From: anonymous

Hello, I loved The Blue Place (shelving mysteries at a public library; wonderful way to discover books outside one's usual genre). Apologies if you've answered this elsewhere, but this whole immigration thing: I'm fascinated by how it was in the national interest for you to immigrate to the US. Was it like Navratilova? I am American but sadly, my own partner being British (Yorkshire as well) did not find open arms into my country; as a result we are both now exiled in Canada. (I write "exiled" only because it is not home for either of us.) What is the long (or short) story here? Thanks! By the way I am not asking for advice, just curious--glad you got in.

Like Martina, yes, in that coming to this country was only possible because I was "well-known." I basically got a really good lawyer and we went all out to work the new Natural Interest regulations. Unlike Martina, though, I didn't whitewash the fact that I'm a dyke; I didn't do any of that bisexual crap. (Let me be clear: I don't mean *being* bisexual is crap, but lying about one's sexuality is, if you're in a situation with any reasonable choice. I'm excluding--for reasons obvious to me--the martyr option. A lie or die choice isn't really a free choice, in my opinion.)

My lawyer advised me that, while she wasn't suggesting I do it, it would no doubt be easier to get the National Interest Waiver if I weren't so obviously a dyke. I said, I've never lied about this in my life, I'm not starting now. She said, Okay, hell, we'll take it to the Supreme Court if necessary! I said, Let's just make sure it's not necessary. I had no interest in being a hero; I just wanted to make the stress stop. Stress and MS are not things you ever want sitting together. They are a very bad influence on each other, and wind each other up, and should be separated as much as possible. Oh, yeah, and MS was another thing that would make the INS raise their eyebrows.

But after several years, thousands and thousands of dollars--all as credit card debt, o joy--and three sets of lawyers, I had my green card. It arrived in the mail on my birthday, along with a cheque from HarperCollins. So my thirty-fourth birthday is currently my favourite birthday of all time.

Sorry to hear about your exile. All those years ago, Kelley and I couldn't get into Canada. We were considering Ireland (though it was rather anti-English at the time) or the Netherlands (we found out that "beer" was "bier" and thought: We can live here). We even briefly considered Mexico, but didn't have the money. Is doing the civil partnership thing in the UK and moving there something you are considering? Kelley and I got married, in a not-binding-legally-anywhere-in-the-world sense, in Atlanta in 1993 (we were the first same-sex couple announced in the AJC...and don't get me started on what it was like trying to register at Macy's...) and we are refusing to marry anywhere ever again until it's the full-meal deal: legally binding on the federal level. If we ever decided to live in the UK we'd probably do the CP thing but as we live here, there's not much point.

So now I'm wondering whereabouts in Yorkshire your sweetie is from...

From: Margaret (mnightskyp@aol.com)

I am currently re-reading Blue Place and Stay, in anticipation of Always. I love the depth and inticacy of your writing, and I am quite taken by the visual imagery. I feel like I am "seeing the movie" as I read the book.

Have you read any of Diana Rivers books? She is another favorite author of mine but she writes what I think of as "blind" books; lots of writing about thoughts and actions but much less about the look of the world.

To my question...in Stay, when Aud is in the park disposing her bloody clothing under a bench and is held at knifepoint, she talks her way out of being killed. Could you talk about how you came up with the solution; that no addict could hold the knife there for more than 3 minutes?

My intention wasn't to say that "no addict could hold the knife" for long enough to kill Aud, but that this particular person had the shakes so bad he couldn't focus. (My little sister was dependent on heroin. I've worked with a lot of others with various chemical dependencies, whether we're talking crack or alcohol or benzodiazepines or barbiturates.) The addict holding the blade (a razor) at Aud's throat may well also have been starving. (A lot of addicts focus only on the substance that feeds their addiction. Food slides down the hierarchy.) In Always it occurs to Aud for the first time that this young person might also have been mentally ill, a paranoid schizophrenic.

Drugs (and/or illness) do not lead to bad-assry. They lead to debility. All those fictional hard-drinking, hard-snorting big swinging dicks make me laugh. Way back when I was studying karate seriously, I even gave up smoking. Peak physical condition simply can't exist alongside drug abuse. At least not in any world I'm familiar with.

From: Stacy (stacyharpis@yahoo.com)

I just bought and read Slow River. I really love that book. I am now going after the rest of your books. Thank you for writing Slow River.

You're welcome. It was my pleasure. Mostly.

That is, I love to write, and I loved writing most of Slow River but it was in building that book that I learnt that writing isn't one hundred percent fun one hundred percent of the time. Thomas Edison said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. I've never been sure if I believe in the concept of genius but you subsitute "writing novels" for "genius," then it works. Finishing a novel can become purely about willpower and doggedness. By "finish" I mean once you've got a first draft, done the easy, oh-it's-blast! part and start polishing. Bringing a novel from "that was good fun" to "holy shit that changed my life!" is *work*. But, wow, when it's done, I mean really done--the galleys are proofed and everything--that it's absolutely worth it. And hearing from a reader that it was worth it to them, too, is the cherry on top.

From: Jeanne (Weezbe@aol.com)

Okay, it's been awhile since Stay was published. It begs the question: can we expect the next book in the series to be forthcoming soon?

