From: anonymous

I noticed your response to a reader that many people have told you Ammonite or Slow River was instrumental in their coming out process, but never the Aud books. Therefore, I want to tell you that it was while reading The Blue Place that I developed my first serious crush on a woman. I'd had some interest in women before, but it was of a very secondary nature. I'm sure now that this is because I was raised in an extremely conservative/religious/repressive way. I'd had lesbian and bi female friends for years and there had been mutual flirtation, but I never fell for any of them. I'm sure it's because I still had too much of my upbringing tying me down on a subconscious level. I had to get my homophobic upbringing out of my subconscious before I could really be attracted to a woman. I'm sure that your book was a very significant catalyst in this process because Aud is an example of what I've always thought the perfect female should be: very smart, very tough, very competent in all kinds of ways---and she's a lesbian---and sexy. I'm afraid I may not be doing a good job of explaining myself, but I wanted to let you know that your book had a big impact on me, and I've since read and loved all your other books, am eagerly awaiting the next Aud book and have read Kelley's book and everything at your website and hers. I've enjoyed reading what both of you have to say and found much to think about at your websites. Thanks to both of you. I also think it's truly amazing that you do so much while dealing with MS. Best wishes.

Well, cool. Thank you. Thank you for letting me know, and also thank you, from writer to reader, for letting my work in deeply enough to affect you. It's a real gift, one that always touches me.

Paradoxically, though, I also, on some level, absolutely expect it of a reader: what's the point of reading novel, spending four hours of your life on a book, if you're not going to give yourself up to it? It's something I have to believe that people are willing to do, over and over, despite the number of times they'll get jilted by some callous, hard-faced little book that flirts monstrously then moves on. Happens to me all the time. I retire from the reading field for a while, and nurse my broken heart, then plunge gamely back into the fray.

The MS thing, hmmn. Well, there are days when I feel astonished by how much I do, and days when I feel as though I don't do nearly enough. This is all coming to head for me right now. First, and most obviously, I have MS. I live with it everyday. It pretty much sucks. Secondly, I find that I'm writing about a secondary character in my new Aud book who has some kind of illness suspiciously like MS. Thirdly, I've recently started working with a local non-profit agency, the MSA (Multiple Sclerosis Association of King County) and so am thinking about MS constantly on a cultural, social, medical and practical level in ways I haven't before.

It was late last year that the MSA popped up on my radar: they had been sponsoring a yoga class for people with MS and they wanted to suspend the classes for two months for budget reasons. I'd been attending these classes. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford to pay for standard yoga classes if necessary but most of the people attending the MSA class couldn't. Going without yoga for two whole months when it's your only physical therapy is not a good idea. More to the point, many of the people attending these classes have absolutely no other social outlet whatsoever. These classes are their community, their home--their source of belonging and validation, where they come for a reality check, they they see the faces of people who aren't their caregivers--and this faceless organisation wanted to suspend classes because they'd spent too much on paperclips or some damn thing. I heard the news, said calmly to the class, "I won't permit this," and went home and kicked the shit out of a dining room chair.

Then I started talking to people. Then I started talking to people at the MSA. Anyway, to cut this part of a really, really long story short, I fixed it. I persuaded various people to reduce their fees, or rent the studio at reduced rates, or make donations, or whatever. Lot of work, lots of smiling, lots of telling people they really *could* make a difference. (A lot of grinding my teeth and imagining Aud would show up on their doorstep one day for a little chat.) The upside: in a very real way, I influenced the lives of about twenty people.

The downside: in a very real way I influenced the lives of twenty people. How do you refuse when they ask you to do it again? (It's invevitable that it will happen again. This time next year, the MSA will be wrestling with the same budget choices because, as with most small non-profits, budget is where cultures clash. Budget is where bean counters and do-gooders throw down.) How can you see a way to make a corner of the world a better place, and not do that work?

Believe me, I tried. I went home and shut the door and told myself all sorts of stories about how there were plenty of other people to do the grunt work, plenty of reasons I should stay safe in my nice little house and hoard my time and energy. All of it's true, of course, but not nearly the whole truth. Basically, I just didn't want to do the work. After a few months I admitted as much, and sighed, and went back and started talking to the MSA again. Next month I'll be joining the board. Expect to see many, many pleas here in the future for funds and volunteers and ideas. Hey, you didn't think I'd be doing this on my own, did you?

From: Larry (larryganz_removethis@hotmail.com)

I just finished reading Ammonite, as an ebook that I bought months ago but had never gotten around to reading. It was mesmerizing - the imagery drew me into the story like I was there, more deeply than any book I've read in a long time. I was able to escape for a short while from the troubles of life, and explore a new world.

