From: Alma (bkamazon@aol.com)

You requested book recommendations and I posted some earlier today under anonymous before I realized, "How cowardly is that?"

Anyway after hitting the submit button I realized how very little formatting was available and that what I'd sent in was a jumbled mess with none of the extra line spaces accounted for. Hopefully, this will look tad less cluttered. In any case...talk about going off on a tangent...I left off an author I think is really noteworthy. Manda Scott. Her Kellen Stewart series (HEN'S TEETH, NIGHTMARES, & STRONGER THAN DEATH) is quite good although I won't re-read any of them because of the elements of animal abuse. I just couldn't stomache it again. (Running of to hug my babies again. {shudder}) She's also written NO GOOD DEED which is quite engrossing. I hope you try them if you haven't already.

I'll reiterate (the sentiment, if not the exact wording) from my previous post...you rocked my world with your work. STAY was just so incredible after the sucker punch ending of the prequel. I must say I felt numb and quite loathed you for a while. I got rid of THE BlUE PLACE after a lot of internal fighting: on the one hand I loved the writing on the other I didn't think I could stand reading it ever again. I'm now the proud owner of all 3 books again, btw.

It's amazing the power of the media (books/movies/shows) have over our lives. I literally threw Hannibal (Silence of the Lambs sequel by Thomas Harris) across the room when I discovered how he'd totally raped one of my all time favorite characters. Or how I sat just dumbfounded when they cut off Xena's head and brutalized her body & set her up to be some kind of trolling dyke with a hard-on for young things instead of someone who deeply loved Gabrielle. I was shocked and saddened for a long time. What depth of enmity towards the very same "dykes" that had made their ratings soar for so many years the creators of the show must have had. They destroyed their own characters/vision/creation just to show us how very little respect they had for us all along. Talk about being used. Or the third Aliens flick (starring Sigourney Weaver) where they just kicked my non-existent cojones up my gut. Not only was what they did to the character totally merciless and vile you could barely make out anything on the screen for most of the picture! Terrible lighting. Sorry, please pardon the ranting.

Just...thank you. I have some great new friends (Aud and company) to visit with over and over again.

When I watched the third Alien film I wondered: What the fuck were they *thinking*? They totally deconstructed the character of Ripley. Instead of just being a person in a bad situation she became a woman in many women's worst nightmare situation: alone in the middle of a boys' prison. And then they also made her (a) embrace the alien, i.e. be pregnant and (b) not only die but kill herself with a dreamy smile. It seriously pissed me off. I didn't read HANNIBAL, but from the reviews I'd guess Harris does the same thing. And you know what? It's a deeply stupid act on the part of a creator to destroy their own character this way. It indicates to me that either the creator doesn't understand his or her own work, or that s/he has nothing but contempt for the place that character makes in the audience's (and I mean readers and viewers and listeners, the customer, the client, the prisoner, the guest, whatever) life.

I was often annoyed with "Xena: Warrior Princess." Season Two was, I thought, awesome. Some really great stuff--except for that vile episode with Ulysses, where they treated Xena as a thoughtless fool and Gabrielle as, well, just a fool. They had spent half the season building their relationship and then--probably not even understanding they were doing this--showed us that none of that stuff mattered. If was a foreshadowing of the end of the series. It's taken me two years to be able to watch Xena again after that finale. Makes the veins in my neck stick out just thinking about it, even now.

This kind of wrong step stems, I believe, from fear on the creators' part: they're afraid to trust their instincts, afraid to stick their neck out and say, Fuck it, this is what I want to happen; this is what I believe would happen; this is what should happen. Those creators who are willing to be seen and known--and, oh, yes, I believe you tell a great deal about a person by what s/he writes or paints or composes--make stronger, more coherent art. They are saying something important to them, something with enough internal integrity that it becomes important to their audience. I've read a lot of modern literature that fails because its authors live in mortal fear of exposing themselves (a lot of it fails because the writers are just poor craftspeople, too).

Anyway, my favourite works--Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, the Aubrey/Maturin novels, Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy, Hamlet, the paintings of Lu Jian Jun, many others--are always true to very rigourous internal rules, true to themselves. The world is littered with nervous, crowd-pleasing might-have-beens.

From: alma (bkamazon@aol.com)

More book recommendations :):
Lisa Alther's OTHER WOMEN & BEDROCK. Carol O'Connell's Mallory Series which starts off with MALLORY'S ORACLE. R.R. Knudson is a great author I loved as a kid. I didn't think you'd mind since you listed The Blue Sword by McKinley. FOX RUNNING, YOU ARE THE RAIN and the Zan Hagan series (ZANBANGER, ZANBALLER,ZANBOOMER & ZAN HAGAN'S MARATHON).

Also, someone whose work I find more than comparable to C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles is Lloyd Alexander, The Prydain Chronicles.