I can be a fussy, pedantic little English person, sometimes, and today is one of those times. To quote Wikipedia:

In logic, 'begging the question' is the term for a type of fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. For an example of this, consider the following argument: Only an untrustworthy person would run for office. The fact that politicians are untrustworthy is proof of this. Such an argument is fallacious, because it relies upon its own proposition-—in this case, 'politicians are untrustworthy'-—in order to support its central premise. Essentially, the argument assumes that its central point is already proven, and uses this in support of itself.

Okay, end of pedantry. Sorry. I'm bone tired today. The reason I'm so tired is that I've finally (yay!) turned in the edited version of the new Aud book, Always, which will be published by Riverhead on April 5th, 2007.

Accepting and implementing editorial comments is a bit like getting physical therapy: it's hard, and not fun, and sometimes it even hurts, but it makes the book/body lither and stronger. Always was massive. Now it's just big: about 170,000 words (for comparison, Stay is about 100,000 words). It's leaner, meaner, and much more likely to win a fight. It had three narrative strands; now it has two: one set in Seattle, one set in Atlanta. It's stuffed to the gills with sex and drugs and physical conflict. And no bad stuff happens at the end--not to Aud, anyway [grin].

Here for your delectation and delight (and as an apology for being so pedantic earlier) is the first paragraph of the novel:

If you walk into a bar and there's a man with a knife, what do you do? Walk out again. If you can. In Atlanta it had been a kitchen, and a woman, and I couldn't.

From: Fran (branwenfb30@yahoo.com)

I work for Seattle Mystery Bookshop. Everyone there told me to read "The Blue Place" and "Stay", and eventually I did, mostly because my partner read them first and pulled the book I was reading out of my hands and said, "You must read this NOW!" She was right, they were right, I'm a slacker for having waited so long, and I apologize profusely to everyone!

Now, the question, and it's obvious, isn't it? Will there be another Aud? And if there is, will you come to the shop for a formal signing? She's too fine a character and you're too fine an author for us not to ask.

So, I know you've seen the Penguin catalogue by now announcing Riverhead's April 5th publication of Always. I know this because I've had email from JB at Seattle Mystery Bookshop. You may know by now that I've already agreed to come and do a signing when the book is out. So I hope everyone reading this who lives in or by Seattle will go there to pick up a copy of this 600-page book. Pick up two. Oh, thinking about publication is *exciting*...

From: Sly -Sylvia- whatever (esmatt@gci.net)

I don't have the need to write fanfic about the Aud stories because they deliver everything I could want so why mess with that. Ammonite and Slow River are whole to me so the same goes for them. (At this stage of your writing life Nicola, I think you should write what calls to you.)

However if it's a show or a book series that isn't delivering the goods that may be a different kettle of fish. I once wrote fanfic for La Femme Nikita as a lot of people were and I found as I was writing one story that I just couldn't make the two characters of my interest do what I wanted them to do because the show was still on the air. And beyond that it was too drastic of a change for the characters to have really done regards reality except in my imagination. I wanted Madeliene and Nikita to have a love affair that no one else in Section One or any of their enemy orgs knew about. A totally private thing just between the two of them but like I say at the time it was still on the air and the network was starting to get a bit miffed at all the sites doing LFN fanfic and wanted them to stop and I could see their point so I bailed on the idea.

I'm not really into slash so even though there may have been sites doing that I didn't seek them out. Although now with the few same sex stories that have made their way to TV I can certainly envision a new way for the producers to bring LFN back. She's sitting at this computer laughing her head right off! Uh huh, dream on.

So my two cents on whatever you decide is whatever it will be and as all things you decide, will belong to you.

PS I'm looking forward to see what changes you made here at your web site.

Well, at the moment I'm toying with the notion of pouring my web energy not into a redesign of this site but into an Aud blog, or possibly a MySpace page for her. It will be all pithy Audisms, and self-defense tips, and maybe playlists for mayhem and destruction (and, y'know, communing with nature and having great sex). There might even be recipes. If anyone have spiffy ideas or special requests, send them in.

As for what calls to me, well, there are so very many things. Ideas (for teleplays, novels, stories, graphic novels, children's book, YA novels, poems, movies, essays, teaching) buzz around in my brain like planes circling an airport. At some point, if they circle long enough, they start to run out of fuel. I have to keep an eye on these ideas and run a priority analysis all the time: how important is *this* one compared to *that* one? How many things precious to me would die if *this* one went down? I can only land one or two at a time, so it's inevitable that many will crash and burn. Right now, the next two I want to bring in are the big old sword swangin' fantasy I've been musing on for a while (it's running on fumes; now or never), and a kind of commonplace book/memoir that uses old crayon drawings and other juvenalia (poems, songs, diary entries) to tell the story of my life in England before I met Kelley (this one is definite; it has a planned publication date of May 2007).

When picking projects I have to be aware not only of the time/energy considerations but of the knife-edge between nuance and self-indulgence. Generally my urge to write is to bound up in the need to clarify a very particular feeling or moment. Sometimes I reach the end of the essay or novel (or whatever) and find that the soupstone no longer belongs in the finished work. This is what I wrestled with on the rewrites for Always. Most of those original moments are now gone, because to leave them in would have been self-centered. I write for me, but a published novel is for the reader.

I'm finding that as I change and grow, so does my writing. This creates an interesting challenge with a series character like Aud. We're moving in different directions. When I finished Always I found that the book reflected me more than her. I had to go in and change things. But now I've finished wrestling those indulgence demons and I feel immensely proud of the result.