From: smyers (smyerspc@yahoo.com)

about four years ago i was sitting at a coffee shop when a friend walked up, dropped _the blue place_ into my lap, and simply said "read this." i was a little sceptical and the jacket blurb seemed a bit much, but once i got into it i could not put it down. i have since repeated my friend's actions with at least a dozen people, boys and girls, straight and gay.

we've got an ongoing casting debate on for the blue place. my personal favorite for looks (not sure their acting chops would hold up) are angelina jolie for aud (if she were ten years older and more in control) and dina meyer (starship troopers) for julia. i know right now that is a dvd i would own.

re: cunt. i have read it, it is a fearless book with an fascinating point of view. a worthy resource.

haven't read _ammonite_, but loved _slow river_ and _stay_. i live in nc so especially dug the setting. and thank you thank you thank you for writing books where gayness was a fact, not an issue.

thanks for the shout out for the susan cooper books, i'm currently trying to locate a used set b/c my mom has apparently lost ours...

q: have you read/were you influenced at all by the travis mcgee books by john d. macdonald? i noticed certain character parallels, it seemed... if you're not familiar, i recommend them as good beach reads. a bit dated on the gender role side but well-written and ahead of the curve on environmental issues.

well, i think i've said enough. i wish you luck in the future and i eagerly await your next offering.

Well, the only reason I'm glad I'm not the Empress of the Universe is that I don't have to make decisions on things like casting my own books. I haven't the remotest idea how to guess whether any particular actor would work in any particular role. Remember the fuss Anne Rice kicked up a few years ago when Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat in "Interview with a Vampire"? I understood her reservations completely, but when I saw the film, I was really impressed by the job Cruise did; he took that part and made it his. Who could have predicted that? The casting director, obviously.

Aud is all about the body; how she moves is far, far more important than how she looks or sounds. A year ago I would have heaped scorn on the notion of Angelina Jolie as Aud--but then I saw that bungee ballet scene in Tomb Raider and can now understand why some people might at least consider the idea. Anyone else got any good suggestions?

Ah, Travis McGee. I started to answer this along the lines of "Oh, yep, I've read those books but I don't think they've had much influence on my work," but after I started to ponder the question I came to the conclusion that McGee and McDonald have had a greater impact on Aud than I had initially understood.

Aud almost certainly owes some of her chameleon qualities, her willingness to tell people what they think they want to hear in order to get what she needs, to McGee. I admire McDonald's work--those amazing rants Trav goes off on, for example, on poodles, or how the end of civilization as we know it will begin in New York--and think he's a far better writer than most people give him credit for. But what he does with McGee is not what I want to do with Aud. I spent a happy hour this evening drinking beer and talking to Kelley about Aud and McGee. She's more familiar with the novels than I am, and she suggested that the major difference between McGee and Aud is age: he already knows almost everything about himself, and Aud doesn't. I think this is true.

McGee is at least ten years older than Aud; he's reached an accomodation with himself and his place in the world. As readers we understand that he's been through a lot, travelled many places, and made a clear choice to withdraw to Bahia Mar and the Busted Flush. While he's not deliriously happy, he's not unhappy (although you could argue that he suffers from depression). For the first few books, as far as I recall (it's been a while), he is relatively content. He isn't struggling, except as the plot demands. Which isn't to say his internal life isn't complex and that he's not self aware. He is. He has an amazing negative capability around the his sense of self, and notions of happiness. On the one hand he is a romantic, constantly galloping to the rescue, while on the other, he understands that it's a big world and he can't change much in it. He does things he doesn't much like in order to keep promises and achieve the greater goal. To some extent, this is also true for Aud. However, her story is not one of choices already made, it's of choices being made for the first time. Her sense of self has been frozen for many years and is emerging anew. She finds that a lot of what she thought was true is not. She is learning for the first time what love, and friendship, and family really mean. Some of the time it's frightening, some joyous, some just damn irritating. But it's all new.

