effects), there is in "art" comics a particular poignancy that seems inherent in the form--apart from the actual story. (The Calvinos I have in mind are the exhilarating, "sci-fi" stories in T-Zero, and the iridescent, somnambulistic, yet rigorously diagrammatic Invisible Cities).

I had no idea how funny Calvino could be until someone read aloud to me one of his stories. Amazing. I just hadn't got it until then.

The last comics, art or otherwise, I devoured on a regular basis were the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which had the teenage me howling back in the late seventies--weeping, pounding the floor with laughter. It was my first brush with counterculture of any description. If I hadn't read it before I left home I'm not sure my psyche would have survived my subsequent enounters with the, ah, non-normative world. But do I still draw? Not really. There again, I never really did. Somewhere I have a psychedelic pastels pic of things I saw in a rain-wet window. And sometimes for Kelley I will draw funny (mostly as in peculiar rather than amusing) wee cat pictures for a birthday or Christmas card but, mostly, no.

Having said that, I did get myself a graphics pad a couple of years ago and tried a kind of automatic drawing exercise where I put the stylus on the pad, drew a line, and then imaged from there would it could be. Here's an animation of some of those pics. One of these fine days I'll get around to doing some more, probably when I take up the guitar again, and the piano, and re-start learning Spanish, and ASL, and...

From: anonymous

Question: hello in what year was shakespeare born?

Ah, Shakespeare (love the ASL sign for Shakespeare: shake the fist, as though rattling something inside, and follow with a gesture that very much resembles throwing a spear; no, I'm not kidding--my favourite sign of all time, though, is that for "freaked out," get a Deaf person to show you). Did Shakespeare really exist except as a prosperous actor? Was he secretly a gay Catholic, or perhaps Christopher Marlowe or the seventeeth Earl of Oxford in disguise. You might try Wikipedia.org, or, failing that, my Do My Homework archives.

One of my favourite non-fiction books of the last couple of years is Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt. Cool stuff.

From: Alex Blue (axblue@harbornet.com)

I wrote a 50,000-word novella in November 2005 for National Novel Writing Month. I think the raw material is promising. Now I want to expand it into a novel, add another 20,000 words or so, flesh out some skeletal scenes and characters.

Do you recommend total rewriting on a blank document, as opposed to cutting and pasting and inserting text on the original document? How do you and Kelley do subsequent drafts of your work, logistically speaking?

Thanks for your generosity.

How to turn 50k words into a novel? That's a massively broad question, the answer to which is, It depends. It depends, for example, on those fifty thousand words. Are they the beginning? Are they the end? Are they a sketchy treatment? Are they first thoughts to be essentially scapped after mature consideration? I can't tell you what to do, or even how I'd do it, because I haven't a clue where we're starting.

However, I do have some observations. First of all, these days even seventy thousands words isn't really enough for a novel. Most novels are right around a hundred thousand. My novels are usually between 105k and 125k. ALWAYS is an anomaly, currently weighing in at 185k (that will change--up or down I'm not sure, but it these things always change before they're done). So think more in terms of doubling what you've got. Secondly, novels are more than long short stories. To have a beautifully balanced book everything must blend and harmonise; that involves more than levering in a chunk of prose here and there. For example, if I change even one word in my novel, it resonates thoughout a scene, that changes a chapter, which in turns affects the whole piece. It sounds silly, but it's true. Rewrites get harder and harder, because the book--the prose, the characters, the events, the metaphors--get more and more tightly wound together. It sort of like a cake. Once it's baked, you can't take some of the sugar out.

I won't speak for Kelley here, but when I do have a novel to rewrite, I tend to do a first conceptual pass with the printed ms. and a pen. Then I take the pages to my computer desk and start fixing the .doc file. Then I reprint, then I scribble, then I fix. Over and over. Writing I do with one hand, i.e. a pen, comes from a slightly different part of my brain than writing I do with both hands, i.e. a keyboard. Why? No idea. But it's true for me. I need both kinds to make a book. Do you? Again, no idea. Try it and see. Try, perhaps, writing with your other hand, see what happens. Writing is craft, yes, but it can also be a mysterious, ecstatic experience. Give it a go.

From: eduardo (ehall@ajc.com)

Hello, zeeba neighbor

gettin pearly, i see.

i love the idea of an aud comic. any idea who you would want to have draw it?

Eddie! How cool that you read AN. [note: Eddie is a very good friend; he appears, pretty much as himself, in The Blue Place and Stay] And, yep, you get the points: the quotes from a previous answer are from Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis, my new favourite comic strip.

As for who would draw it, no, I haven't a clue. I'm so far out of the loop I wouldn't know where to begin. Suggestions?

From: anonymous

I hope you can clear up my confusion. I was taught that the word "dyke" was an offensive term to lesbians, but you use that term to refer to yourself a number of times.

So is "dyke" an offensive term, or does it just depends on the person?

Thanks for answering my question.

Dyke is one of those words that's being reclaimed. (For more on this concept, go to www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclaiming.) Like another four-letter word, cunt, it can be a fighting word in the wrong context. I would certainly look askance at some straight person I didn't know talking to me about "dykes."

However, use of the word is getting a lot more common. For example, there's Dyke TV, a cable public access show by, for and about lesbians that airs in more than a hundred markets. There's Dykes to Watch Out For, a brilliant comic strip by Alison Bechdel, that's been going on for over twenty years.

Generally speaking, "lesbian" is the term to use if you're worried about offending someone. Personally I don't much care for being labelled "gay." Why? Because if dykes are called gay (which, to me, has always been a word to apply to boys), it's just one more way of being invisible, and dykes are invisible enough without helping to stuff us behind the curtain etymologically. To myself, I'm a dyke (or a writer, or Kelley's sweetie, or English, or irritable, or rather dim) or a lesbian. I can cope if people use Queer but I don't use it myself because to some extent I associate it with the academic field of queer theory where "queer" refers to an exploration and deconstruction of the ways in which the world sees sexual identity. It means connecting what I like to do in bed (or should I say the sex of the person with whom I like to do things in bed) with politics in an in-your-face way that doesn't always apply to me these days. Perhaps I'm getting old and boring; perhaps that's a bit of a relief.)