Monthly Update
December, 2003

Though I haven't had time to go back and check on the Arabic and Turkish words I used in TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD, I remember that hamam is the word for the public baths, and the Burned Column is a Roman monument that stands - or stood - close to the Grand Bazaar. I used an early-twentieth-century Baedekker's for my knowledge of Istanbul. Where the notes are now I can't even imagine.

One day I may do a backstory on Ingold. I'm not sure whether the Ingold fan who wrote has read MOTHER OF WINTER or ICEFALCON'S QUEST (which didn't get nearly as wide a distribution as the main trilogy) - but yes, Ingold very much deserves his own book.

Thanks also to those who encourage me to do a sequel to RAT-GOD. At the moment I'm sorting out possibilities for the next-up project after GLASS OF SHADOW, the follow-on to SISTERS OF THE RAVEN (for which the folks at Warner were incredibly nice enough to wait while I pulled EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE together). Naturally, I suspect nobody in New York is going to give me an answer on anything until after the first of the year - giving me a clear shot at getting GLASS well under way!

I have finished with the quite-minor re-writes on WIFE, by the way, and sent it in: I can't wait to see it in print. I suspect that, like the editorial staff of Bantam Books, I've slipped over the edge of the annual Christmas/New Year gravity well and won't really be able to get back to work until after Christmas at least. In addition to shopping (which I hope to finish tomorrow) there is wrapping, and doing Christmas cards (and I have the horrible feeling I left the stamps on the counter at the Post Office), and I am also having my back yard landscaped (YAY!! AT LAST!!), which entailed a lot of subsidiary errands. Since my dear pal Victoria is coming to stay for the weekend (Rose Bowl Swap meet! Opera at the Dorothy Chandler!) I had to put in a day of shoveling out the accumulated clutter of eighteen months of immersion in the Civil War. Some of the stuff I chucked was coming up on the tenth anniversary of its sell-by dates.

So, I've been putting in a bit of time doing introductions to stories for the second anthology of George's short fiction (George Alec Effinger, my late husband, for those who came in late). The first volume, BUDAYEEN NIGHTS, got a starred review in Publisher's Weekly - George's first, I think. ("What do you got to do to get a starred review out of PW, die?") The second, GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER LIVE! FROM PLANET EARTH contains some of his funniest, saddest, and weirdest stuff; it's good to get a chance to re-read it.

Everyone have a joyful Christmas!

Monthly Update
October, 2003

The friends and family members who live in the fire areas are all still okay and all still have houses, albeit in some cases a bit smoke-blackened.

My editor at Bantam says THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE is the best thing of mine she's ever read and she's over the moon with delight.

I'm over the moon with the thought that I won't have to do major re-writes.

I just wrapped DEAD WATER - Benjamin January #8, otherwise known as "The Steamboat Book."

Future projects are pending.

Thank you all for your letters - it's always good to hear from you. I'm delighted someone asked me about a sequel to DRAGONSTAR, considering the execration I got a year or so ago about that series. Admittedly it's a bit dark, but I enjoy it nevertheless and I'm glad to see I'm not alone in that opinion.

Aohila is pronounced AY-oh-HI-la, and I think I came up with the name from playing around with Biblical names; I don't really remember now. The Demon Queen herself is one of the very old characters in the locker-room of my head: I've been making up stories in which she's the villainess since I was about eleven, and I think the original image for her came out of a movie I saw, though like everything else it's been added to since. Like all the characters from the locker-room, her name changes from story to story. I was glad to be able to finally use her.

Regarding who I'd cast as January: although I describe him as being very large and rather scary-looking, in fact I could see him being played by either Washington or Poitier. The actor I think most like him (except for not being six-foot-three) is now too old for the role: Louis Gossett, a very fine actor who never quite got offered roles up to his abilities.

Yes, there are Ben January books out in French, from Editions du Masque: certainly the first two, perhaps the first four (though I'm not certain of that).

And you're right, I did goof up about how long Hannibal was in New Orleans before January got there. I didn't start working on a concordance until the second or third book of the series, and even then, there were so many small details that they got away from me.

I picked the name "Dillard" for the Texian romantic interest in DAYS OF THE DEAD out of a list of Alamo defenders; presumably there were several members of the same family who came out to Texas in the 'teens and 'twenties. While researching I encountered the story about Santa Anna being apprehended disguised as a woman, but the way it was worded made me wonder whether that was true or just one of those legends spread to disgrace and humiliate a fallen enemy leader. (Jefferson Davis was also described as trying to escape in a woman's dress). Now, both stories may very well be true. Drag is a fairly good disguise (as Hannibal finds out at the end of DAYS OF THE DEAD), though at six feet I can't imagine President Davis thinking for a moment he'd make a convincing lady. Santa Anna was of medium height and might have thought he could get away with it. Considering the feeling in the Texas army after the Battle of Goliad, he may have been worried enough about surviving capture to try anything.

Regarding crinolines, I hadn't heard about the sugar, though I did read that in the 1940s and '50s (and probably MUCH earlier) the mothers of little girls in the South would slick their daughters' hair with sugar-water, to hold spit-curls stiffly in place. This evidently attracted every bee and wasp in the neighborhood. I should think that alone would discourage you from loading up your petticoats with the stuff - besides, sugar was expensive. But it's an interesting piece of information.

I've had the outline for a sequel to RAT-GOD in my desk drawer for six years now. I was let know in no uncertain terms that the profits on the original didn't justify a sequel - it's another of those that I'll probably end up working on "on spec" and seeing if I can sell, already finished, to a small press. There are several like this on the back burner.

And Matt, thank you for the word on "Travelers' Picquet". I'll definitely have to check on the Public Domain URL.

Many thanks to all, and have a lovely Halloween.

Monthly Update
September, 2003

It's been a busy month. I meant to write something around Bilbo Baggins' birthday (Sept. 22) but went to a really, REALLY bad opera instead. (I kept expecting Dan Ackroyd to come out on-stage and say, 'And tonight on "Really Bad Opera" we present scenes from....')

I did, as I said, finish Mrs. Lincoln and get her out the door and on her merry way to New York. The manuscript is the size of a cinder-block and I'm climbing up the walls waiting for editorial comment - with 43 years to cover, any appreciable cutting is going to involve major structural change. I've done my best not to have sentences like, "Ten years later, her feelings about him were still the same...." after a decade encapsulated into three little stars and an extra line of spacing.

To keep from going insane waiting, I took a little road trip up to visit a friend in San Jose, and spent a couple of days shopping, doing handicrafts, and watching silly movies on the video. Back in LA, I went to the LA County Fair, and watched horse shows and pig-races and veggie-chopper demonstrations, and walked til I couldn't walk anymore. (Every year I resolve that the next year, I'll enter the Table-Setting Competition, but I guess that gets filled up REALLY fast - it's a blood-and-cutthroat event.)

This past week, I sat down and did up outlines for future projects, with the result that I want each of the six books I plotted to be the Next Thing Up. One of them's a horror novel that George - my deceased ex-husband, for those of you who might have come in late - was going to write: we worked out the plot together, and I was always sad that he never got more than a chapter done. I'd write that one under both our names. The others are a straight historical novel, a historical murder mystery in a different era than the January books, two more January books, and a sequel to SISTERS OF THE RAVEN, since the next book I owe is to Warner's.... There are two more fantasies in older, Del Rey serieses that I'll put together while finishing up DEAD WATER (Ben January #8 - the Steamboat Book), but since the Warner contract takes priority there's no real hurry on those (Deb's note here: she's not giving out details about which serises yet!).

So I feel a bit disoriented, to say the least.

Monthly Update
August, 2003

The usual cycle of post-partum depression and anxiety was interrupted last night by a very lovely birthday party, a back-yard picnic by the light of tiki torches and "flame lamps" (those silly fake-fire things with the ripply silk and red lights - I keep wanting to set them up in my bedroom and keep realizing that there is NO way I could keep the kittens out of them) Very pleasant. And thank you for hanging in there and being patient.

I tried to get a signing set up for Days of the Dead in the LA area, and I realize now that the bookstore never called back - I got so involved with Mrs. Lincoln that I didn't notice. And now I suspect that because it's not "hot off the press" it's too late for most bookstores. I'll be doing a signing sometime during Thanksgiving weekend at the local LA-area science fiction convention, LosCon, which I THINK will be at the Burbank Hilton again (though the person who asked about an LA area signing should probably check LosCon 2003 on their web browser to be sure).

Regarding fire-related deaths of frontier and 19th-century women, I can only pass along what I've heard on the subject. I haven't done any statistical studies on it, since I'm not really a scholar (I just play one in my books). Perhaps a woman's clothing was rendered more flammable by the absorbtion of cooking-grease? I don't know. I did read someplace that the really flammable part of a woman's apparal was her crinolines, which I think were stiffened with glue or sizing of some kind. I, too, would be interested in some more factual information.

On the subject of factual information, I recently finished reading a previous well-known Big Novel about Mary Todd Lincoln, written in the 1950s, and was truly startled by the number of things that I'd found in my researches that the Author More Famous Than Me simply left out, or downplayed into a whisper of near-invisibility. (Compulsive spending? What compulsive spending?) I kept thinking, "The names are the same but these AREN'T the people I've encountered in my research." Very odd. On the other hand, I've read at least one biography of MTL which simply denies that she was ever incarcerated for insanity - it just said she was in Europe at the time, in spite of the fact that her trial was covered in several newspapers, the documents connected with it are in the public record, and I've read the day-book from the asylum where she spent May-September of 1875.

Once MTL is out the door, yes, I will be doing more fantasy. I've now done three historicals in a row and really miss the freedom of writing about magic, strange monsters, and someplace other than nineteenth-century America. I did take a little break and wrote a contemporary occult romance novella, "Someone Else's Shadow," for Harlequin, but I haven't heard back from them - I'm sort of afraid I might have alarmed the editor.

But it was nice to write about belly-dancing and the Tarot.

Hope all is well with everyone - take care of yourselves, and I'll try to be better about updates in the future.

Monthly Update
June, 2003

Monthly Update
May, 2003

6 tsp flour
3 heaping tbsp granulated sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp vanilla
pinch nutmeg
powdered sugar
2 eggs
cooking oil
2 cups cooked rice

Mix flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, salt, vanilla, and nutmeg. Beat the eggs and add rice to them. Add the dry ingredients to the rice and egg mixture. Mix thoroughly. Drop by spoonfuls (or roll into balls slightly smaller than golf-balls) into hot, deep oil (about 360 degrees) and fry until brown. Drain on a paper towel. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve hot. The Old Coffee Pot restaurant on St. Peter Street used to (maybe still does) add chopped pecans to the mixture, and serve them with grits and maple syrup. Not a calorie in the carload. This recipie is from Leon Soniat's LA BOUCHE CREOLE.

I thought we'd established a few months ago that I was actually Deb, so how could I be Martha Wells also? I am, in fact, neither one - I really am just myself.

A rather tired self today - I just finished the second draft of DEAD WATER, and have a couple of small projects and a road trip before starting on the third draft. It's chilly in Los Angeles - not unusual for May, actually, the coastal clouds-and-chill zone generally extends until nearly July - and as usual the cats are asleep in front of the office heater.

Yes, I started out my researches on DEAD WATER with LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI - Twain beautifully captures the flavor of the riverboating era, in the way more scholarly works do not. But Twain couldn't be my only source, since Twain learned his trade in the late ‘50s rather than the ‘30s, and there had been many advances even in twenty years. Also, there were things Twain didn't mention, like some of the finer details of low-water navigation, and the layout of steam-boats - where exactly DID they serve dinner? And would free people of color be able to get a stateroom, or dine with other passengers, or not? (That seems to have depended on the boat). I admit I did a certain amount of guesswork, but in the ‘30s, steamboats were far from the "floating palaces" of the postwar era.

I'm delighted to hear that FREE MAN OF COLOR is required reading in courses on history - I always loved having a novel that could make what I was learning real. EVERYTHING in it concerning slavery and relationships between blacks, whites, and free colored is as accurate as I could get it from the research that I did. Marie Laveau definitely existed, though not a great deal is known about her - there are accretions of legend and folk-tale, but many of those were designed to be sensational. Details about the free colored demimonde of the 1820s-40s are VERY scanty - it was one of those things that everybody knew about and nobody talked about or wrote about, except travelers who were trying to impress the folks back home. But most of the free colored property-owners in New Orleans were women, to whom white men willed houses and money after long relationships. I got as close to the facts as I could find them, and didn't knowingly say things that contradicted what I could learn or deduce.

I always look on my books - certainly the January books, and others with historical background as well - as teaching tools, to show people things they might not have known. I know I have a tendency to explain too little about, for instance, local New Orleans idisyncracies, like the fact that the sidewalks were called banquettes or that proper Creole manners dictated that you came in through the bedroom, not the parlor. But as Benjamin is a New Orleans African Creole himself, these wouldn't be things he'd even think about.

Detail is one of the things I use - to answer another question - in making my worlds ‘believable.' Once I've researched what would be in any given environment where Our Heroes are dealing with the latest of their problems - or sitting taking a break between plot points - I try to see what they would be seeing, smell what they would be smelling (and believe me, New Orleans is a world of smells!). What is it actually like to be them, in that place, at that time?

It takes practice.

I am sorry if I gave the impression - as I seem to have done - that I don't think much of creative writing programs. I've had a couple of bad experiences with writing classes and writers' groups, but I know also that they can be of tremendous help. More power to you!

To answer the question regarding my late husband George's last novel, WORD OF NIGHT, it was never finished - barely even started. The first two chapters will appear in an upcoming collection of some of his short stories called BUDAYEEN NIGHTS, from Golden Gryphon Press. Golden Gryphon is doing several collections of George's short stories, which I think would have pleased George very much.