One thing that was so appealing was the love the people of Jeep had for each other - caring and giving to others, sensitive to their needs, unlike the selfish world we live in today. Even as a conservative Christian male, I was not put off by the subject matter, as it was in perfect line with Jesus' command to love one another and take care of each other. Your writing was about relationships and love, not sex. In contrast, I have often been put off by Robert Heinlen's books, as well as Larry Niven, when it comes to science fiction mixed with sexuality.

Now that I am done with the book, I can't stop thinking about it, and am wondering if you plan to write a sequel, or similar story?

Thank you for the wonderful book, and can you also recommend one of your other books that I might like? I long to be lost in the story and escape once more.

Love lies at the heart of all my work, or at least that's my intent. However, some of my novels are more, ah, emotionally ambivalent than others. Slow River, for example, while also science fiction, and almost wholly centring around love and community and friendship, around trust and the betrayal of that trust, has a lot of sex in it, and a fair amount of callousness. There are a couple of seriously damaged people in this novel. They don't always behave well. Under the relatively grim surface, however, lies hope. Despite some of the horrible things that have happened to the main character, Lore, she believes that the world is essentially knowable and inhabitable. She allows herself to forget this every now and again, allows herself to behave badly, but hope always resurfaces. I spend some time in the book examining why she hopes while characters in what appears to be the same situation don't. I learnt a lot from writing it. Would you enoy it? I couldn't say. Try it and let me know.

From: Rebecca

I note that you mentioned Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy in your list of faves. I love Mary Renault's work (the historical fiction anyway, the romance novels were a bit over the top). I'd have to say her two Theseus novels were my favourites (The King Must Die and the Bull from the Sea). Mary Zimmer Bradley's "The Firebrand" is also up there.

I have read very few S.F. novels, and read Ammonite and Slow River because I loved The Blue Place so much that it led me to find and read more of your work (I get a little addicted to authors) so my list of must-read books doesn't overlap with any of the others I've seen in AN (I did only go back a few months though).

Here is a very brief list nonetheless:
Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
Val McDermid - The Wire in the Blood (The Mermaids Singing and Last Temptation as well)
Jasper Fforde - the Thursday Next series
Eoin Colfer - the Artemis Fowl series
Donald Jack - the Bandy Papers
Marian Engel - The Honeyman Festival

Many of the writers on your list are people whose work I feel as though I should enjoy, but just don't. For many years I was fine with that. Ha, I thought, what a bunch of morons some readers are. Then I went through a (thankfully brief) period when I felt slightly inadequate, as though perhaps I wasn't seeing what everyone else was, and that if I could only squint a certain way when I read, everything would leap into focus. My current truth (what's that quote about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds?) is that, hey, taste is just taste. I like tea and don't much care for coffee. I love steamed white cabbage tossed with butter and a smidge of freshly ground white pepper and find green beans tedious. I think fresh wholemeal bread with cold Danish butter is the stuff of heaven but believe pasta is evil. It's just the way my upbringing and taste buds and budget lined up. It's also a matter of timing. I remember a time, for example, when I thought cabbage was a particularly fiendish torture invented by a cruel god. I remember loving coffee. I remember finding the lightly cultured, lightly salted creaminess of Lurpack (the butter) nauseating.

Three books I've read in the last month or so that, in my opinion, are worth taking a look at are: SET THIS HOUSE IN ORDER, by Matt Ruff (thanks to whoever recommended that, by the way). It's a truly complicated setup--a man with multiple personalities meets a woman with multiple personalities; there's family psychodyamics, and love, and friendship, and greed--but Ruff manages to make it easy for the reader to follow without bursting her brain with the strain. I met Matt and his wife, Lisa, a couple of months ago at the Nebula Awards here in Seattle. Nice people. So whoever it was who recommended that book to me, you did a good thing. The other book is THE WHOLE STORY AND OTHER STORIES, by Ali Smith. Some of these pieces are extraordinary. Vast with love, bright with joy, dense with experience, wide with understanding, and apparently fearless. They blew me out of my socks. Truly stunning. I can't believe I haven't read her stuff before. Of course, some of the stories are a bit naff--they sort of twist in on themselves and implode, or else tweedle away into nothing--but nobody's perfect. Smith, though, comes closer in the short form than anyone I've read for a long, long time. The third book is William Boyd's ANY HUMAN HEART, a long novel from the point of view of a man born into privilege at the beginning of the twentieth century, living a full life (meeting many famous people along the way), and dying in her garden in France as the century draws to a close. It's a novel as rich and sad as autumn, and as full of possibility.