From: John Nicholas (j_nicholas@excite.com)

Hi, Just finished Slow River. I really liked it and am now halfway through Ammonite. I've been reading a lot of women authors lately because I like strong women characters (I have two young daughters).

I like your style enough that I'll look for Stay and The Blue Place even though I'm a bigger scifi fan than mystery fan. But please do some more scifi too. Esp the near future stuff like Slow River. I found it through the Nebula win. I've been using Nebula and Hugo winners to find new authors.

I'll put a vote in for the free content being in palm format as well.

If you liked Slow River you might like my new collection, With Her Body, which is a story, a novelette, and a novella published a few months ago by a brand new press here in Seattle. The story is a quiet, post-apocalyptic tale set in Duluth, a suburb of Atlanta. The novelette is set in Atlanta, and it's a science fictional tale of art and sex, and love and genius and madness. The novella, well, a lot of people call the novella, which takes place in the jungles of Belize, fantasy, but I think it's just as easy to read it as a tale of hopeless longing and madness.

But if near-future skiffy novels are what float your boat, Solitaire, the novel by Kelley Eskridge might be just what you're looking for. Admittedly, I'm biased because Kelley's my partner, but it's a rip-roaring read as well as an extremely subtle examination of identity and community. The middle section is a tour de force. Astonishing stuff. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. The New York Times Book Review says it's a "a stylistic and psychological tour de force," and named it a Notable Book of 2002.

From: anonymous

Is your name NI-CO-LA?

I'm trying to understand what you're asking here. Yes, my name is spelt Nicola. If you're asking how it's pronounced, the emphasis is on the first syllable: NIC-uh-la, the way you'd pronounce Nicholas, only without the s. I have no idea what the name means, or its etymology. I did have some guy from Romania or wherever accusing me of stealing his name about five years ago...

From: Manueala (manu999@freesurf.ch)

I've read the blue place, stay and slow river. Even though I usually dislike SF, I adored slow river. All your books are outstanding and a real pleasure to read!

I came across your audio readings and very much enjoyed them. How exciting to listen your reading. Did you ever plan on releasing the blue place or stay in a complete audio version?

I wish you all the best and look forward to your next book about Aud, she's delightful!

I'd love to see the Aud books as full audio works. Unfortunately I just don't see that happening. Generally a publisher won't do an audio book unless they expect to ship at least 75,000 copies of the print version. My numbers are nowhere near that. So I could do it myself, but unless I can figure out a way to make it cost-effective, I won't. My guess is that whole novel would need a CD set of somewhere between twelve and sixteen hours. And that would take a couple of weeks of recording time, unless I hire a professional. And then there's the studio. (Yes, I recorded the other stuff myself at home, but a twenty minute reading is much more forgiving of imperfections than a fourteen-hour reading.) Also, recording isn't nearly as easy it might appear. It takes a lot of work to make things sound interesting and clear. My respect for voice-over and audio book professionals shot up about nine notches doing mine.

But I'm curious about your other remark: that you normally dislike SF. What have you read? With regard to books, Theodore Sturgeon said that ninety percent of everything is crap. I think he was a little optimistic. So, yes, at least ninety percent of SF is crap. Ninety percent of romance is crap. Ninety percent of "literary fiction." Ninety percent of YA novels. And then, of the ten percent that's left, probably 9.99% won't be to the reader's taste. Finding a good book is like an epic quest; only The Chosen survive. The rest of us stagger about with our brains scrambled and a horror of ever trying anything new again.

From: Nikki (nbmassage@msn.com)

I just wanted to say thank you for your writing, in particular The Blue Place. I will read just about anything I can get my hands on and rarely do the words affect me, but I walked around for days in a stupor after finishing The Blue Place, sort of like my mind refused to process anything else. (I've reread it so many times that the cover has fallen off). Stay was wonderful as well. I am very much looking foward to the new Aud book when it is ready.