With regards to Starhawk's cribbage technique, I'll often drop into the middle of conversations between characters, so I don't know how many points she counted up earlier. I assume they were either using the point-count system from the convent where Starhawk went to school, or that there were extra points awarded for winning the hand. Being raised in a convent, of course Starhawk would never think of cheating.

And with regards to John Aversin's abilities to make double vanilla lattes in DEMON QUEEN… think about the place he was working in! It was a mix he squirted out from a hose under the counter, of course.

Monthly Update
April, 2003

It's gorgeously beautiful here and I have a terrible case of Spring Fever which comes out in Nesting Behavior: making curtains and redecorating.

As usual, thank you all for your questions and comments - I do appreciate hearing from you all.

I have not yet read any of the Harry Potter books, nor have I met the author, so I truly have no opinion of them. One of these days I'll rent the movies, which I'm told are entertaining - sometimes I'm too tired to be entertained much.

No, I never wrote more than those few lines of the song about the dragons and their colors. And yes, I got the count of the dragons in DRAGONSTAR mixed up, where they are moving in and out of the power-crystals at the end. That's something my usual line-editor catches, and of course for reasons too long to go into, among the MANY other problems I had with DRAGONSTAR (including the entire - hand-corrected - manuscript being LOST during the editing process and having to be re-done… don't even start me on that) was that I didn't have my usual line-editor working with me.

Had I know there would be that much trouble - and that many delays - with DRAGONSTAR, I would NEVER have done what I did in that series, making the first and especially the second books so grim and dark. But I am still a bit disconcerted that so many people found DRAGONSHADOW and DEMON QUEEN as horrifying as they did… don't other people write grim, scary stuff too?

Isn't the POINT of getting your hero into and out of trouble, to see how horrifyingly awful that trouble can be?

When I write about demons, I'm not talking about cute little squeakers with pitchforks. They're as close to Pure Evil as I've gotten - uncaring and obliviously selfish appetite.

But yes, if you want to find the real nastiness in my stories, it's usually the human villains, simply because humans should know better, and - for whatever reasons seem good to them - choose not to know.

Regarding my characters, some of them are semi-based on people I know - usually amalgams of several people - and others simply emerge from my head. As I think I've said elsewhere, some of them - like John Aversin and the Icefalcon -- I've been making up stories about for years, in one incarnation or another. There's a bit of the Crocadile-Dundee, Wise Barbarian archtype in John, and a bit of him in Abishag Shaw, the policeman in the Ben January series: but John and Shaw are very much individuals. I generally don't think of any of my characters as archtypes (which I tend to regard as sloppy writing).

Sewing is something that comes in and out of my life - for a long time I did historical costuming, but now I generally just turn out an occasional Hawaiian shirt. Some of the Simplicity Civil War patterns are quite accurate, and others are… well… let's say they're designed for Halloween or School Play level costuming. There's a wonderful establishment called AlterYears (or Alter Years) that specializes in historical patterns and costume notions (coset-bones, fancy clasps, etc), and they act as a sort of clearing-house for the various historical pattern companies. Unfortunately, they're sufficiently disorganized that they haven't put out a catalogue since '98, but if you do a Search on your Browser and look them up, they may have a catalogue or partial catalogue on-line, and I know they do mail-orders.

For the person going to New Orleans and looking for used bookstores, I most recommend the Librairie (I think it's called) on Chartres Street in the Quarter. The Faulker House Books, on (I think) Pirates Alley in the Quarter is also very good, though more expensive and dealing more with rare books. The Garden District Book Store on Prytania at The Rink shopping center (my favorite in New Orleans) has a case of rare old books, which they used to leave open for browsers until they discovered that some browser had been helping him or herself and walking out with the books under their coat. But if you ask, they'll unlock it for you.

With regard to the nit-picks: It's sometimes very difficult to figure out coinage in the 1830s, and that's something I'll double-check next time it comes up. As far as I could figure out in the upcoming Mexico book, DAYS OF THE DEAD, a reale was about two pesos (or vice versa - I can't remember now) and wasn't very much; I could easily have mistaken myself and used a reale and a Mexican dollar interchangeably. That's something line- and copy-editors frequently miss, too, though the one I've had is usually VERY good.

Monthly Update
March, 2003

Since the next Benjamin January book, DEAD WATER, takes place on a steamboat going up the Mississippi in the summer of 1836, I booked myself onto the sternwheel steamboat Mississippi Queen and went upriver from New Orleans to Vicksburg, a thoroughly entertaining journey.

The Mississippi Queen is a genuine steamboat - that is, powered entirely by steam and propelled by a paddlewheel - though it's about twice the length and many times the volume of any steamboat on the river in the 1830s. One of the things I noticed in my studies of medieval history - which was my field of study in college - is the tendency of so many people to generecize: they think everyone in the Middle Ages wore fourteenth-century houppelandes and henins, for instance, or that all warriors then wore plate armor, forgetting that the "Middle Ages" covers everything from sixth-century scale-mail up through the Renaissance and guns. Unless you're in the SCA or a grad program there's no reason to know any different, and the same blurring is in effect about the antebellum period in the U.S.

Steamboats changed a lot from 1811, when the first one cruised down the river, even up to the heyday of the "packet boats" in the 1850s, let alone the big excursion boats after the War. I goofed up in several of the earlier January books by describing them as white-with-gingerbread - an 1850s phenomenon that didn't exist in the 1830s -- and by speaking of their whistles, which weren't invented (I now know) until 1844. (Oops.) God knows the Mississippi Queen is NOTHING like anything to be found on the river during January's rather ill-fated voyage.

And, of course, the river is very different since the invention of snag-boats, locks, and erosion control. The ground on which the formerly notorious river-port of Natchez-Under-The-Hill stands is about a sixth the size it was when Abraham Lincoln and his assorted cousins and step-brothers stopped there to get drunk, laid, and probably robbed on their way down to New Orleans by flatboat in the late 1820s - the old buildings and the land they stood on have literally washed away. Naturally, it's a Disney-oid tourist attraction now.

But I did get to see that most heart-shaking of sights, the night sky away from any city or lights, clear velvet black down to the horizons and burning with more stars than you'd think are possible. And I did get some astonishing shore tours, including a visit to Angola Penitentiary. The museum there was a monument to human ingenuity - I didn't know how many things could be made into weapons or whittled into keys. (One fellow carved the handle of a black plastic comb into a key so accurate they had to change all the locks in the prison). There was a 40-cup coffeepot that had been converted into a still - somebody didn't have to worry about cigarettes for the duration of his stay. I also had a nice walk around Natchez, saw an amazingly idiosyncratic museum in Vicksburg, visited a working reproduction of an old cotton-gin, and on one Cajun Music shore tour there was a prize-ticket drawing at the end and I won an accordion.

And, the voyage itself was great fun. It was a "Big Band Cruise" and most of its population were retirees; there were four very nice "dance hosts" in the employ of the boat, whose job it was to make sure that the singleton ladies all got danced with. Very nice fellows, handsome well-dressed well-mannered gentlemen between 45 and 70 who doubled as escorts on the shore tours. Mostly I spent my evenings in the Paddlewheel Lounge at the back of the boat, listening to the house band - banjo, piano, drums, very Kingston-Trio-like. Fun, mellow, peaceful evenings and unlimited quantities of popcorn.

I'm glad I went.

Monthly Update
January, 2003

Many thanks to everyone for their letters. It's always good to hear. I especially owe thanks to Matt in Philadelphia for the heads-up on Thomas Gunn's THE PHYSIOLOGY OF NEW YORK BOARDING-HOUSES. It is delightful, quite funny if you're into the Dickens-Twain type of nineteenth-century humor (I found it hilarious), and ENORMOUSLY helpful. I especially liked the chapters on Spiritualist Boarding-Houses, Vegetarian Boarding-Houses, and Boarding-Houses Where You Are Expected To Make Love To The Landlady. I scored a copy through Books Redux in Yorba Linda, California, and I recommend anyone who's looking for old or rare books to contact Miriam there: she's a great searcher and I've never found her prices to be outrageous.

Monthly Update
December 2, 2002

Little mysteries of History. By the time they got back to Washington, of course, the White House had running water (cold… the servants still had to heat baths on the downstairs boiler and haul the water up the servants' stair to the little bathing-room on the second floor). Probably Washington had public baths by then, so Lincoln's two secretaries - who shared a bedroom across the hall from him - bathed out, the same way they ate their meals at a near-by boarding-house. Mary couldn't stand either of them and they called her "the Hellcat."

What a pity the TV series about the Lincolns in Washington was turned into a sit-com that was, by all accounts, a comprehensive exercise in bad taste: it was an amazing household. The TV series should have been done as the 1860 version of The Sopranos. Which reminds me of one of the weirdest things I've ever seen on TV: some small history show did an episode about Robert E. Lee, and used - I'm not making this up - what were purported to be Robert E. Lee's home movies: black-and-white, silent, "Wave at the camera, dear…." VERY silly, but hugely entertaining.

Sorry it's been so long since I updated. Hawaii was lovely. My friend and I rented a house essentially next door to the one I - and other friends - rented last year, on the North Shore of Kaua'I, about ¾ of the way from Hanalei to Ke'e Beach. We took a helicopter tour of the island - during which I found it is possible to be awestruck by wonder and beauty at the same time as one is utterly terrified - but other than that we did nothing. Lay on the beach, and a little bit of hiking. We hiked the first two miles of the Kalaulau Trail, down to the first beach (after that one needs a Parks Department permit). I didn't realize at the time that it's one of the most challenging hikes in the world. The muscles in my knees and ankles grew so fatigued that they wouldn't bear my weight and I fell a couple of times going over rocks, but fortunately it didn't start to pour rain until we were about halfway back. Then it washed off all the bug-spray and I got bitten all over, aside from having my glasses get wet so I couldn't see and had to guess the angles of these wet slick rocks underfoot. I take great pride in the fact that I finished the hike and didn't have to be airlifted out. The annoying thing was we kept getting passed by these little surfer-girls, who would dart past us - barefoot - with a surfboard under one arm and a six-pack of Cokes in the other, on their way to the beach.

Mostly we just put in beach-time, watching the interactions of the thousands of tiny sand-crabs who would emerge from their holes and chase each other around, sort of a Thimble Theater version of Wild Kingdom. Since we were there for the Days of the Dead, we put up an offrenda at the house (my companion is also a widow), very peaceful and sweet.

Thanksgiving was also very pleasant: an afternoon with my family, and the evening spent with my best friend (and sometime editor) Laurie, at the house of her sister who still owns the house they all grew up in - great fun with old friends. Then I was at LosCon, the local LA science fiction convention, signing a few books but mostly talking with old friends.

And the next things I have to deal with are the Civil War, and Christmas.
Everybody have a lovely holiday.

Monthly Update
October 22, 2002

I'm attempting to pinpoint how the inhabitants of boarding-houses (specifically in Washington DC in 1848) bathed - did they heat water in the landlady's teakettle and have a quick scrubbie in their rooms, or did the guys at least have the option of going down to the local suds-a-torium, with or without prostitutes as part of the deal? Since most of the Congressional Representatives lived in boarding-houses (which divided up by State, party, or both), we're talking about the governing body of the country . It is extremely clear to me why Mary Todd Lincoln HATED boarding-houses - in which she unfortunately had to live many years of her life, both with Mr. L and without him. (Of course, she didn't even have the option of a bath-house, if there were any, with or without hot and cold running prostitutes. In 1848 it wasn't respectable for a woman to enter a restaurant.)(Except perhaps in that Gomorrah on the Gulf, New Orleans).

I've also discovered that Mr. L loved to bowl, and did a lot of it while a Rep for Illinois - presumably after his wife got fed up with bathing herself and two children under the age of five in a dishpan in a corner of the bedroom, and went back to Lexington to live with Daddy for the duration, and small blame to her.

Little Lessons in American History.

Anyone with information about where I could look for stuff on this subject, please let me know. ("Public Baths - history" on various search-engines has only netted me 94,000 sites devoted to Ancient Rome and Istanbul Through the Ages.)

Many thanks for all your kind letters.

Why did I drop Callista? It's a long story, the short version of which is that having been asked to write about the great love of Luke's life by the editor of the Star Wars novels at that time, when the editor was replaced, I was told that another author (and presumably another author's numerous fans) wanted to have his female lead end up marrying Luke. Since it's not my driveway and not my toys, I complied. That's the one pitfall of writing in someone else's universe… It's someone else's universe.

I love Callista and I was glad to have had the chance to write the two novels about her that I did. I also wrote a short story - for the STAR WARS ADVENTURE JOURNAL - about some of her adventures after the end of PLANET OF TWILIGHT, when she's traveling on a Gamorrean trading-ship. It's called "Murder in Slushtime" and I think it was out in August of '97 or '98.

Both e-books and audiobooks are a rather ticklish subject as far as rights are concerned. It's something I leave up to my agent.

With regard to having my Russian translations re-translated, I'm not sure how long my Russian contracts will bind, and what their provisions are. I also have no idea what placing the books on the open Internet might do to my OTHER rights to those stories: that is, if doing so would kill any chance of a film deal, for instance. So it's something I haven't looked into. There are TERRIBLE tales about authors who weren't sufficiently careful with rights, who ended up having to abandon books or, in one case, who lost rights to a major character and had to essentially drop the whole series. I don't like to be picky and niggly - or greedy and unreasonable - but it's a bizarre world out there, so I err on the side of caution.

I've never done an official "Benjamin January's New Orleans" piece for any guidebook, but if you're going there, walk along DuMaine Street between Dauphine and Burgundy, and then along Burgundy, to get an idea of the neighborhoods where his mother and sisters live. In the 1840s and ‘50s the neighborhood got very bad, and, I believe, worse after the Civil War: nobody cared very much about protective zoning for primarily free colored neighborhoods and for a time every other house sheltered prostitutes. But in the 1830s it was very much a "respectable" free colored neighborhood.

