From: Spikey and Bobo

I went to one of your Stay readings where you said you "rewrote that puppy thirteen times." You said you were not one of those writers that can churn out a book every year, but we think you secretly are as prolific as Steven King, and one day there will be your own version of the "Bachman books" revealed. What is your pseudonym? Where should we look for your secret writings?

I have two pseudonyms that I've been playing with, but neither has any fiction to his/her name as yet. There's some non-fiction, though.

I find the idea of writing under another name intriguing. Readers, when they pick up a Nicola Griffith book, expect certain things, and on some level I allow myself to be constrained by that. Using another name would mean...oh, it would mean I could write about anything. A delicious thought.

From: Anonymous

I've loved your writing for a long time, now. And I mean I enjoy all your writing, not just your books...sometimes I come to "Ask Nicola" just to read something I know will be thoughtful and witty and well-written, a mental glass of fresh, cool water on a hot day. Thank you!

I'm writing today, because I just now ran across this news article and, for some reason, thought of you and wondered if you'd seen this research info yet: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=594&e=4 &cid=594&u=/nm/20020424/hl_nm/curry_ms_1

Well, it's entirely my own fault but I took so long getting around to answering this question that the article was no longer available. My apologies. Normally I'm better at keeping up with things but with publicity for the book, and the general weirdness that life occasionally throws in my path (my partner, Kelley, had to have an emergency appendectomy, which sort of screwed things up a bit for a while; plus I've been pretty tired) I've been more behind than usual.

I did check the URL when I first got your question, but I just don't remember which particular piece of research it dealt with. I generally try to stay on top of MS research (I have a couple of search programmes that go out and get me interesting tidbits from news sites) but I don't recall anything particularly mind-blowing lately. I'm becoming more and more convinced that stress, physical and emotional (which, of course, creates physical stress), is the number one enemy of people with autoimmune disease. I'm also getting close to being sure that diet is a huge part of the problem. For anyone interested in this, one website worth checking is www.direct-ms.org. I'm currently mulling the supplements suggestions...and am trying to avoid thinking about the diet. I've done both restricted diet and a supplement regime before (slightly different ones) and they helped enormously, though as MS is so variable anyway it's hard to tell whether the diet made a difference or it was just the disease going temporarily into remission. Adding supplements is easy (if not always great fun--and certainly not cheap). Going on a really restricted diet is vile: no chocolate, no tea, no beer, no sandwiches, no pasta, no vindaloo... God, it makes me shudder.

Health, though, is a bit like writing: you have to do the work. So now that I've done almost everything else (I do yoga a couple of times a week, I eat well, I've tried to remove as much stress from my life as I can) it's probably time to experiment once again with supplements and, if they don't make an appreciable difference after a couple of months, then with the nasty old diet. If anyone's interested, maybe I'll post an update on my findings in a few months.

From: Melissa Robison (mrobison@tuhsd.k12.az.us)

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love your writing style, you create a place so real yet so foreign to my life. I am entralled with Aud! I could not put down The Blue Place nor Stay! I did hate that Julia died but I forgave you that with the brillance of Stay!!

Keep writing, Keep well and will you be visit the Phoenix area on a book tour ever?

I've never been to the Southwest; I'd love to visit. I have my fingers crossed for next year when Vintage publishes the paperback edition of Stay. Also next spring, Ballantine/Del Rey will be reissuing Slow River as part of their XYZ line (which from what I can gather is hip-lit for twenty- and thirtysomethings). It'll get a new cover, new solicitation from booksellers, and hopefully some publicity. Overlook, at some point, will be releasing the paperback edition of Bending the Landscape: Horror and the hardcover reissue of Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (with a new cover), though I doubt there'll be any publicity to go along with that, which is too bad, because Bending the Landscape is a very readable, well-written and hopefully occasionally thought-provoking series of stories whose authors really deserve more attention than they've had. I'd love to see Overlook make a splash with their final volume.

But back to your question about whether I will ever be in Phoenix. Yes, I will, one day. I just don't know when. I'd really like it to be soon. I suspect it won't be for a while, though.