One particular phrase from the Blue Place sticks with me. "smiling gently around the edges." I'm not sure why, but that painted such a vivid picture of Aud's mental world for me. Thank you again.

For me "smiling gently around the edges" epitomises Aud when she falls into the blue place. It's a euphoric state. There again, so is the place we get to after serious exercise. At least I always found it so. I really miss not being able to do that sort of stuff anymore.

The new Aud book is/isn't finished. That is, I thought it was finished late last year, but now I've decided to change it radically. It's going to be a big book, probably twice as long as anything I've done before, with much stuff in it that I've avoided talking about head-on for many years. But the time is now.

From: Bruce Chrumka (brucechrumka@shaw,ca)

By way of introduction, I'm a 45 year old, married, electrical engineer by profession and reader by predilection. I discovered, to my great dismay, today, that you are currently living with MS, and hope that you are well.

I understand that you've a new collection and look forward to reading it.

'Slow River' was a flat out sensational read: full stop.

With all my heart, I wish you and yours the very best.

Thank you. As it happens, I'm really not well at the moment. MS is a pretty eccentric illness, and it's currently biting me in the arse. With luck, it won't last too long; with luck, I'll do doing okay again by summer. I say "with luck" because having MS turns one's life into an exercise in superstitious behaviour. I wake up in the morning and if my arm has pins-and-needles the bottom drops out of my world: am I losing function? Then I find that, hey, I just slept on it funny and cut off the circulation temporarily. And then there are those mornings when I wake up numb from the armpits down and think, Oh god...

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to these flare-ups, except that stress is usually in the mix somewhere. By stress I mean any kind of physiological red-lining. Excitement is nearly as bad as worry. (Given my basic adrenlin junkie personality, this sometimes really ticks me off.) Kelley and I moved a couple of months ago. I've been working hard for eighteen months on Aud III and other things. I'm not complaining--I love to work; it makes me feel smug and complacent and at peace with the world--but I've been going and going and going. Making the energizer bunny (TM) look like a slacker. And now it's spring; the atmosphere is flooded with tree pollen, to which I'm viciously allergic. (Not sniffle and sneeze allergic but heart-arrhythmia-and-vertigo allergic.) But once the contractor has finished waking me up every morning with hammering and sawing, and once this damn pollen has gone, I'm hoping to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and back at work again. Thanks for your good wishes. It helps.

From: kylie (lil_soccer_gurl1013@yahoo.com)

Like why are u a singer and y do u look so pretty do u have a dog do u have a boyfriend if so wut is it like will u talk to me later emial me love ya kylie

Alrighty, then. That's as clear as mud. Want to send me a real question?

From: B (bbkphile@aol.com)

Hmmm...perhaps this is the Xena fan fic piece you meant?

http://ausxip.com/fanfic/obsidian.html

I am absolutely ecstatic at the prospect of a 3rd Aud book. And "HELL YES" please post the edited out chapter on the web. You're so wicked repeatedly mentioning it focused on S-E-X and then being tentative about your plans to post it.

I'm off to purchase WITH HER BODY. Hasta la proxima.

Nope, this isn't it. (I believe the story I read so long ago that impressed me so much is by a writer called Rooks. (see a previous Ask Nicola for more.) But I read this one with interest--and found I didn't buy the premise for a minute. Xena as stone butch? Nah. Wouldn't happen. She loves life and is too engaged with it, too confident of it and her place in it, to guard herself like that. She likes risk. Being a stone butch is, in my opinion, about sexual safety.

Yeah, I probably will post that cut chapter--but not until the book is published. And maybe I'll password-protect it, and only give people who show proof of purchase the key. Actually, no, it's not proof of purchase I'd want but proof-of-reading. The reason I cut the chapter in the first place is that Aud wouldn't act that way anymore, not after the changes she's been through, so I'd want readers to have read how she would really act before they read how on one deranged night I thought, for a while, she might.