The streets where Rose had her first school, and where the original Charity Hospital stood, have all been obliterated by the Interstate: it's that whole strip behind the Quarter that used to be the heart of the free colored culture in New Orleans. (What a surprise that they put a highway THERE, hunh?) The French Market is pretty much what it was - stalls under a brick roof - though the "Moon Walk" didn't exist. The levee was much lower and that whole area was thriving steamboat wharves. Congo Square - now Louis Armstrong Park - has been way spruced up, of course. Back then it was a dusty marketplace surrounded by plane-trees, where the slaves would sell produce from their own gardens on Sunday afternoons, and would dance until curfew. Their masters would usually pocket some of the money they earned, but they could keep a portion of it, either to save toward their freedom (increasingly difficult after the cost of slaves skyrocketed) or to buy little luxuries that made their lives more bearable.

Mme. Lalaurie's house still stands on the corner of Royal and Ursulines, but it's been largely rebuilt since the Civil War. The Orleans Theater and Orleans Ballroom (where the quadroon balls were held) are now the Omni Hotel, probably much rebuilt.

Look for a copy of Lillian Crete's LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS IN THE 1830s for more info. I could go on for FAR longer than there's time or space for here.

And yes, I am a seamstress.

I'll try to keep those happy endings coming.

Monthly Update
September, 2002

Which is a lovely way to live, actually.

I'm feeling much better (though actually not at this moment, since I have a mild cold and am NOT looking forward to getting on an airplane tomorrow - Foolscap is in Seattle, not Portland as I'd thought. Sorry about that.) I had an interesting and restful time at CopperCon, which is a nice little convention. Phoenix has always been one of my favorite road-trips. In the mid-70s the UC Riverside Karate Club would car-caravan across the desert - an all-day sojourn - to do battle with the Phoenix club. We'd spend one night in a hotel sleeping on top of each other 12 to a room, do the tournament, have a large Mexican dinner in Tempe, and then trundle slowly back through the darkness so we could all show up for class Monday. I remember writing a strange little novella called KARATE MASTERS VS. THE INVADERS FROM OUTER SPACE as a spin-off from one of those trips - it never got published, but I should probably dig it out and see if it can be re-worked. It's good to remember those days.

I keep wondering why I have so little recollection of the ‘70s and I realize it's because I was in the dojo pretty much the entire time. That's what got me out of the habit of watching TV, and though I quit karate with knee-injuries in '82 I never went back to watching TV in the evenings. (I now spend a couple of evenings a week at dance classes - same thing, except you don't come home with a black eye).

I rather like this business of not frenziedly juggling projects. I find I can think, at let ideas bubble to the surface naturally while I'm dealing with such questions as why any woman in her right mind would have married Abraham Lincoln. (Of course, as the Cook County Courts later certified, MTL wasn't.)

Everyone have a lovely week.

Monthly Update
end of August, 2002

I just had my birthday, and as I feared it's been a difficult week for me. I'm recovering from George's death pretty much as if I were recovering from a head-injury, slowly and with a lot of flashbacks. I'm doing an intro for a collection of his short stories, which is proving much harder than I thought it would be, especially at this distance. I find I still don't want to be around people much: with everyone except about a half-dozen very close friends, I get overwhelmed by the desire to just run screaming from the room.

I'm told I will get over this.

Fortunately I had the week pretty much off. I wrapped DAYS OF THE DEAD (yay!) and the graphic novel I was asked to do for Pennyfarthing Press's comic-book series THE VICTORIAN - something I don't think I've mentioned, mostly because I was a little uncertain of myself in writing it. I seem to have acquired a reputation as an expert in nineteenth-century America, rather curious, since it wasn't one of my major fields in college. (I've seen real scholars, and I know I'm not one - I just like to do research and fortunately was taught how to do it). Since a lot of THE VICTORIAN series (which is being written at present by my pal Len Wein, of Wolverine fame) involves New Orleans, I was asked to do a one-shot graphic novel about the villain, who is from there more or less.

It turned out to be a lot of fun, a very different fashion of storytelling than prose; it was as if I were seeing the story in a series of Norman Rockwell paintings, four or six to a page, which I described in detail, plus as little dialogue as I could manage to tell the story not only of a single individual but of the secret organization which he betrayed. The folks at Pennyfarthing are REALLY nice, and what I've seen of the series is both interesting and beautiful. The graphic novel will be called, as far as I know, "The Invisible Labyrinth" and I'll keep everyone posted as to when it will appear.

Having finished that, and DAYS OF THE DEAD, I took off what turned out to be almost two weeks, mostly to finish sewing projects that have been stacking up for years, and to sleep. It's nice to have only one major project in the offing (though once I get most of the Lincoln draft done I'll be starting on the next January book, DEAD WATER). Nice to think, and rest, and regroup. I usually throw a big garden-party around this time of year but I'm simply not up to it - instead a couple of my friends are taking me out for Moroccan food.

As I said, I'll be at CopperCon in Phoenix, at Foolscap in Portland, and at Bouchercon in Austin.

And then it'll be Christmas.

Everyone have a nice Labor Day.

Monthly Update
July 29, 2002

The result is that SISTERS OF THE RAVEN is about to appear, and I really hope those of you who've faithfully purchased DRAGONSTAR and WET GRAVE will go out and get it, too, because it's a story I'm very pleased with and proud of. It's the first new cast of characters I've done in many years (more on that, later) and it's much more an idea-story than I've done in awhile: I have no idea whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, market-wise. (But then, I have never been market-wise).

But it does bring up a rather uncomfortable issue raised by the person who wrote in that grumpy letter about how he wasn't going to buy any more of my books until I finished the series he wanted me to finish, i.e. Sun-Cross.

And that is, books don't get published in a vacuum.

Sun-Cross was a very different book, as originally written. It was one hugely long volume, over which I fought - bitterly - with my editor, resulting in a much-changed ending, and the splitting of the story into two. It may have made for a better book - my editor was a very wise man and had the most amazing story sense of anyone I've ever encountered. Whether he saw or understood the story I was originally trying to tell, I don't know. Nor, now, can I ever find out. He left Del Rey before MAGICIANS OF NIGHT came out and I'm only glad that I was able to mend my fences with him and visit him in friendship three weeks before he died: I was probably the last of his authors to see him.

Maybe if I'd been at some publishing house other than Del Rey, with a different editor, Sun-Cross would have appeared as originally intended. Maybe he was right and it needed the massive changes it got, or some other massive change that it didn't get. That's another thing I don't know.

It's also a bit disconcerting to be urged, "Write a sequel to X," or, "Let's have another book in the Y series," and then be dissed for being "allergic to endings." Editors like sequels because serieses can be profitable. I tend to leave my endings a little loose and ragged because life goes on beyond the edges of the book.

If the editor who champions a certain series leaves the publishing house, your chances of selling another book in that series largely depend on who steps into the job.

In the year 2000, for a lot of reasons, some having to do with the buy-out of Del Rey, I signed a contract with Warner Books for the first fantasies I've written outside the Del Rey umbrella in a 20-year career. This meant the chance to work with different editors and different marketing departments - to get different advice and different choices - but when you switch houses, it usually means you have to start a new series, since no publisher is going to pay you to write in a series whose backlist belongs to another publisher. (Well, they probably will if you're Larry Niven or Marion Zimmer Bradley).

This gave me a chance to meditate on - and bring to fruition - a story I've had in mind for many, many years: the story of what happens to a world where magic has always been accessible only to men, when men lose their magic, and women begin to develop power. This story became SISTERS OF THE RAVEN. (At some future date I'll talk about the hair-tearing nightmare of picking titles).

They'd like me to do a second book about those characters, but that, too, has been slipped to the back burner by a chance to do a major historical novel, something I've been angling to get the chance to do for years.

But what it means is, that it will be awhile before I can get back to any of the Del Rey serieses. They have a new editor at Del Rey, whom I've worked with before… but particularly these days I feel uneasy about even considering what the future may bring. "Always in motion, the future," Yoda said.

All I can promise is that I love Antryg, I love Sun Wolf, I love John and Jenny, and Ingold Inglorion, and Norah Blackstone and all the others; and I assure you, I'll absolutely do all I can to see them again.

That said, SISTERS OF THE RAVEN will be out soon (if it's not on the stands already - I've been so buried in trying to wrap DAYS OF THE DEAD I've barely been out of the house). (That's another problem lately: I finished the first draft of DAYS OF THE DEAD approximately four hours before my husband died, and though I continued to work on the manuscript, I shouldn't have. It all had to be re-written and I lost six or eight weeks of work).

To the unfortunate person who got a copy of CHILDREN OF THE JEDI with duplicated pages, take it back to the bookstore where you got it, show them the problem, and they should be able to send it back to the publisher for a refund.

Regarding Gottschalk, the New Orleans piano prodigy, in 1835 (which is where Ben is in WET GRAVE) Gottschalk would have been 6, probably a little young to enter the story.

Regarding Gar and Judy - two of the absolutely nicest people in the entire world - they, too, ran into the editor-left-series-stalled conundrum, and, like me, headed down another road while waiting for things to un-stall. They're always swamped with work - frequently co-authoring William Shatner's Star Trek novels (and they say he's a prince to work for, generous and pleasant), and story-editing and now co-producing The Lost World TV show, which involves long periods of living in Australia. (Gar, by the way, looks like the square-jawed blond hero of a Victorian boy's adventure novel - stalwart, except for the devil sparkle in his heroic blue eye).

I'll be at Comic Con in San Diego in early August: at CopperCon in Phoenix 6-8 September, at Foolscap in Portland 27-29 September, and at Bouchercon (mystery convention) in Austin October 17-20. (Dinner at Threadgills, yay!). After that I'll be in an isolated beach cottage on the north shore of Kauai, listening to the waves break and watching feral chickens.

Many thanks for all your kind words and thoughts.
Everybody stay cool.

Monthly Update
June 29, 2002

First, many, many thanks to all those who sent such kind thoughts and wishes of condolence. They meant a great deal to me. I'm feeling a bit better, or I would be if I weren't too tired to feel much of anything at all. Ten days is entirely too long to travel, particularly if you have mild food allergies and start feeling REALLY funky if you consume too much wheat or coffee or caffeine, substances that are fairly difficult to avoid.

This was my big Lincoln Research Trip and I hit Lexington, KY (where Mary Todd Lincoln grew up), Springfield IL (where she and Mr. Lincoln met and lived most of their married life), and Chicago, where Mary went after Lincoln's death. I talked to a number of very prominent Lincoln scholars who were all extremely nice in sharing their knowledge, and I stayed in some lovely places. If anyone has occasion to go to Lexington, the Sills Inn was wonderful - not in Lexington, but in near-by Versailles (pronounced V'r-sales). I LOVED Springfield, and the near-by re-created village of New Salem, which was where Lincoln drifted to after leaving his father's house and where he got his start in politics and the law. In Springfield I highly recommend the Mischler House Bed ‘n' Breakfast, just across the street from the two-block area around Lincoln's old house that's been restored to its 1850s appearance (and quiet). The Mischler House is a big old Victorian dwelling that's been beautifully restored, very comfortable and with lovely patio breakfasts.

I got a lot of excellent research done in Chicago, but I have old, distasteful, disturbing memories of bad times in Chicago in the past and the fact that all the streets around my hotel were either barricaded, torn up, or one-way didn't help. I rented a car and had lovely long drives through the Illinois countryside, and that helped.

The cats were glad to see me return home. One of them - I presume it was Rocket - feared that I would be hungry upon my return, or else thought to coax me out of wherever I was hiding, and left the front half of a very dead mouse on my office chair for me, which was sweet of her. I must say I inspected the bedclothes VERY carefully before retiring for the night.

With regards to the tignon worn by both slave women and free women of color, I have heard many times that the way it was wrapped, and the number of points allowed to stick up, contained coded information, which varied from place to place and from time to time. I've never found any "hard" examples, except that one person told me that one point meant single, two points meant married, and I think three meant, "I'm shopping around," but don't ANYBODY quote me on that because I may be misremembering that part. It was different in New Orleans than it was in the Carribean, I have been told. I'm sorry I can't say more than that. I suspect the lower-ranking voodoo queens wore more points - possibly five - but again, that's only surmise on my part. These were things that never got written down, like an awful lot else about the free people of color.

I've heard someone was asking my agent about the Darwath Trilogy movie rights awhile ago, presumably in the wake of Fellowship's multiple Oscar nominations, but I haven't heard further than that. I'd love to see it done - it's still one of my favorites.

So: I am home, I am VERY tired, and I will spend the next week or two wrapping up DAYS OF THE DEAD before starting in on Mrs. Lincoln in earnest. I discovered that George's death affected my work more than I'd thought: I kept on working through the worst of it, and was glad I had DAYS to work on, but a lot of the stuff has got to be re-written. I'll be at the Westercon science fiction convention this upcoming weekend (July 4) but only because it's right down the street from my house. It's extremely difficult for me to be around people still and though I'm hosting a memorial party for George on Friday night, I keep wondering if there's a way I can sneak out early and go to bed.

Everyone have a safe holiday weekend.

Extra Update
May 20, 2002

I still can't believe I'm never going to see him again.

He died peacefully in his sleep about 2 a.m. of the morning of April 27, of intestinal bleeding, possibly from an ulcer. I saw him a month prior to his death, at Coast Con in Biloxi. If both of us had been asked what we'd like to do for the last time we'd see each other, we'd have picked what we did: dinner at Antoine's, a fun movie, and hanging out together all weekend at a convention.

Since the divorce two years ago we'd talked nearly every day. It's as if the marriage per se was just a sort of sidebar on the ongoing relationship, whatever that relationship was: soulmates, colleagues, friends. The first time I met him it felt that I'd known him - and would know him - forever. He was a difficult man to live with and a wonderful man to know.

