From: anonymous

Some questions: I don't know anything about permissions or copyrights or adaptations and what is permissible and what isn't but if someone was to adapt your novel (e.g. The Blue Place) into a screenplay, how true to the story would it have to be for you to approve? 2nd: If not Nicole Kidman for Aud (a no-no for me too), what do you think of Naomi Watts? Most importantly, do you think she's sexy? Hee hee. And 3rd: Have you been watching the L Word? If so, what do you think?

Last question first. I've been enjoying The L Word enormously. It's a big old lesbian soap opera, all sturm und drang and naked breasts. However, if I were Empress of the L Word Universe, there are some things I would change. For one thing, there wouldn't be a character who was having a hard time with alcohol (I get so tired of that); the committed couple wouldn't be having a baby (ditto); and Jenny, the bisexual writer, would get a haircut (nothing drives me crazier than wispy, wimpy characters with hair flopping in their eyes). Most importantly, though, I'd find a way to make the sex more convincing. I haven't believed a minute of it. Pretty people pressing together. Doesn't raise my pulse rate one beat. Still, they *are* pretty, and it is fun. I'll keep watching.

Naomi Watts sexy? Absolutely. I have a weakness for delicious blondes. Could she play Aud? I haven't the faintest idea. I think she can act, but, as I've said before, Aud is so much about the body. The actor who plays her, whether for screen or stage (her story would probably make a good opera...), would have to move like an assassin.

As for being true to the story, well, that pretty much depends on how you define story. If you mean plot--what happens, and how and when exactly--then I don't care a whit. If you mean the emotional journey, the difference between the internal landscape of the main character at the beginning as compared to that at the novel's end, then I care a great deal. So there's that, and then there's the essence of the thing. Let me illustrate by looking at Lord of the Rings and its film trilogy adaptation.

The films get the essential plot right: hobbits, Sauron and his wicked old ring, elves, long lost kings, and so on. They get some of the relationships right (Aragorn and the hobbits, Gandalf and the hobbits, Gandalf and Aragorn). They succeed with the notion of sacrifice and bravery, and a variance of the notion that you can't step into the same river twice, but where they fail is with the idea of nobility. I lay the blame for this squarely on the fact that the screenwriters hail from New Zealand.

It's my belief that if you take a person out of an oppressive environment, they will not immediately become sane and rational and wise and kind. They are likely to exhibit some reactionary behaviour. It's natural and ony to be expected. Think of it as a kind of deprogramming. If you take a young man from a strict, fundamentalist background and set him loose as a university freshman, he will more than likely go hog wild. If you take an abused young woman from her sexist family and put her in a lesbian separist community, she's going to espouse serious man-hatred for a while. If you pluck a small deaf child from his or her orally-biased family, from her mainstream school where she is forced, day in and day out to communicate with her voice instead of her hands, there may be a period when she despises hearing people and everything they stand for. In my opinion, it's the same with the culture of a country that was a colony.

Colonial people (Americans, Kiwis, Aussies, South Africans), when they finally break free of the motherland, develop, for a while, a serious bias against the uber-culture of that motherland. Often this shows up as adamant anti-nobility. Rough and tough colonists leave behind the effete, good-for-nothing leechlike bluebloods of the British Imperium. They pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They're just as good as anyone else, damn it. They don't need to hark bark to ancestor rolls stretching into the mists of time, yada yada yada. The screenwriters of the LotR trilogy do not appear to believe in majesty.

In the novel, Aragorn was noble in every sense of the word. He led the Dunedain and their horses through the paths of the dead through sheer power of his majesty, his personal presence, which stemmed from his heritage: his family, his history, his education, his experience, his self-knowledge, his acceptance and embrace of his fate, his wyrd. The books take it as read that there is a quality one can describe as kingly. Look, for example, at all those passages comparing Boromir with the younger, "lesser" men of Rohan, and Faramir, in whom "the blood of the men of Westernesse runs true" with Aragorn and the long-dead kings of Numenor. Kings are extraordinary; they carry the weight of the world, a noblesse oblige from which it is impossible to stray. Kings are different, born special; they can't escape it; they can't even dream of escaping it. It's who they are. Ordinary men, on the other hand, are just that: ordinary. Pleasant enough, even heroic at times, but ordinary. They have choices. They are not bigger than they appear. In the films, Aragorn is ordinary. Brave sometimes, yes, and kind, and occasionally wise, and he's good with horses and swords and has a cool elven babe at his side, but he isn't cloaked in majesty. Nor is Faramir. One of the best moments of the book, for me, is when Faramir eschews the ring simply because it's the right thing to do. No one has to tell him. He knows, because he's noble. In the films it becomes a petty family psychodrama moment: I want to prove myself to my Dad! I disliked that intensely. But is it still a really fabulous set of films? Absolutely. Does it capture the essence of the book? No, not really.

So, back to my books. What is the essence of The Blue Place? Aud. Who is Aud? Well, if I could sum her up in one sentence I wouldn't have to keep writing these books to figure it out. But she is noble. She does believe that from those to whom much is given, much will be asked. Quintessential noblesse oblige. She's the protector of the weak for no other reason than she can, therefore she must. It's expected. It's what one does. There's a lot more, of course: her visceral understanding of the world, her paradoxical childlike cynicism, her determination to learn and do it better next time, whatever it may be at the time. If someone wrote a screenplay that captured all that perfectly, I'd sell the screenrights for one dollar (and above the line credit, and a slice of the backend [grin]).

From: Jeanne (Weezbe@aol.com)

It occurred to me while watching The L-word and Queer as Folk on Showtime that The Blue Place would make a terrific series. When I look at the structure of the chapters, each has a complete story arc, perfect for a serial adaptation. Has your agent ever considered approaching Showtime or HBO to transform The Blue Place into a working script?