The story of Aud is the story of change. It's interesting to consider how this compares with the story of McGee. For example, although his attitude to women changes in the course of the series, becoming noticeably less sexist, he doesn't appear to be aware of this. It is not a conscious change; as a result, I tend to think this reflects a change in the author's attitudes more than the character's. With Aud, we get to watch her making the mistakes that can teach her--if she's willing to learn. Obviously, some lessons are easier for her to learn than others, but the point is that we watch the whole process. We see where she fails, where she succeeds, and where the outcome is uncertain. Over time her attitudes and methods and ways of thinking change. McGee, on the other hand, while he appears to learn in the course of a novel, doesn't appear to change the way he behaves because of that knowledge. Basically, what happens in his world/the course of the novel merely reinforces what he already knows, and he sighs, and accepts once again that he's a romantic in a cynical world, or a cynic in a romantic world, and goes back to his boat.

As I've said, it's been a while since I've read these books, and it's Kelley's opinion that towards the end of the series McGee does, in fact, go through some serious change, but for me the point is that reading these books clearly triggered something in me that was one of the things that led to Aud. Answering this question makes it clearer. Taking another look at the plot for the latest Aud novel makes it clearer still (and, no, I'm not going to talk about it until it's done).

From: anonymous

So, are you in the new McSweeny's? Your sweetie? You've said you admire Michael Chabon, and an acquaintance who's seen the new book says that she recognized several interesting women amongst the contributors, so, I figure you must be plugged in? If not, why not? You should be!

Nah, I'm the original unplugged novelist, one of those scary writers whom none of the other writers have ever met. And foreign, to boot.

From: anonymous

Not a question - but a comment or two. I LOVE the two books you wrote with Aud as the protagonist. I love your mind and the breath-taking depth of thought. You books came along at a particularly difficult juncture in my life - and in the quirky way of life's syncronicity, gave me the things I needed to hear. When you wrote about Aud not being "broken" but instead grieving, a whole mental construct of some 40 + years melted like ice in a heat wave. I have a more reasonable platform to stand on now to find badly need healing. Thank you for being - you have an awesome mind.

It's my belief that unless you already knew that you needed to heal, you could not have recognised that truth from Aud's experience in Stay. I don't think we hear things until we already, on some level, know them. I could probably have walked up to you in a bar five years ago, bought you a drink, and talked earnestly about my opinions on personality, self-delusion, grief and healing, and you would have stared at me as though I were crazy. The Aud novels may well have given you some of the words you needed to crystallise what you already knew but, flattered as I am at the idea, I can't really take the credit for your epiphany. I'm betting you'd already done all the work.

From: anonymous

I can't seem to get an answer about a board that used to exist in which you were active. Are there any boards out there that discuss lesbian literature? Is there one in particular that you respond to? Ammonite is still my favorite piece by you. Will you go there again?

The board I used to post on (and still do, very occasionally) is the AOL lesbian book discussion board. You have to be an AOL subscriber, and unless you've already bookmarked it, getting there can be a bit tedious. Pull up the Channels menu, then follow this trail: entertainment}chat&messages}message boards}books boards}book discussion groups}more book discussion groups}lesbian book group. The traffic varies considerably.

And in answer to whether I'll ever return to the world of Jeep, the answer is Probably Not. But for the club mix of that answer, here's what I said the last time someone asked: mutterings about Jeep. If that's not enough, there's a whole archive on all things Ammonite, and there are many questions and answers on the subject in the not yet archived section. One of these days I really must get around to writing a FAQ.

From: Lindsey Main (beanmain@yahoo.com)

Hi. I know... I wasn't going to say anything, let someone else answer, but I haven't seen it yet. And well, you seemed like you really wanted to know. So, it was Christopher Leland who paraphrased T.S. Eliot when he said,"Good writers borrow; Great writers steal". I thought it was T.S. Eliot. I looked it up. He said, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal". And Hemingway said something about good writers having built-in shit detectors and great writers always using them. Anyway, when I looked up Eliot, I got the skinny on Leland. I don't know who he is, but he's the one who said it.

Thanks for the ladybug(bird) tip. Last year I was out back for hours, sliding my fingers between thorns, stripping off little clusters of aphids and squishing them them in my hand (gf thought I'd lost it--yard chemicals make me nervous and besides, we have dogs). For $35.00, I can get 2700 of them (900 a month for 3 months). I can't wait for Spring(evil, evil laugh).

Christopher Leland? Thanks. Now I'm going to have to go look up his name and find out who he was and what he did--apart, that is, from giving us that very useful quote.