His life was a difficult one, especially in his later years. I never knew anyone who had such lousy luck and such terrible judgement. He didn't leave much, and what he left was in shambles. Two unfinished projects - one of which I'm going to complete - and a marvelous legacy of tales, nearly all of which are out of print now. A little bit of jewelry. The biggest collection of 30-day sobriety chips in South Louisiana. His old teddy-bear and the pack of Tarot cards he got in the East Village in the sixties. A fat old black-and-white cat who's been living with me since George went back to New Orleans. A whole lot of George-stories among the people who loved him. A staggering heap of medical bills.

Everybody's being very, very nice but I'm not doing real well right now. I'm working, and exercising, but there are very few people I can stand to be around - fortunately, one of them lives in New Orleans. Most of the time I'm just numb, and a little confused.

Thank you all for your very kind wishes, and for the messages of sympathy I've gotten from all here. They mean a lot.

In the meantime, DRAGONSTAR is FINALLY coming out this month: I went through the copy they sent me and re-read my favorite bits, and I'm very pleased with it, and with the DRAGONSHADOW trilogy as a whole. (The Darwath Trilogy had two single-book sequels - the single-book DRAGONSBANE had a trilogy for a sequel). WET GRAVE will be out in June and SISTERS OF THE RAVEN in August, I think. In June I'm going on my little pilgrimage to Lexington and Springfield to do Lincoln research, but I'm heartily glad I'm not working on Lincoln at the moment. I don't think I could write particularly well about a woman grieving the death of her husband, though I suppose I'll be able to do so quite accurately later. I've always said no experience is ever wasted, but this wasn't what I had in mind.

So life does go on. And once I quit waiting for him to phone, I'll be fine.

Extra Update
April 27, 2002

Monthly Update
April 22, 2002

The good news was that I DO back up my stuff by printing it out - a lot of that stuff is around here somewhere. And I ALWAYS print out what I'm working on.

The bad news, of course, was that - mostly due to stress, I think, and the pressures of what I know is over-work - I wasn't backing up the way I should have been. I never COULD get that damn zip-drive to run.

So, my dear, sweet mother is now keying in the first ten chapters of DAYS OF THE DEAD and the first eleven or so of THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE, and I'm backing everything up like crazy on the new system. I'm very angry at myself over the stuff that I did lose - all my correspondence, plus files that I've transferred from computer to computer for years.

This sort of segues into the letter that someone sent, mentioning the discussion of whether my writing has become darker over the past few years. Yes, it has - particularly, of course, the John-and-Jenny books, though I've pretty much come out of that (I think) with DRAGONSTAR, and the series comes to a very happy ending. But thinking back, very few of my books have EVER had unmitigatedly happy endings. Even Sun Wolf and Starhawk finish each book by lighting out of wherever they are as fast as they can ride. As dark as the January books are, they mostly end happily (WET GRAVE especially, I'm pleased to say), or as happily as they can for someone who's still black in Louisiana in 1834.

But I think the heavy darkness on DRAGONSHADOW and DEMON QUEEN, and also on ICEFALCON'S QUEST and MOTHER OF WINTER, were largely the effect of my marriage. In the midst of that particular horribleness there was also tremendous upheaval at Del Rey books resulting from their buy-out by Bertelsman, resulting in my editor being fired and my having to look for another publisher VERY QUICKLY. This meant that I was unable to contract for anything in my existing serieses - but the upside of that was that I was able to write SISTERS OF THE RAVEN, which (though the ending isn't precisely happily-ever-after) is one of my favorites (mostly because I've got a terrible crush on the King). Since they asked for a 2-book contract, the next fantasy I do will be in that same series - and whether I then return to Del Rey, or talk the Warner editors into continuing the Del Rey serieses, I don't know.

(We won't even go into the contractual - and editorial - morass that DRAGONSTAR turned into, largely as a result of the buy-out I think.)

That's all sort of in the future because of THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE, which came to me through the Ben January series and which I think is going to be stunning. I am enjoying both the writing and the research HUGELY - but it's a terrible juggling-act in terms of time and commitments.

I love Antryg and Joanna. (I just re-read DOG WIZARD, and enjoyed it as much as I did when I wrote it). I love Asher and Ysidro and Lydia. I dreamed recently about Sun Wolf and Starhawk, from whom I've been parted entirely too long. Digging around the files I came across the outline for CURSE OF THE SWAMP MONSTER and God knows who I'll ever be able to talk into letting me write that.

I'm delighted that you all love them the way I do. And I will return to them, when I can, if I can. I promise. I originally started writing multiple serieses because I didn't want to end up one of those writers who's locked into a single series - a single world - until they're bored and writing the same book 37 times (or until they can't think of anything to do but start killing off main characters). But the other side of that is this immense juggling act, trying to do justice to both new and old.

I hope you like SISTERS OF THE RAVEN. I hope you like DRAGONSTAR. I hope you like WET GRAVE. I feel I'm out of the darkness, but there are so many roads to walk down.

On a more mundane note, Abishag Shaw's name is the fault of the compiler of the name-list that I took it from - I was not aware it was a female name. And when I did find that out, I figured there are so many women running around with male names (starting with Shirley and Evelyn and going on through Morgan, Ashley, etc) that it really isn't that important to me. Presumably Shaw's mother was illiterate and didn't know the source either.

I tried to track down the date cocaine was isolated and couldn't at the time - thank you very much for the information. If I do another edition of GRAVEYARD DUST it'll be simple enough to alter that to an herbal Indian powder. Goodness knows I've made worse goofs than that in the series.

Yes, "Horsemen" was a story that came out in a World Fantasy Convention anthology with a total print-run of about 250 copies - I didn't know whether that qualified as "original" for Nalo's anthology or not.
Everyone drive safely and be sure to back up your files.

Monthly Update
March 10, 2002

A lot of news this time. I've got 3 short stories finished and turned in, though goodness knows when the anthologies they're in will appear: "The Horsemen and the Morning Star", a voodoo story for a collection of Mojo Conjure tales being edited by Nalo Hopkinson; "The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Neice" (a.k.a. Watson's Brain) for the Sherlock Holmes vs. Chthulhu anthology; and "The Dollmaker of Marigold Walk" for the Friends of Sherlock Holmes anthology being put together by Michael Kurland. Three short stories is something of a record for me, but who can pass up doing Holmes?

The big news is that I'll be doing a straight historical novel for Bantam about Mary Todd Lincoln, something I've been putting together research for since June. (I now know more than is anybody's business about the Lincolns' marital affairs, to the extent that I dreamed about Mr. Lincoln the other night. He was, as I had been led to believe, VERY tall.) At the moment I'm putting together the January book that's due in June, DAYS OF THE DEAD, and having a huge amount of fun with that, and have just finished the re-writes on DRAGONSTAR, which is grinding crunchily through the production phases at Del Rey. I leave for New Orleans the day after tomorrow, to be Guest of Honor at CoastCon in Biloxi (and to hang out for a few days and see friends, including my ex-husband George).

A reader queried about the name Starhawk: THE LADIES OF MANDRIGYN, of which the heroine's name is Starhawk, came out in 1984, about a year before I saw the New Age writer Starhawk's book (CIRCLE DANCE??). They came out so close together I think this was a case of true synchronicity. I certainly had never heard the name before I invented it for LADIES, and she was clearly calling herself that before LADIES came out. (I actually first used the name in a Star Trek fan story in the '60s: the Starhawk was the name of a ship.) As for the second part of the question, I have pagan friends, and I'm curious about the varieties of religious experience as I'm curious about all aspects of human experience - I'm very cautious about talking about my own personal spirituality in public print. When I do write about anything spiritual - for instance, voodoo - I try to get the facts as accurate as I can out of respect.

On the subject of other names, yes, both Ingold and Inglorion are Tolkien derivatives: I just thought they sounded great together. As anyone can tell reading my fantasies, Tolkien was an enormous influence on my, a life-changing influence, which is one reason I'm SO delighted that LORD OF THE RINGS is being done so well. I've waited for 35 years to see that film and it was worth it! Everybody looks EXACTLY like they should.

Now, with regard to the Grieb-Strieblings.... The name comes originally from a sketch by Monty Python. My friends are all Monty Python fans. And among my friends are the wonderful writing-team of Gar and Judi Reeves-Stevens (who in addition to being probably the best Star Trek writers going do EXCELLENT techno-thrillers). With a name like the Reeves-Stevenses, it's impossible not to distort that into the Grieb-Strieblings when we send them party invitations. That's how the name ended up in my books.

I am very touched by those who have shared with me that my stories have helped them, have been a gate out of a painful world into a temporary haven in which they could rest until they were ready to go on. This was what Tolkien did for me. This was what Oz did for me, and Sherlock Holmes' adventures. Like meditation, these other worlds disengaged the brain from the stress it was under, like immobilization and anti-inflammatories that permit a wound to heal. This is why I write. I'm glad I can make enough money as a writer to support myself, but this is really why I do what I do. I am very glad that I'm able to help.

Everybody have a nice Easter - WET GRAVE comes out in June.

Monthly Update
February 1, 2002

However, I had a very pleasant time.

The DC leg of the trip was in connection with the Big Project (which I HOPE will have a contract signed by my next Update, so I can at least say what it is - my agent has the contract now). I couldn't get into the White House, of course, but did manage to do a little work in the Library of Congress, a thoroughly fascinating experience. And I stayed at a wonderful hotel called the Tabard Inn - three Victorian town-houses joined together. My room was at the top of two flights of what were obviously servants' stairs. The New York hotel was less wonderful but probably nearly as old - I'd read THE SHINING recently so was convinced there was a dead lady in the bathtub when I wasn't looking. It was that kind of bathtub. I had wonderful lunches with three editors and saw the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the Guggie - jawdropping. And in Washington I saw the last bits of mortal remains - i.e. locks of hair - of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and several strands of Traveller's mane, which for some reason brought tears to my eyes.

I came back, of course, to a copyedited manuscript that had to be back in New York in 2 days (I'd had lunch with the editor a few days before - she hadn't mentioned a thing).

Regarding the fate of the free colored in New Orleans in the period immediately prior to the Civil War: As sectional conflict heated up, the free colored continued to lose their status (which had slipped even between the 18-teens and the '30s). Though they were not, as a class, enslaved, they were further and further restricted by increasingly strict "black codes" as white Southerners grew more angry about the northern abolitionist movement, and more concerned that abolitionist "agitation" would trigger slave revolts. This drove the community in on itself (rather like what happened to the Jews during the Babylonian exile), strengthening the customs and sense of community. Some of those who were 1/32nd or 1/64th African simply moved north and "passed", trading their heritage for the ability to get better jobs and a better living for their children: trading their past for their future. A hard choice.

Benjamin and Rose, I am guessing, would stay on in New Orleans, because that's where their family ties were, and often family ties (both white and black) were the only way you could get money or credit. Though I haven't thought this all out, I suspect Ben did some espionage during the Civil War (he'd be 68 when it started); his sons would have gone into the Union army as soon as it started taking blacks (which I think was in '63). (Sons? you say.) Of course, Ben's mother could survive anything, including the Civil War: she was undoubtedly one of those women who dumped chamberpots on the heads of the Yankees.

Someone asked, too, about what Benjamin meant in SOLD DOWN THE RIVER by referring to the indefatigueable Harry as a machine: it was only a sidelong comment about Harry's energy and enterprise, and did not contain any sinister meaning. From everything I could read on the subject, it sounded like the slave-quarters of plantations were part African village, part co-ed minimum-security prison, and in most institutions you'll find a hustler who can get anything or finagle anything, like James Garner's character in THE GREAT ESCAPE. (Mentally I cast Will Smith in the role - as I would in a remake of ESCAPE, for that matter).

To the anxious reader who inquired about whether the January books need to be read in order: as he'll have probably learned by this time, No, not really. I work hard to make each book a stand-alone, though of course it's a bit complicated to do so, given the Dickensian scope of the regular cast.

As for further tales of the Darwath series, they're there, pushed to the back-burners of the stove like dozens of other projects. I'm glad you enjoyed the existing five enough to want more. I love those people, too.
And yes, film-rights to the two vampire books have been optioned, though of course that means almost nothing. Most of the things that get optioned NEVER get made. It's like finding $2500 on the sidewalk - you put it in your pocket and walk on.

Thank you all for your letters; it is good to hear from everyone, even though it's sometimes hard to steal time to write Updates. They are read and appreciated.

Everyone have a lovely Valentine's Day.

Monthly Update
December 21, 2001

I've also been working on a couple of short stories, for two separate anthologies both curiously enough about the same person. One anthology is Friends of Sherlock Holmes - I write a story from the POV of Mrs. Watson and Mrs. Hudson - and the other is Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulu Mythos. It's harder than you might think to write a Lovecraft story (though I've been heavily influenced by Lovecraft throughout my writing career): most of Lovecraft's tales, once you break down what actually happens, involve Our Hero discovering Something Unspeakable and fleeing screaming into the night The End. ("My God, Watson, it is the footprints of a gigantic shuggoth!" Did anyone ever encounter a medium-sized or tiny shuggoth?)

My other big project this month was to pack up 60 boxes of George's books - which have been clogging my garage for 4 years - and finally get them shipped away. I'm now the only householder in my neighborhood who is actually able to put the car into the garage, with the result that the local children come and play in my driveway, never having seen at their own houses a 17x24 concrete pad without a car on it. Additionally I helped my best friend and sometime editor Laurie move - from her apartment into her first house, with her gentleman friend Mel Gilden, author of SURFING SAMURAI ROBOTS (which is some of the best fake-Philip-Marlowe I've ever read).

I guess this is what is called Having A Life. It's very pleasant.
Everyone have a lovely Christmas.

