From: Jane (jgladson@pipeline.com)
I’m not sure there is a question here, except the question of whether any real person has ever used the word “swang” aloud, in conversation? And the question of when you will be in NYC for a book signing?
I’ve made it to page 47 of Stay. I had already cried by page 15, and I had to stop reading (however briefly) at 47, because my heart was pounding out of terror. I sat on my balcony overlooking the ocean in Key West and made myself watch the boats and track the 7 distinct shades of blue green the ocean turns in the late afternoon, in order to bring myself back in sync with the real world. And then I could figure out that my terror had to do with the impossibility of living with that kind of pain and loss and my inchoate fears for Aud, that somehow she will be hurt more.
And it made me remember an Ask Nicola answer you wrote about 2 years ago, about how it feels to live with a whimsical and cruel malady such as MS. I
went to your web site to see if it was still there, and couldn't find it. And so I discovered your new web site, which is a delight. I love it that the available links change from page to page…I think you must be the first person who has seen a web site as a continuous flow, rather than a back and forth navigation/thought process, in which one has to keep
returning to the home page to decide where to go next. It is the first web site I could surrender control to, instead of trying to out-think the navigation so I can find exactly what I want in the most efficient and
quickest way. But please put that old Ask Nicola response back on the web site: I saved it at the time, but it was really really wonderful, so more
people should be able to read it.
I came to your work by way of a short story in one of the SciFi magazines, named “Jaguar” except in Spanish. It made me go out and look for everything else you had written, which at the time, was only Ammonite. I see that it is to be re-issued which brings up question #3, have you changed it at all? Do you like it as much as the later books? I don’t,
not that it was awful, but rather that Slow River and The Blue Place have so much greater depth of character. And both had far greater impact on me,
personally: I can remember everything that happened in both books, although I’ve forgotten hundreds of other books read more recently.
Which brings me to the hardest thing I wanted to say: you are a really great writer. There is simply no way to say that without sounding stupid,
but there it is. What you write makes a difference to me. Beside the pleasures of reading your books, they make me think differently. They make me just a tiny bit different. Thank you.
The OED lists the past tense of swing as either swung or swang (I admit, they say the latter is used "rarely," but it's not obsolete). I grew up using swang--was taught, in fact, to use swung as the past participle only, in the way one would use sing, sang, and sung. I also grew up saying shone and dreamt and leapt. English and American are not the same language. Aud learnt (or learned) English in the north of England, a rather old-fashioned part of the country. My copyeditor and I went back and forth on this particular issue. I let a lot of things go--all those anaemic American spellings (color instead of colour, jewelry instead of jewellery, sigh...), for example--but this one...well, I just dug my heels in I'm afraid. You're the third person to ask me about it in as many weeks.
As for that Ask Nicola question about MS...I wonder if it's in the "not yet archived" section? If it's not in there or the Archives, then I'm afraid it's lost forever. It just didn't occur to me to start archiving until a couple of years ago. If you send me the answer, along with the original question, and the original question, I'd be more than happy to repost it.
In the new edition of Ammonite there are probably a dozen changes, all tiny cuts: a comma here, a word there, maybe as much as a phrase but never as much as a sentence. The basic idea of the book was conceived fifteen years ago, when I saw the world differently, and wanted to communicate different things to that world. It wouldn't have been fair to make great changes; it would have been like one writer editing another's work.
As for "Yaguara," one of these fine days I really will put it up on the website as a free-download PDF. I'd love to see my short fiction available, I just can't seem to find the time to do all the stuff I want. But I'll get around to it one of these fine days. Honest.