Happy reading :)

Kelley introduced me to Lloyd Alexander a couple of years ago. I thought they were okay but nothing to write home about. There again, I suspect they're something one should encounter at a certain age. An editor once said, "The golden age of science fiction is twelve," and to a certain extent he was right. There are many books (such as EE "Doc" Smith's LENSMAN series) that I loved fiercely as a teenager and still have a fondness for, even though I know, as a more experienced reader that in purely prose terms they're, well, dreck. The same for music. I absolutely delighted in Queen when I was fifteen. Now I smile at my younger self fondly and shake my head. One of these days, if I ever have the time (oh, ha, ha ha ha), I'll make a lovely graph with delight in certain works plotted against my age. I wonder if the music curve would swell and fade away in- or out-of-step with the literary one...

From: Adam Diamond (secbanana@yahoo.com)

Not so much a question as a response to your plea for book recommendations, although I could ask the question are you sure you want them? 'Cause I'm betting you'll get a truckload of recommendations. Also, thanks for listing some of your recent favorites. It may make me sound like more of a blind follower than I'd like, but some of my favorite new reads in recent years have been recommendations by some of my favorite writers.

I read constantly. If I can't find anything new that intrigues me, I re-read old favorites. But when something new inspires me, I want to tell everyone I know. There have been a handful of these in the last couple of years (notably Stay and Solitaire). The two that stand out are Passage by Connie Willis and Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff.

I'll read pretty much anything by Connie Willis--her stuff is consistently well-written and literate. Passage is her most recent novel and it centers on doctors studying NDE's (Near Death Experiences). You could call it science fiction, but one of the things I love about Willis' writing (and yours, by the way) is that it defies categorization. I've read a lot of hard science fiction that focuses so much on the science that the writing, the characters, the plot, become secondary. Willis manages to blend the science with the rest seamlessly without losing any impact. If you like Passage, I'd recommend anything else Willis has written.

Set This House in Order is a different beast, but no less riveting. It's about people with multiple personality disorder, and of the two dozen or so characters with appreciable screen time (page time?), most are simply different personalities surfacing within the same couple of people. I'd never read anything structured in quite this way, and it sucked me in pretty quickly and showed me some things I'd never quite seen/read before. This is Ruff's third novel--his last one--Sewer, Gas, and Electric--is another personal favorite, but completely different from Set This House In Order in almost every way. Just as good, though.

So check 'em out, let me (us) know what you think.

Okay. I bought the Matt Ruff novel and will try to get to it by, oh, spring. I have literally a hundred crime novels waiting for me on the floor in the living room (oh god), and my own novel is fluttering piteously at me from the screen while I type this, begging for attention. But the Ruff looks pretty damn interesting. Thanks for the recommendation.

From: Erin (czarerina@aol.com)

One of my co-workers lent me a copy of The Blue Place with a wink. After reading the back cover, I quickly surmised that it wasn't just her enjoyment of it that led to the recommendation, but an unwittingly humorous, well-meaning, albeit misguided: "You're a lesbian. The protagonist is a lesbian. You're gonna love it!" So I set out to do the exact opposite. She'd ask me what I thought. "...Why does she go into painstaking detail about disconnecting Honeycutt's alarm system, and when Aud is successful, is surprised by two thugs in an upstairs room who what?--are somehow immune to detection. How the hell did they get in?! And I had no idea it's so easy for someone with a dire prognosis (or even a good one for that matter) to find a replacement liver practically overnight! And then you fly the poor woman across the ocean for surgery!" My co-worker waited for me to launch into a diatribe about a wasted weekend, when I said: "So, can I borrow Stay?"

Thank you for two riveting reads. The sections with Aud and Tammy at the cabin are a delight, and the evolution of Aud from one novel to the next is especially well-crafted. I'm curious about your writing process. Do you know where the narrative will take you when you begin? Looking forward to reading more of your work...

Well, offhand (can you tell I've spent a lot of time thinking about this [grin]?) I'd say that the two men who broke into Honyecutt's house are professional housebreakers and therefore privy to all kinds of tools and skills that Aud isn't familiar with. But, ha! I love getting email like this, love knowing I hooked you in despite yourself. Heh heh [picture me doing the dance of triumph in my office].

As for knowing the way when I begin a novel, well, that's a pretty complicated question. Yes, and no, and sometimes. What happens is that I think about a novel (or story, or essay) for a long time, usually while I'm still working on something else. Then one day I just sort of start writing it. After I've been working on it for a few days, I admit to myself (and Kelley) that I've started. Then I write a bit more. Then when I have a chapter or so, I write an outline. Then I start again from the beginning. Somewhere around the middle, everything starts going in the wrong direction. I agonise and complain and drink too much for a while, then I abandon the outline and follow the new path to see where it's going. And eventually I end up, somehow, back at the final scene I'd envisaged in the outline. Mostly. It's actually a fairly mysterious process to me but I've now done it enough times to understand that it will all work out in the end, and that despairing is a waste of everyone's time. Now if I could only act on that understanding...