Monthly Update
November 20, 2001

My apologies for not doing an Update sooner. I returned from Mexico - where I was researching Benjamin January #7, tentatively titled THE DAYS OF THE DEAD - to find a polite request from Warner Books that I make certain small changes in SISTERS OF THE RAVEN by the week before Thanksgiving.

Now, these were in fact minor changes - mostly having to do with sharpening the focus of the story - but even if there's no structural alterations ("Can you get rid of the whole love-story thing?"), the ripple effect carries through the entire book, and at just over 600 pages (my average manuscript runs about 450) this is pretty severe with a ten-day deadline. My suitcase from the Mexico trip is still sitting on the floor of my bedroom; the rest of the house looks like a sty... But SISTERS will go into FedEx tomorrow.

Mexico was WONDERFUL. What a lovely, amazing country! Mexico City is astonishing, combining all the worst aspects of Manhattan and Los Angeles. Not speaking Spanish or having ever been to Mexico before, my friend Victoria and I elected to go the safe tourist route most of the time, but on the last day in Mexico City, we went down to the Z-calo - the main city square in front of the Cathedral - for the celebrations of the Day of the Dead. These were astonishing. The Days of the Dead are very much a family holiday, people setting up offrendas - altars - to welcome back the spirits of those family members who have gone on to the next phase of existence. These are furnished with all the stuff Grandma and Grandpa and all the others loved in life: Grandpa's favorite brand of tequila, Grandma's rings or cameos, plus lots of candy, and cigars, and skulls made out of sugar and decorated with colored icing. And marigolds, the flowers of the dead.

The offrendas are like Christmas trees. They're set up in hotel lobbies, in restaurants, in gas-stations on the road between Mexico City and Puebla. There was a giant offrenda competition in tents in the city square - gorgeous altars with full-sized skeletons and bread baked with cross-bones on it - and the place was like a mosh-pit. There were Aztec dancers, shamans smoke-blessing people, a life-sized replica of the Aztec skull-rack with green and purple plastic skulls, marigolds blazing everywhere you looked, wall-to-wall riot-police, and street-food to die for. (I told Victoria, "If you see me going for the street-food, slap me." We'd pinched empanaditas from the hotel breakfast buffet and ate them sitting on the curb down a side-street with all the Mexican families eating THEIR lunches, and neither of us ever got sick the whole time we were there. God knows what would have happened if I'd gone after the sweet-potato candy.)

Everyone was friendly, everyone was cheerful, there was no trouble or unpleasantness, though Victoria and I kept a darn close eye on our purses. But that's only what you do, in a crowd in a big city. I got stopped and interviewed by a very sweet high school girl named Marisol, who needed to interview a tourist for her English class. She had, very properly, a brother or cousin or boyfriend along to keep an eye on her in the crowd - which was mostly locals, very few tourists in sight. All one billion of them.

We climbed the Pyramid of the Sun and walked down the Avenue of Souls at sunset on Halloween night; we gaped in delighted awe at the frenzied Aztec baroque in the Church of Santa Maria Tonanzintla and saw old Mexican ladies scattering trails of marigold petals along the village streets to guide the spirits into their open doorways; we got caught up in a village fiesta in Oaxaca with torchlight parades and brass bands playing the Beer Barrel Polka and shooting off fireworks and swear-to-God actual dancing in the streets - it was a beautiful warm tropical night, why stay indoors and watch TV? We wandered around markets in the non-tourist areas of town. We had local experiences with restroom facilities under town square bandstands. We bought candy skulls and pottery. We didn't do nearly enough. And in Mexico City I got a phone call from my agent saying that it looks like I'll be doing a major mainstream historical novel for my next project.

So it's just as well I got SISTERS OF THE RAVEN, and DRAGONSTAR, pretty much wrapped.
I hope everyone had as lovely a time as I did, and wish everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Monthly Update
October 14, 2001

Mostly I've been staying quiet since last I wrote an update, working on THE DAYS OF THE DEAD (Ben January #7) and on a short story for a "Friends of Sherlock Holmes" anthology, about Mrs. Watson. Wednesday I get to travel by airplane, o joy - less of a nuisance for me than for some, since I NEVER took much cabin baggage (and to tell you the truth, I won't be sorry if it turns out that things that are now excluded are strollers and those immense "suit-bags" that take five minutes to stuff into the overhead while everyone else stands packed in the aisle). (Although I do understand that strollers make travel with children VASTLY easier).

In any case, I am going to Albuquerque, to speak at a conference of the Literacy Volunteers of America, one of the largest organizations for adult literacy in the country. Check out their website for more information (literacyvolunteers.org). Having been raised by parents who loved to read and who made reading a part of household life, I had never (I am ashamed to say) given a lot of thought to people who through dyslexia or other conditions (which up until a few years ago were neither recognized, understood, nor treated in our school systems), or simply through circumstances beyond their control, reached adulthood unable to read. (When you're a child, MOST circumstances are beyond your control.) These people are champions, both the volunteers and the students, and I feel like such a fraud beside their dedication and courage.

Then I get to come home, do a load of laundry, and head down to Mexico for the Days of the Dead.

After which, in appallingly rapid succession, it will be Thanksgiving and then Christmas.

Other than that, all has been quiet. I did a lovely road-trip a few weeks ago, to see the friend of a friend in the San Jose Opera production of "Falstaff"; on our return we found that the off-ramp that led to my parents' house was in the middle of a brushfire that encompassed huge portions of the foothills around I-15, with much smoke and excitement. It appalls me how many people thought it was a good idea to load their kids into the family SUV and have a tailgate party watching the blaze. I'm sure an audience was just what the San Bernardino County Fire Service wanted just then.

I still haven't heard on the possible new project; I'm bemused by the widely various speeds at which different publishing companies process manuscripts (WET GRAVE is already through line-edit, and I have not heard a single word about DRAGONSTAR since I turned it in). All projects are complicated by security in the mails, of course - security which extends to FedEx as well, though I think they get things through more quickly. A new and ghastly meaning to, "The check is in the mail." It's a time to sit tight, keep my head down, and tend my roses.

I hope all is well with all of you.

Monthly Update
September 7, 2001

The last book of the John-and-Jenny tale is DRAGONSTAR. The new fantasy - which will be out from Warner's (I hope not at the same time as DRAGONSTAR) with a new cast and some interesting stuff about deserts and magic and how people react to crisis - is officially titled SISTERS OF THE RAVEN. Watch for it next spring.

Thank you all for your letters; I do so much appreciate hearing from you. It's been a very busy end-of-summer. I celebrated my fiftieth birthday with a luau in the back yard - well, we didn't exactly bury a pig, but there's a wonderful Hawaiian restaurant in Torrance where we got all the fixings. And the backyard was lovely, tiki torches burning and twinkle-lights in the tea-house and the shrubbery, and little tables scattered around. It was like a nightclub, lots of talk and good feeling; I wandered around in a sarong and a tank-top looking like a character in a WWII movie who's been on the island too long.

After that I painted the kitchen, and built cabinets and shelves. For the first time I have usable work-surfaces in there, and adequate storage space. I am exceedingly sore and extremely glad to get back to doing my real work.

Thank you for the various comments about KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN (which, for those who didn't see it - I don't think the distribution on it was particularly good - is the sequel to DRAGONSHADOW.) DRAGONSTAR is being edited at Del Rey now. Yes, my goal in DRAGONSHADOW and KNIGHT was to investigate what demons are and can do, and since I take villains and dangers VERY seriously, I wanted to go into what demonic possession could do to not only the possessed, but to those around him or her - and to what it might do to the exorcee's relationships even after "deliverance." Sometimes I think fantasies tie things up too neatly, like TV sitcoms that always end with a hug. Sometimes healing takes longer than that.

But of course John and Jenny return to one another. And of course I don't burn him at the stake. (You all should know me better than that.) (And I think I set up his extrication from the barbeque very nicely, if I do say so myself.) I also had a great deal of fun writing the Bladerunner-esque, science fiction sequence of KNIGHT - and I must say, I love the Demon Queen.

Other queries: Yes, I did want to give an impression of a patronymic formula with the names of Eldor Andarion and Altir Endorion. I thought of it as certain House-Names carried down the generations, which every nobleman knows about every other noble House. The song Antryg sings to Seldes Katne - well, I didn't know whether it would be legal for me to use even half a line from "Yellow Submarine." But I agree that it's very like him. On the subject of songs, quite some time ago someone asked me about the song that Luke Skywalker hears whistled in the empty corridors of the Eye of Palpatine in CHILDREN OF THE JEDI: the tune I hear in my head is "Mockingbird." (The lullaby version, not the James Taylor/Carly Simon hit).

Where did I do black powder shooting? One weekend in the California desert, with a couple of very dear if rather crazy friends (the same ones who taught me historical costuming). We also shot off illegal fireworks in a river-wash, to amazing effect.

One day I'll write more about Aunt Min's disreputable youth. I realize now, re-reading SILENT TOWER, that the computer stuff sounds dated, as all science-fiction stuff does in a VERY short time. Reality overtakes one so quickly. Ormolu is imitation gold leaf, frequently made with copper and tin, a favorite decorative material in the eighteenth century. SORCERER'S WARD is the British title of STRANGER AT THE WEDDING - there was much to-ing and fro-ing about that one, as there was about the book whose original title was DAYSTALKER and which got changed to THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT in the States and IMMORTAL BLOOD in the UK. (I'm not lucky with titles. No one would EVER let me call the Ancient Roman Murder Mystery THE BABY-EATERS like I wanted to.)

As for Nic Cage.... Well, much as I adore him, he isn't who I'd cast as Ysidro. Though, mind you, if his agent phoned and said Mr. Cage was just DYING to play Ysidro I certainly wouldn't take out any full-page ads saying what a bad idea I thought that was. I think Cage gets cast as vampires because of that notorious film he did early in his career about someone who thought he was a vampire. He has a crazy edge that a lot of people find fascinating (I do.) Myself, I'd cast Johnny Depp.

Everybody have a lovely weekend.

Monthly Update
August 1, 2001

It's funny, other people have told me I looked and sounded exactly the way they thought I would. I never quite know what that means, but thank you. I'm glad I didn't disappoint you.

With regard to the Grieb-Strieblings... Actually that's a double reference, because for awhile our mutual friends referred to authors Gar and Judi Reeves-Stevens - who co-author William Shatner's Star Trek books - as Gar and Judi Greib-Striebling. (They say, by the way, that Shatner is an absolute prince to work with, honest and fair and intelligent).

Yes, I knew there were Abolitionists around in the 1830s, but my impression has been that it was a movement that moved from north to south. In the next book after the one I've just started working on, January crosses their path, but aside from the fact that January avoids Americans when he can, I didn't feel the movement was something I could get into without making the book ABOUT the Abolitionists. I've been mostly working with things that were specifically of New Orleans: placage, yellow fever, voodoo, sugar plantations, opera... Jean Lafitte's treasure. DAYS OF THE DEAD is the first time I've really broken out - it takes place in Mexico City on the eve of the Texas revolt.

Which brings me to the subject of Real People in Fiction, particularly those about whom not a lot else has been written. With someone like Abraham Lincoln you have LOTS of accounts of what he was like, even if they don't always agree. With someone like Robert Todd Lincoln, you have to look at his actions and extrapolate, although you still have lots of his own letters to go on. When you get down to people like Judge Canonge and John Davis and Dr. Ker of Charity Hospital it gets a little tougher, though they are still mentioned in biographical works and you can get a little bit of an idea of what they might have been like. (Dr. Ker, the physician who ran Charity Hospital in New Orleans during the 1830s, was in New Orleans because he'd been the British Army Surgeon at the Battle of New Orleans. After the British were defeated he allowed himself to be captured by the Americans in order to take care of the British wounded who'd been taken prisoner. He stayed on in Louisiana and ended up a respected citizen).(You can't make up stuff like this).

But for truly unknown folks - people of whom the ONLY information is police records, or perhaps a scrap of letter or diary - I'd probably study everything I could about the time and place where they lived, read other peoples' diaries and letters, do whatever I could to get a feeling for who people were in that time and place, what they thought about and felt. From there I could look at and extrapolate actions, and make deductions - where possible - about why this person might have done what it is recorded that they did. (The author of IN THE HEART OF THE SEA - whose name I'm blocking on - did a wonderful job of that, studying not only the local culture of the Nantucket whalers and their families, but psychologists' studies of how people react in similar situations of stress or deprivation). (None of this is made any easier by the nineteenth-century custom of not printing any of the REAL news in the newspaper: it was assumed you'd find it out through gossip and grapevine).

As to WHY I do this - why I put in the real Judge Canonge or Delphine LaLaurie... I guess it's part of the time-travel effect of historical novels, which I guess is what we write them for and read them for. (And boy, am I having fun writing about General Santa Anna!) I try to be as fair as I can to the known facts, but sometimes you have to just gather all the information you can and then take your best guess.

Tim Powers once told me about researching for (I think) THE STRESS OF HER REGARD. When he found himself calling long distance to a pub in London to ask what the color of the carpet in the upstairs room was, he realized he really needed to get a grip.

Besides, they'd probably re-carpeted since Byron's day anyhow.

Monthly Update
June 28, 2001

I'd hoped to have good news about an interesting new project in the offing; then I feared I'd have bad news, about the illness of a dear friend. But as both situations are simply hanging fire, all I can report is that there's a big pile of paper here with DRAGONSTAR printed on the top sheet, ready to be copied and sent off to Del Rey - and here it isn't even the end of June yet.

I had a nice massage to celebrate, and will start on Benjamin January #7 - tentative title DAYS OF THE DEAD - as soon as I get off jury duty.