Aud has considerable appeal both to male and female audiences. The book is extremely visual and would translate well into film. Nearly every person I know who has read the book sees it as a cinema possibility. However, to find a producer to make a full-length movie adaptation would be a rare find. Television, especially cable, seems a perfect venue for it. I wonder if your other readers would feel the same.

Would you consider the medium of television? Would you consider writing its adaptation? It's simply wishful thinking on my part.

Well, there's something I'd never really considered before. (Probably because no one's knocking my door down trying to offer me money to make it happen.) Aud as a TV character, the new Spenser For Hire. Huh. Interesting.

I tell you, though, I would rather stick a fork in my eye than write a TV series. Oh, I'd be happy to write a pilot, but then I'd walk away. To really work for TV, you have to live in LA. You have to be right there in the room, fighting for your stuff, interacting with other writers, day in day out. It would drive me crazy.

From: Lynn

I stumbled upon Stay after I ducked into a tiny Seattle bookstore to escape a smattering of rain outside. Loved it. Amazing, tight writing with fantastic character development. Aud's relationship with Julia helped me appreciation the grace, eroticism and depth of love between two women. Thanks for a terrific read.

This is one of those writers' fantasies: the little bookshop as refuge, a warm dry haven in a cold, wet world, stuffed with treasures, populated by a shifting clientele discriminating enough to know a Work of Genius when they see it. Very satisfying. Thank you, you've temporarily restored my faith in the world as a very fine place.

From: Attraio

From a South-African fan, a question I bet you get a lot, but which I cannot find an answer to here. (Class intruded!) Sorry if it is a repeat.

Is there a sequel to Ammonite planned? I always thought there was more story there than was told! Our libraries are a bit skimpy, so I have not read any of the other books, but I will. Eventually.

Ammonite is a truly wonderful book that I reread fairly frequently, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who yearns for the story to continue!

Yeah, I do get asked this a lot, though not be South African fans. You're one of only about half a dozen people from that country who have written in. And, no, I am not planning a sequel to Ammonite. Search the Ask Nicola archives for all my reasons for this. However, if you liked the novel, you might like my story, "Mirrors and Burnstone," my first published story (I sold it to Interzone at what feels like the dawn of time--certainly the dawn of my career. 1987. Wow). It's available free as a .pdf file here, as are several other stories.

There is always more story than is told. It's what makes a character or place more substantial, the knowledge on the writer's part of what kind of food Lu Wai hates, or the fact that Marghe's first girlfriend had cold hands, or the story behind Vine's terrible scars. I know what kind of woman Gerrel will turn into. I know what clothes the original colonists wore when their ship was thundering, Serenity-fleeing-from-the-Reapers-like, through the atmosphere. I have seen and tasted and smelt the swamps of Trern. It's part of the joy of writing, for me: going there.

From: anonymous

Do you know how to serve oysters on the half shell? Is that appealing to people in, say, a party atmosphere where there is an acoustic band in a Retro store selling 50's 60's & 70's furniture, art and design pieces? How many oysters per person, two? What about mussels? What are they all about? What kind of beer should I have on hand? A porter or an ale? Sometimes one needs to simply ask the questions that are the big concern...I have read your books, think you are astounding...and I could reiterate what others have said, I could ask you an obscure literary question or tell you every book I've read since I was three or I could try to shed some light on these issues that are really on my mind. What am I going to serve at our shop/gig on April 24th? Any thoughts?

Well, I'm about six weeks late answering this question, so this event will have passed, but, yes, I know how to serve oysters. My previous physical therapist, whose father is an oyster farmer, showed me how to open the little buggers. It's such a pain I don't know why anyone would bother. As to what they should be served with, hmmn, if they're so fresh they taste of nothing (the way they should), you don't need anything to go with them. Maybe some really, really good French or Italian bread--something just a little rough, with substance. People who don't like oysters often like sauces (usually red, usually spicy) to dip them in. Or lemon wedges to squeeze on them. Tina also once cooked me some oysters on the grill. They basically barbeque themselves: after ten minutes they pop open, all cooked and with a sort of smokey flavour. Quite tasty. I can imagine that a bright, fierce picante sauce would work with those. I happen to hate retro 50s 60s and 70s furniture, so you could burn a few of those ugly chairs and toast the oysters over that. Toss in the acoustic band while you're at it, unless they're really good. The beer should be utterly convinced of its own worth, and it should be on draft, not those nasty cans. Real Guinness (which you can't get in this country, so, oh well, that won't work). Very cold imported Stella Artois (but do not chill the glasses first; I hate that). Stella, unlike Guinness, bottles well; just make sure it's imported, not the stuff they brew in this country. Pitchers of whatever dark and meaty local microbrew stuff is freshest--a nice IPA, perhaps. I don't think bitter works well with seafood. And there's no beer on god's green earth that goes with mussels. Frankly, not much does. I've never been able to understand why someone would willingly eat something that looks as though the server had just pulled it from his nose.

My main argument with buffet foods is that hosts spend more time trying impress their guests than feeding them. How many people like oysters? Not that many. How many can eat them gracefully? Even fewer. How cheap are they? Not even remotely. So why serve them? The world, in my opinion, would be a better place if we spent more time trying to make each other happy and comfortable than trying to impress everyone to death. This is no reflection on you personally. It's the way the world works, particularly the business world: everything is about competition, trying to be bigger, better, faster, more expensive, more economical, more profitable, whatever. Impressing people is just part of the peacockery of that particular heirarchy. Still, I hope the evening went well. Maybe you could write in and let me know.