My neice graduated from UC Santa Cruz at the beginning of the month, and my sister promised her a trip to New Orleans as a graduation present: I went along as a native guide and did a signing. We missed Tropical Storm Allison by 24 hours; the streets were just drying out as we arrived. We rode the steamboat, visited my favorite plantation, had the Cajun Roadhouse Lunch Experience (which included the Stuffed Alligator in the Ladies Room Experience), and had Close Encounters with Very Large Insects in the laundry-room of the bed 'n' breakfast where we stayed, to my sister's unmitigated dismay. I am extremely glad to be home.

Thank you for all the communications, and my intense apologies for being so remiss about updates. I lost about ten days of work between the graduation and the New Orleans visit, and the deadline on DRAGONSTAR was June... as was the deadline on FADING OF THE LIGHT, and WET GRAVE. I feel like I've done nothing all year but make up stories about people I like.

On the subject of stories about people that I like, a few years ago I wrote up an outline for CURSE OF THE SWAMP MONSTER (sequel to RAT-GOD) and had it turned down. RAT-GOD was always a quirky book, and the marketing department never had the slightest idea what to do with it: thus, it was something I could sell in the late eighties, but probably couldn't sell now. It'll probably have to wait until the book market sorts itself out a little and all the editors start to breathe a little. I can hardly wait, because SWAMP MONSTER will be ENORMOUS fun.

I don't, however, (in answer to another question) cross universes: have characters from one series show up in another one. That's just not something that I do, I suspect because I encountered some writer way back in my childhood who did it badly. The closest I came was having the old Rabbi in SUN-CROSS mention meeting Ingold Inglorion.

I never wrote a third book to SUN-CROSS because the story is, basically, about Rhion's exile to Germany - the prequel was more or less done at the insistence of an editor who wanted it to be a more "standard" fantasy. One day I may go back to that world, but there are many other projects on the list. SUN-CROSS will always be one of my favorites, but it was a difficult book to write: I probably didn't do research that unpleasant again until SOLD DOWN THE RIVER.

In the meantime, my thanks to everyone who's hung in there with me while I've been buried in work. The comment about discrepancies in the John & Jenny books didn't upset me, really - I do need to know about things like that. It's just a measure, to me, of how stressed I was at the time I was working on the middle two. I'm glad to have been able to finish DRAGONSTAR happily, something I didn't think I was going to be able to do a year ago. I'm now reading the final galleys of MAGIC TIME, which should be out in December: I'm quite pleased with it, except for the extreme discrepancy between my pessimism and my collaborator Marc's optimistic view of the story, which never quite evened out. (He made me take out several thousand corpses, which I put into DRAGONSTAR - waste not, want not).

I hope I will have good news - and will not have bad news - when next I write.

Monthly Update
May 9, 2001

About eight months ago, my friend Bill and I were talking about his love for Hawaii and his plans to spend another 2 weeks in the islands - as he does every year and sometimes a couple of times - and he said, "Would you like to come with me and my wife? I've noticed you haven't taken a non-working vacation since I've known you... And I've known you about 16 years."

So, I've just got back from two weeks on Kauai. I wasn't able to completely dispense with work - I have serious deadlines in June - but thought I had to work every evening, the days were restful: though I didn't experience the "sell everything and move here" impulse so many people do with Hawaii, it is an extremely beautiful place, slow-paced and peaceful. Bill and his wife are avid snorkelers: I snorkeled once and found the experience nightmarish, and thereafter they'd snorkel and I'd lie on the beach looking at the waves and the sky (and the mile or so of completely unoccupied sand on either side of me). The place really does have these pink beaches with coconut palms growing out over them, and water in exquisite gradations of turquoise, blue, and indigo.

The week we spent on the north shore near Hanalei it rained most of the time, brief showers that swept across the woods where we were renting a plantation-style cottage. There were cows in the pasture near-by and they'd walk through the woods behind the cottage every evening, mooing. There are also hundreds of wild chickens that live all over the island; you see them everywhere. In the morning they'd start crowing at about 4. By first light all the rest of the bird would join in, a beautiful sound. I'd wake up, meditate, then go for a walk on the beach (if it wasn't raining). The second week we were in Poipu on the south shore, more touristy but only slightly so. I found the black lava flats fascinating.

We took an off-road movie tour - saw all the places on Kauai that had doubled for other places like Costa Rica and South America - and got as close as we could to the center of the island, the fabled "blue hole", a swamp in the center of the extinct central volcano, Mount Wai'ale'ale. I NEVER saw the peak of Mt. W. Like Kong's Island, it was ALWAYS covered in cloud, but beneath that cloud the inner walls of the crater are covered with fern and trees, and hundreds of waterfalls pour down the old lava. Breathtaking. And we drove entirely too far on battered dirt "haul cane" roads around to the last place where the roads go on the west side. Beyond that is the Na Pali coast, green cliffs going hundreds of feet straight down into the sea, accessible only by boat or helicopter. Beautiful beyond words.

I could go on at much greater length, but won't. You've all seen Kauai anyway - it looks just like Jurassic Park. (Goodness knows how they got all those cows zipped into latex dinosaur suits).(And how they kept the chickens out of frame).

Many thanks to those who wrote me. The letter about the extreme discrepancies in the Dragon books really bothered me, because that isn't the kind of mistakes I usually make (though I made a similar goof about the age of Olympe's daughter in the Janvier books, too). I'm not trying to excuse myself, but I did notice the mistakes all took place at the same time, books written during a period of great stress and unhappiness when I simply wasn't paying the attention I should have been. I apologize. I'm working on arranging my life so that kind of thing doesn't happen so often.

Kauai helped.

By the way, if people have attempted to e-mail me, I am now deleting unread any communication whose address I don't recognize, so please put in the subject line some specific word or topic that will let me know that this is, in fact, something directed to me and not just yet another virus-bearing piece of spam.

I should not speak ill of spam. Among the things I investigated on the island was "island food," not restaurant fusion cuisine but the kind of stuff locals eat. It includes a lot of spam - though I was not impressed by the spam sushi. I did learn to like poi, and also the beauties of slack-key guitar. I never gained much appreciation for either Hawaiian quilting (very different from mainland) or those fleshy red Martian-looking flowers.

Everyone have a lovely Mother's Day.

Monthly Update
March 28, 2001

I will write my update now because by the 1st I will be buried again.

I finished THE FADING OF THE LIGHT yesterday. I try to pace my books so that everything comes together at the end: revelations, self-realization, confrontations, battles with monsters and magic, if possible something burning down (all I managed this time was a couple of cafés, but I did have a sandstorm - I'll do better next time).... And then all of a sudden I'm shaking hands with the cast, giving everyone a big hug, get in my car and drive away. I feel like I've stepped outside without a sweater. Chilled and desolate. I miss them. (I sort of developed a crush on the King). Even reading the first chapter of the rough draft of DRAGONSTAR only helped a little, although it'll be great to be with John and Jenny and Morkeleb again.

So, it's time to take a day in my real house, with the cats and the roses and cleaning up the really alarming mountains of paper heaped on all sides of the desk. Family is coming for lunch Sunday, and after that it's back to work at a fairly fierce pace, so I thought I'd say Hi to everyone now, and answer the questions that Deb has sent me. Gil Patterson of the Darwath Series pronounces her name with a hard 'G', as in 'go'. Her real name is Gillian, which she also pronounces with the hard 'g'. (I've heard it both ways, and for some reason there's never been a question in my mind that this is the way she says it).

Actually, I think Nic Cage comes across as a little too much of a homeboy to correspond with my image of Ysidro. Johnny Depp could probably do Ysidro, also Daniel Day-Lewis: the quality of brooding is different. Other candidates would be Alan Rickman or Steven Rea (although I'd take Rea as Asher). (Any competant actor with a voice coach can manage a Spanish accent.)(Er, well, having just seen WEST SIDE STORY again for the umpteenth time, I take that back - all apologies to the late Ms Wood. For a sixteen-year-old seamstress newly arrived from Puerto Rico, Maria spoke AWFULLY good English).

A number of people have commented on how dark DRAGONSHADOW and KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN are. I apologize for that. I was in a very, very bad place when I was working on those; I didn't realize at the time how much my own pain was coming out in my writing. (And curiously, it doesn't seem to have affected the Ben January books I was working on at the same time. Maybe things don't GET much grimmer than being black in New Orleans in 1834). I think DRAGONSTAR comes back up out of the darkness as John, Jenny, and Morkeleb set about mopping up the demons. I am certainly much happier now, and besides, as I said, you all know I wouldn't actually barbeque John. (He knew the job was dangerous when he took it.)

I'm shooting to get DRAGONSTAR in by June. After that it's up to Del Rey Books.

Many thanks for your patience and your comments.

Everyone have a nice day.

Monthly Update
March 5, 2001

It's an extremely pleasant way of spending one's days, by the way. I wake up early, go to 12-Step meetings, take a long walk on the beach, come home about 10 a.m. and work until bedtime. I've wrapped WET GRAVE (Benjamin January #6) all except for a final polish and the re-write of half a chapter that I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working; I just finished up the final rewrites of my sections of the long-gestating MAGIC TIME (with Marc Zicree); I'm doing well on THE FADING OF THE LIGHT, which started life as a very grim and serious book and isn't anymore. I'll get DRAGONSTAR in under the wire in June, which is fortunate, because the Los Angeles Supreme Court has told me in no uncertain terms that they want me in a jury-room on the second of July, no ifs, ands, or buts. (They no longer care that you have no other means of support than meeting your deadlines. At least the Inglewood courtroom is close).

Considering the unholy amount of amusement I derived the last time I as on a trial jury, things could be worse. This was out in what are referred to as the Cow Counties of California and the entire proceedings was like something from Geraldo: White Trash On Parade. In addition to people changing their testimony on the stand and repudiating their formerly sworn affidavits, it quickly became clear that the killer, the victim, and a number of the witnesses were all sleeping with the Star Witness.

On the other hand, I was on Food Stamps in those days and didn't have house payments.

So, here I am and here I'll be. Fortunately the chair is a comfortable one, though the cats don't understand why Mommy doesn't like them to sit on the manuscript.

I will, by the way, be at Rok-Con in Little Rock in mid-May (typing frantically away on DRAGONSTAR on my laptop in my hotel-room, I can tell you that already), and I will be a speaker at the national convention of the Literacy Volunteers of America in October, in Albuquerque. I can't express how proud I am to have been asked, but given the scope and importance of the work they do I feel like an impostor by comparison. And, I'll be in New Orleans briefly again in June, getting ready to start on Benjamin January #7 (which I'm still trying to negotiate a title for).

The cats are staring at me and looking pointedly at their watches. It must be time for bed.

Everybody have a pleasant couple of weeks.

Monthly Update
February 8, 2001

That's what I've been doing since returning from New Orleans in mid-January, and what I'll be doing until June. It makes for dull Updates, but there you have it. Generally these days I go to my morning 12-Step meeting (you didn't think I got even this sane by myself, did you?), take a walk on the beach, come home around 10 a.m., and work until bedtime. And that's it. Oh, and I walk the dogs.

I had a wonderful time in New Orleans, doing a different type of research: talking to people, other experts in various fields. Had a couple of great encounters with a lady named Jessica Harris, who specializes in history of cooking: there's a great shop called Lucullus on Chartres Street that has a kitchen set up in the back room - gallows-irons, coffee-roasters, clockwork turnspits, and all. (My friend was shopping for absinthe glasses - she collects 19th-century drug paraphernalia). We were directed to the Hermann-Grima House, which has cooking demonstrations from exactly the period of the Ben January books every Thursday in the kitchen, amazing efficiency of cooking with cast iron and hot coals. We got a private tour of the St. Louis #2 Cemetary (which is in such a crummy part of town that most tours don't go there): beautiful stuff. It rained a lot and was FREEZING.

And, it's freezing here too at the moment.

But I'm extremely pleased with all three manuscripts - I'm working on WET GRAVE at the moment, and can't wait to get ahead on the next round with FADING OF THE LIGHT. I'm also putting together outlines of future projects. The days seem very short. All kinds of business is falling through the cracks. I'm already planning what I get to do when everything is finished: I'm going to paint the kitchen and have a nap. (I don't have time for a nervous breakdown, so a nap will have to do.)

I am extraordinarily happy.
More later.

Monthly Update
December 19, 2000

It occurred to me the other day that I have been working on first drafts - easily the most exhausting part of writing a book -- since September, first for WET GRAVE, then for DRAGONSTAR. Last night I wrapped up the first draft of DRAGONSTAR, sat back, and stared at the walls in blank confusion.

I'm on vacation.

Back in November I took a few days to go up to Dickens Faire, the San Francisco Victorian equivalent of the Renaissance Faire. Great fun scurrying about in corsets and a feathered bonnet. Someone at the MacDonalds where we stopped for a Coke asked if we were carollers and my friend and I promptly burst into "Three Old Whores from Winnipeg" sung to the tune of "We Three Kings of Orient Are." But other than that I've literally been doing nothing but writing, and the house is knee-deep in papers and covered with tile-dust from the contractors re-doing the upstairs bathroom. I'm getting very tired of taking showers off-site, not to speak of sneaking downstairs to use the other bathroom in the freezing cold middle of the night and getting barked at by my own dogs.

But the Christmas Tree is up, the shopping is done, the virus in the main computer is allegedly fixed (I've been hunched over my laptop for two weeks) and all is well with the world.

Many thanks to everyone who's written in over the past few weeks (and been so patient about me not doing an update in so long. I really was working on DRAGONSTAR, honest).

To the person who wrote the long defense of Livia Janvier, yes, of course she is all that you say: a strong woman who has never, ever let the world bring her down. I adore writing her just for that reason, for her strength and for her selfishness, hard in a world where one had to be hard to survive. It's been interesting, in DIE UPON A KISS (of which I just finished the final pass on the galleys) and WET GRAVE, how her relationship with Ben has changed now that he's no longer living under her roof: in many ways it's easier for both of them.

I also very much enjoy writing Mamzelle Marie, trying to get to the bottom of what she must have been like to have commanded the position she did. The stories about her are contradictory and generally drenched in prejudice and mis-understanding of what voodoo was and is: she must have been an extraordinarily charismatic woman, and a brilliant one as well. Part of the fun of doing a historical series is trying to get into the heads of historical characters - not the well-known ones, but the peripheral ones, like Mamzelle Marie or Delphine LaLaurie or Judge Canonge or Dr. Ker, the head of the Charity Hospital, who was the British Army surgeon at the Battle of New Orleans and allowed himself to be captured by the Americans so that he could take care of the wounded prisoners. I guess he stayed on, and ended up head of the hospital and very well respected by all.

Since DIE UPON A KISS is about opera in New Orleans, one of the main characters (one of the main suspects, in fact) is a fellow named John Davis, who owned the Salle d'Orleans where the quadroon balls were held - another fascinating local character.

To Matt Near Philadelphia, who asked about how long it took to get TIME OF THE DARK published: yes, it did take a couple of years, from the time I got the offer from Del Rey until the time it came out. They were almost a year just wallowing around on the contract, although I think I mis-remembered the date, because it wasn't anything like four years. They must have bought it in '79. I know I was working on it when I worked at General Dynamics, and I left GD in January of '81, two days after I signed the contract.

For the time being, ICEFALCON'S QUEST is the latest of the Darwath books, though I know of no reason why I wouldn't write others in that universe, about those people, in the future.

It's just that I have all these projects - not just the three that are due in June (all of which are turning out to be great fun, in spite of the panic I was in about DRAGONSTAR), but future historical mysteries, and another Hollywood book, and at least three straight historical novels I'd like to do.

But for the time being I'm on vacation, which I'll spend digging out the accumulated debris, and wrapping packages in pretty gold paper for Damsel to chew on under the Christmas Tree. (She really is an awful little troublemaker).

Everyone have a Merry Christmas.

Weekly Update
November 3, 2000

So of course, I DID go live in Oz after all.

And speaking of going to live in wonderful places, I hope that Deb, my wonderful Sitemistress, is settling into her new place in Cambridge, England. (It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.) I truly hope it hasn't turned cold there yet, and that the apartment is heated. My recollection of English housing is of very small electric heaters and doing a lot of shivering - and of some fairly eccentric sleeping-quarters. (One b-n-b chamber had obviousy been a kitchen - complete with a tiled counter and sink - and another was in the library of an old farmhouse. You couldn't walk down the hall to the bathroom without being barked at by three of the biggest Irish wolfhounds in creation.) Mostly what I remember about England is the smell of burnt toast, which seemed to permeate the airport and every hotel I stayed at.

My usual excuses for not doing a mid-October Weekly Update. I really do have a LOT of work that needs be done this year, and I find I simply don't have the energy to work the kind of hours I used to. I sleep a lot, and I work a lot, and the office hasn't been cleaned since about May. (I think it was May).(I don't remember May very clearly, though.)(Or most of October, for that matter). The situation will probably worsen when the fellow comes in and starts re-tiling the upstairs bathroom next week, and I'll be over working at my friend Laurie's apartment on my laptop. I've done this periodically over the years when there's been work going on here. I remember working on GHOST-WALKER at her dining-room table, being overlooked by a very old calico cat named Dinah, who would watch my fingers on the keys with great intensity - then reach out, very deliberately, and hit one key.

Back in the mid-sixties, during the second half of the first season of Star Trek - when nobody had ever seen Star Trek before, EVER - my family went to Australia for six months, dragging me kicking and screaming: I knew I was missing a phenomenon, and couldn't make them understand how important this was or why I was upset. And Laurie, God bless her - in those days of no videotapes, no cable TV, and no allowance (her family was really broke) - would type the weekly synopsis of each week's episode of Star Trek, plus the best dialogue bits, on the one pale-blue airmail sheet that she could afford from her meager gleanings of returned Coke-bottles. That is true friendship.

On the up-side of this week, I've finished the rough first draft of WET GRAVE, Benjamin January #6. Though it is, I hope, a good mystery, I find myself just as interested in what's happening in Benjamin's life, and in the lives of his family and friends. Is his sister going to be okay when her protector gets married? Will he ever marry Rose? I'm trying hard not to make the books of the series too self-referential - trying to keep them as stand-alones, so that any new reader can come in anywhere - and yet, to me, these are real people: servants, as are we all, of the God of Time.

I will REALLY try to get another Update out before Thanksgiving, but in case I don't, I'll be at the LosCon Science Fiction Convention in Burbank on Thanksgiving weekend.

In the meantime, everyone have a nice week.

Weekly Update
October 1, 2000

Probably because for the past month - since my return from New Orleans - I've done very little but work (and go to the opera, but that's another story). I wrapped the second draft of FADING OF THE LIGHT, very satisfactorily (although I realized I need about two more scenes on one of the several intertwining stories of this ensemble piece), took a week off of which I haven't the smallest recollection, and now am back working on the next Benjamin January, WET GRAVE. After the complex juggling of FADING it's sort of nice to be back telling a straightforward tale. Also, since it's mainly about pirate treasure, it's no grimmer or heavier than DIE UPON A KISS was - or anyway, as light as it can be given the grim social darkness of the setting in the antebellum South.

It is fun writing about Jean Lafitte & Company, who are very different, upon close inspection, than they're usually portrayed in American History. Lafitte himself, although he must have had some shipboard experience before coming to New Orleans (I can't imagine him holding the alliegence of the out-and-out Gulf pirates if he hadn't), was for most of his career more of a racketeer and a broker of stolen goods than a cutlass-wielding pirate: he got into the pirating business fairly late, after being called in to mediate between rival gangs. Though he had his own ship (various names for it are given), he was mostly the front-man to sell stolen and smuggled goods - usually slaves - up until after the Battle of New Orleans.

There's a Jean Lafitte Society - I was greatly helped, and occasionally very entertained - by their publications. Now I wonder if they have a Web Site? I'll have to go look.

Many, many thanks to those who contributed to the lovely birthday-greeting book that Sitemistress Deb put together. I was very surprised and feel very honored. Thank you, also, to those who sent kind wishes about my friend Adrian's death, and about the loss of my pet.

With regard to CHILDREN OF THE JEDI and PLANET OF TWILIGHT, I don't think I can say more than, An author who works in a series evolved from someone else's universe, like the Star Wars universe, doesn't get to make certain decisions. Anything further that I may write in the future concerning Callista - which I would love to do - will of course have to be cleared through Lucasfilms.

Someone wrote asking about George Alec Effinger, to whom I was married for a short while: I'll have to ask him if it's okay to pass along his e-mail address. He's a very private person, and something of a hermit. I know he's done some work on the fourth Budayeen book (the working title is WORD OF NIGHT), but at this point I don't know how much. Because of severe depression and illness, it's been a long time since he's had anything new come out, and most of his works are out of print. You might search on ABEBooks.com for used copies, but I have no idea what the status of new stuff is or might be.

(I might add that George and I are still very dear friends - we had a lovely day together when I was in New Orleans and he took me to one of his groddy "for locals only" hangouts. Do people still say "groddy?")

In reply to a question about what's my most recent book: my most recent book is SOLD DOWN THE RIVER, Benjamin January #4. Due to various upheavals in the publishing industry and problems with contracts, my next book is probably going to be Benjamin January #5 - DIE UPON A KISS. This is the first time in almost two decades when I don't have a fantasy novel actively in production, and this bothers me a lot, since I do not intend to give up the fantasy side of my career. MAGIC TIME, which I wrote with Marc Scott Zicree, will be out at some point next year - September, I think. I'm working as hard as I can, folks.

Everyone have a nice week.

Weekly Update
New Orleans, or, Love Bugs on the Bayou
September 1, 2000

The folks at the Historic New Orleans Collection were enormously helpful, as usual, in my quest for information about Jean Lafitte's smuggling organization. The Collection is in an old police station on Chartres Street, directly next door to K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen. August in the French Quarter is quiet and you can walk right in and get a VERY nice lunch without waiting in line (at K-Paul's, I mean, not the HNOC.) This seemed to be my trip to investigate down-home dives, because George (Effinger, my ex) took me to Port of Call, one of those quintessentially New Orleans burger hangouts that tourists never get to. More on down-home diving later.

In quest of further enlightenment regarding Jean Lafitte, I drove the two hours or so down Bayou LaFourche to Grand Isle, one of the barrier islands that separate Barataria Bay - that vast marshy labyrinth of water and reed-beds - from the Gulf of Mexico. Lafitte and his gang had a headquarters there for about four years.

It's a different world down there. Nobody wears a watch, or knows what time it is, or cares. There's a lot of pelicans, flying around practicing to be pteranodons. It was hot. On the way down the bayou I encountered a kind of agricultural pest known locally as "love-bugs," so-called because they only appear for a week or so a year when they mate: black, small, pod-shaped bugs seemingly permanently paired off in eternal fornication. They don't bite or sting, but there are SQUILLIONS of them. Driving through clouds of them sounded exactly like driving through a rainstorm, spattering wetly on the windsheild.

They weren't on Grand Isle, though. Thank God. Sue and Andy Galliano, who ran the bed and breakfast on Grand Isle, made me welcome as if I were a member of the family and showed me around. I said I wanted to go across to Grand Terre - which used to be a sort of headland where Lafitte had his HQ and is an island now, due to erosion and one of the many hurricanes that have swept the area - and Sue said, Well, there's no bridge and no road going there and nothing there now but a research station, but Ricky that lives in the trailer behind the house has got a boat.

Ricky's boat was a camo-painted fiberglass shoebox with an Evinrude on the back. Armed with plastic buckets and garden-forks, Sue, Ricky, Ricky's wife Melanie, Ricky's dog Pepper, and myself went blasting across the choppy waters of the bay, pursued at a distance of about ten feet by large numbers of curious dolphins and getting absolutely soaked with spray. Pepper tried to convince us she could leap out of the boat and catch a dolphin. On the north side of Grand Terre - the bay side - we scrambled around the shell ridges and "flottants" of root-matted grasses, digging for chips of broken dishes. In the 1870s and '80s there were numerous resort hotels on Grand Isle and the near-by Chenier Caminada. In 1893, a hurricane passed across the place like a razor in one of those animated commercials. Hundreds were killed. Every hotel was flattened. The broken china still washes up, little wave-smoothed bits of it among the shells.

We investigated the ruins of Fort Livingston on the south side of the island. The center of the fort, as we crossed through it, was a thick mat of trees, brush, undergrowth, and hidden pools and ponds, and mosquitoes rose up and covered me like a brown blanket - ignoring my companions, I might add. I ended up having to wade out into the Gulf of Mexico to get rid of them (I was fortunately soaked already - see boat ride, above). I waded around the fort's broken walls to get back to the boat. There was no way I was going back through the middle of the fort.

In the upcoming Benjamin January book, somebody - I don't know who yet - is going to have a Really Bad Experience with mosquitoes.

That evening, after spending the afternoon reading the copy-edited manuscript of DIE UPON A KISS which my editors had thoughtfully FedExed to me at The Chimes on my first morning in New Orleans, I was invited out sailing with Sue and Andy and THEIR dog, Harry, this time in a beautiful 35-foot sailboat. More dolphins, more pelicans; watching the sun set and the shrimp-boats line up in the pass between the islands, where the shrimp all rise when it gets dark. We came ashore and had phenomenal fried catfish at one of those Cajun roadhouses that look like they've been there forever. The shrimp-boats dock just past the edge of the parking-lot, and the whole hot darkness smelled of brine and fresh crustaceans.

I spent the night scratching.

On my way off the island in the morning I stopped at the State Beach and met some very nice ladies who showed me how to set crab-traps. More wading around in the Gulf of Mexico, this time with a crab-net. I don't know where the love-bugs went, but they were mostly gone by the time I drove back along Bayou LaFourche back to town. If I never see another one - or another mosquito - it will definitely be too soon.

Weekly Update
August 1, 2000

Visiting with that community is always useful as well as entertaining. Adrian was an avid historical re-enactor, as her partner still is, and I raided the library up there and gained both knowledge and "feel" for a number of aspects of the world of Jeffersonian/Jacksonian America. This ties into a couple of questions that were forwarded to me from the letters: eventually, yes, I'll do a book that's connected to Abishag Shaw's backstory. I'm very fond of Shaw as a character, and yes, I think it's pretty obvious he hasn't much use for slavery as an institution - but he also tends to keep his opinion to himself.

Alas, regarding my sources about sixteenth and seventeenth century pronunciation, I am a victim of my own untidiness. I remember reading about the sounds I describe - I believe in an enormous reference-book about English dialects in either the Loyola University library or that of the University of California at Riverside - and taking notes, but what the title was, or the author, I haven't a clue. I may have picked bits out of Mario Pei's THE STORY OF LANGUAGE, or out of something by Bill Bryson, but I can't guarantee either of those as sources for things I put into the two vampire books. I'm sorry. I know I read it - I just don't know where.

To the question about, Do I work out the characters and then have them interact to produce the plot, or do I not worry about the characters and just flesh out the idea? The answer is, Yes. Most often, I have a couple of the major characters first, then the plot, then the minor characters filling in as needed for the roles. Sometimes I base characters on people I know. Sometimes I see the role the character fills in the story and think, "What would a person be like, who'd be there doing that?" And then, I have the Locker-Room: dozens of characters who sort of live in my head, waiting in the wings for a story to star them. Some of them I was writing tales about when I was in grade-school or high school - evidently other writers (most notably the Brontë sisters, I heard someplace) do or did the same. Others, like Ysidro and Ben January, more or less appear out of nowhere, fully fleshed-out and ready to start work on Monday.

Never, to my knowledge, have I gotten characters mixed up, or stories or back-stories mixed up. That's not how I work - it's not something that happens to me. Never have I had characters "take off" with a story, or go in unexpected directions.

I've just finished reading the galleys for the mass-market edition of KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN, and was surprised at how thoroughly I enjoy that story (considering the painful and unhappy circumstances under which it was written). Jenny's incarnation as a white dragon - rather than the more colorful patterns that develop on young dragons - is indicative of a couple of things: she ISN'T a typical dragon, because she has a human nature and human origins, and a human's soul and spiritual development.

Having gotten that task done, I can now settle down to work on THE FADING OF THE LIGHT (or whatever it's going to be called) and to the enjoyment of those big white spaces on the calendar for the next three weeks, until it's time for the next research trip to New Orleans.

Everybody have a nice time until then.

Weekly Update
July 22, 2000

All this has made the month of July seem extremely long. For a good portion of it I haven't been able to work much - just sit in my red chair and stare. I'm doing better now, feeling a little more like myself. But I feel pretty old. I finally got - and signed - a contract for DRAGONSTAR, and am looking forward to being able to start it; there's also a sizeable heap of first-draft pages for FADING OF THE LIGHT (and a couple of alternative titles) - with any luck I should have the first draft done by the end of next week. FADING is a multi-POV, multi-plotline book, something I haven't tried to do before; it feels like driving a strange car. DRAGONSTAR - and the next Ben January book, which I'll be starting soon also - are pretty straightforward by contrast.

Thank you to everyone who's written in. To Evelyn, yes, the aol address that you have for George Effinger is correct. (Far be it from me to imply that he's poor about getting around to answering his e-mail or anything like that....) And yes, I'll cheerfully sign and mail back any bookplate that someone sends me, provided the send a SASE with it. Sometimes it takes me awhile, though. Although I have no sense of being under stress - at least I didn't until the beginning of this month - I've been exhibiting major stress symptoms since the breakup, chief of which is absent-mindedness. Definitely I will get back to Asher, Lydia, and Ysidro, but it may be awhile.

It's the end of another hot day in Southern California. I've just returned from a signing at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, and as Adrian would have said, I have been beat really hard with the Freeway Stick. The new puppy, Damsel, is lying under my chair licking my toes: a sort of animate cotton-ball the color of a scorched biscuit. (The cats are in Major Snit Mode and haven't been downstairs since she arrived).

I deeply appreciate you all hanging in here with me.

Everybody have a good week.

Less Weekly Than Ever Update
July 3, 2000

I DID start an Update for mid-June and I can't even find the file for it - I haven't the faintest idea what I said. I wrapped DIE UPON A KISS on the 14th (the due-date was the 15th) and immediately went out and bought paint: I spent a lovely 10 days painting the living room and the downstairs bathroom, which formerly had fussy "country cozy" wallpaper and looked like a kleenex box. I cooked myself for two days out in my driveway building a new entertainment center that didn't take up 1/3 of my not-very-spacious living-room, and got the old one (referred to generally as "Stonehenge") hauled away. I had a massage and got my hair cut and tried yet again to find out from the podiatrist what the heck is actually wrong with my foot.

I'm now back at work on FADING OF THE LIGHT, an odd feminist fantasy-mystery I've had in mind for many years now, and waiting for a contract that will let me begin on DRAGONSTAR, at long last. (Don't even ASK about why I have to do FADING first.) I'm very pleased with FADING - it's been awhile since I've done an out-and-out mystery in a fantasy background (I think the last one I did was THE WITCHES OF WENSHAR), and I very much like the cast - The Girls, as I think of them, since part of what the book is about is what happens when women, who have previously been completely unable to work magic, start acquiring the ability, and men, who were formerly the only wizards, all slowly lose theirs. Raeshaldis, who is more or less the central character, is the first female to be trained as a wizard.

But I haven't forgotten about John and I WILL get him out of the mess he's in. I am very, very sorry about the scheduling tangle.

Reply to the question about karate: I made first dan in Shotokan Karate in (I think) 1979 or 1980 - I had to quit in '82 because of knee injuries. (I got a clue when I realized I was routinely going upstairs to my apartment on my hands and knees because my knees hurt so bad. You put up with a lot when you don't have health insurance.) I frequently wonder why I don't remember much about the '70s and then I remember - Oh, yeah. I spent most of that decade in the dojo. At the time our dojo was affiliated with the JKA, though what with the general messiness of karate politics I have no idea what's happened since. I still dream about karate.

Up until a few months ago I was taking ballet, but, as I've mentioned, there's SOMETHING wrong with my foot and that's on hiatus until the situation gets sorted out. I can walk - and ride my bike - but the thought of hopping up onto my little pink toes for a pirouette makes me flinch.

On the 22nd of July I'll be down in San Diego, at Mysterious Galaxy, for a book signing, and I'll be in New Orleans at the end of August. In fact, I'll spend a day down on Grand Isle, which is where the next-after-the-opera January book takes place. I'll spend a day, that is, if there isn't a hurricane - August is the heart of the season for them and Grand Isle is where they come ashore. (I must have mentioned that the stilts on the houses get taller and taller as one drives down Bayou LaFourche, until on Grand Isle itself almost literally EVERYTHING is 12 feet above the ground.)(Not where I'D want to be in 180-mph winds...!)

And, in the meantime, plots for other novels - the next six Ben January books, and a couple of straight historicals, and a different series of historical murder mysteries - keep appearing in my mind. It's a fertile time for me, but it's going to be a damn busy year.

Not-Quite-Weekly-Update
May 31, 2000

As one of my friends said, it's about time Benjamin got a break.

My apologies - again - to everybody about KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN. It'll all be okay, I promise. I'm working as fast as I can. I lost about 4 weeks' work with the divorce, which actually isn't bad, but it was an upheaval; I'm doing what I can to catch up.

No, I didn't write a prequel to DRAGONSBANE, about John and Jenny meeting. It's just that these people are so real to me that I have the sense of just dropping into their lives mid-event. Of course they have a long history with one another.

And thanks for the word from New Zealand. I'm glad my stuff is getting down there, but I gather from my agent that rights for Australia/New Zealand are a stiff bone of contention between British and U.S. publishers. Having tried to buy used books in Sydney for a plane-trip home, I sympathize about the problem. (Finding airplane books is always a bit tricky for me, because they have to be interesting enough to keep my attention but not actually demanding of anything in the way of concentration, which I don't have much of in flight, especially not on that ghastly marathon between Sydney and LA. I ended up with George RR Martin's FEVRE DREAM and MZB's MISTS OF AVALON - and I finished FEVRE DREAM in the airport before even getting on the plane!) (This was a couple of years ago - I came back from Australia with a horrific depression brought on by, of all things, the violent switch in length of daylight hours.)

Regarding Ysidro's changes in living arrangements: I suspect he abandonned some of his nests and didn't abandon others, and that he underestimated the extent of Lydia's researches. Also, Lydia searched for quite some time to locate Ysidro's various aliases. She didn't hit the house on Spaniard's Court right off the bat.

Regarding costuming, and is there a club for it? Yes, in fact - there's an outfit called the Costumer's Guild, of and for people who like to costume, either historical or fantasy, for a hobby. The woman who founded it has - or had at one time - a store in Pasadena whose name I knew up until five seconds ago, specializing in costuming books and paraphernalia (things like corset-bones and fancy latches for bodices, that kind of thing.) Check in the Pasadena Yellow Pages under both bookstores and fabric. The Costumers hold a convention every year. Great fun. One year I built a fully-rigged kitchen-table Elizabethan - those things with the enormous farthingales like Judy Dench wore in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE - and wore it with full werewolf makeup.

While in Washington for the Malice Domestic mystery convention, I was turned on to a marvelous series for all those interested in further reading about slavery in the antebellum south. As everyone probably knows, back in the 1930s it occurred to somebody that all those folks who had actually been slaves were going to die off fairly soon, and it might be a good idea to get first-hand information on the subject - and besides, there was a depression on, and writers needed money. So the WPA paid writers to go interview these folks... And pretty much shelved the results. I've seen some of the slave narratives republished, but never well organized.

Now, a woman named Donna Wyant Howell is undertaking the monumental task of organizing this information in a form where it can actually be made sense of: publishing it by topic, instead of by narrative. So far she's put out six thin volumes - about 50 pages each - on the lives of slave men, the lives of slave women, childhood in slavery, slave-breeding, slave auctions, and plantation life in general, essentially chopping each narrative into what was said on each topic. She plans another 20 or so.

Weekly Update
May 10, 2000

Thank you, everyone who wrote in. On the subject of the meltdown, yes, I regret to say that George Alec Effinger and I are separated now: he has returned to New Orleans to live, I have remained here in Los Angeles. We're still good friends and wish one another nothing but joy.

Yes, I did used to work as a book-shelver in the Ontario Public Library in Ontario, California. That was between getting laid off my last regular job - at General Dynamics - and the time when I was clearing enough money from my writing to support myself. I shelved books, did a little modelling for local college art classes, and, ultimately, started writing animation scripts for what they used to call "Toaster Shows" - you know: 68 half-hour episodes that were commercials for vehicles that turned into superpowered robots. (I'll say more about the celestial mechanics of Outer Space in those shows another time).

I just got back from the Malice Domestic convention in Washington DC. After nearly 20 years of going to science fiction conventions, a mystery convention is very different: much more reader-oriented, more a sense of it being about books, and far more authors present. I renewed acquaintance with the few mystery writers I know -- Ann McMillan and Elizabeth Peters among them - and spent a couple of very instructive hours in the Smithsonian, looking at the sort of pianos Benjamin January would have played. Some of them looked pretty strange, I must say. The small square ones were to be expected, given the limitations of string-tension and wooden framing, but there were things called "giraffe pianos", like baby grands stood up on end, which included keys for drums and bells, to provide sound effects for the dramatic "battle symphonies" that were popular just then. (The exhibit also had one of Liberace's diamond-covered grands, and manuscripts of music in Mozart's handwriting.!)

Yesterday was spent in Philadelphia, being given a tour of the place by my agent (who sends me recipies and reminds me to take a sweater if I'm going to a convention in Chicago). I will put in a plug here for a restaurant called Tangerine, in downtown Philly - wow! I'm a sucker for Moroccan food, especially a thing called bistilla, and this was excellent. Foxy waiters, too. I spent half the evening trying to figure out where in my house I could put a wall of lamp-niches, like the ones they have in Istanbul (and in Tangerine). (I alternate between wanting my living-room to look like a Mexican restaurant, or the harem at the Topkapi Palace.) If you're in Philly, go there.

I'm glad I'm home.

Weekly Update
1 May, 2000

To the people (if any) who showed up at the Dangerous Visions and Mysterious Galaxy booths in the hopes of seeing me, my most abject apologies.

In truth, I'm sort of glad that things worked out that I didn't go, since parking at the Bookfest is always just dreadful, and it's invariably a horrible walk, even without whatever it is that's had me icing my swollen-up left foot for a week. I'd like to say, "Oh, I didn't go because I have a stress-fracture of the metatarsal..." or whatever the doctor's going to tell me it is when I see her this afternoon (gout? Housemaid's knee? Advanced hypochondria?), but in fact, I haven't looked at my calendar in about three days.

Or done much of anything else.

I'm back at work now on DIE UPON A KISS - Benjamin January #5 -- after an enforced vacation of a week, and I'm feeling much better. As a raving workaholic, my solution to everything is Unbridled Frenzy - not, I must continually remind myself, the best way to get a book written. It's no good to have an extra 25 pages if you're going to have to re-write them anyway because they're awful.

Once I finished packing up mass quantities of George's books to ship to him in New Orleans (where he's doing well - we talk just about daily), I had time to sit down and re-read A FREE MAN OF COLOR - and ended up wincing and gritting my teeth over all the continuity errors I've committed since. Most of them are small (like the name of the old Wisewoman on the plantation where January was born); some are embarassingly major. Some are simply the result of facts I hadn't come across at the time I wrote the first book, that I learned since. (Like, steamboats didn't start looking like the classical "steamboat gothic" palaces until about the 1850s.) That's a problem with writing about an era that wasn't your primary field of study: if you wait til you know EVERYTHING, you'll never get a story written, but somebody's going to send you a letter about what year the Nazis started using Schmeissers. (And it's usually guns, cars, or WWII that brings the experts out of the woodwork.)

I also do owe an apology about vocabulary, which I gather is more of a concern than I was aware of, both in fantasy and in historicals. I delight in obscure words - and in making up words - without taking into account that lack of explanation can be mystifyingly annoying. I mean, I'VE been working with these words for months or years, surely they're clear from context, right? Thank you all for the hint. I'll try to be better about either glossary or clarification as I go.

And thank you, all of you, for hanging in with me through deadlines and separations and all the upheavals lately. I THINK I've managed to cover most questions Deb has sent me, if a little belatedly. Yes, eventually I DO plan to write a third in the Sun Cross series, but since the story was originally planned and structured as a single volume, it will probably be awhile before I'll be able to sit down and work out implications of Rhion's return and the war of the wizards against the priests of Agon. Also, with the changes that have taken place at Del Rey books lately, I'm not sure that it's a series that the editors there will want to make a priority.

Thursday I'm off to Washington D.C. for Malice Domestic, my first large murder mystery convention - I'll be there May 5-7, armed with shopping-lists of out-of-print mysteries to look for in the dealer's room. Thank goodness for a reliable laptop. The deadline on KISS is coming right up.

Hope everyone has a calm and peaceful week.

Weekly Update
April 1, 2000

New Orleans was lovely as usual. In between helping George hunt for an apartment for himself (he moved back to New Orleans for good the middle of last month), I got massive amounts of research done, both in the Historic New Orleans Collection and of the more hands-on variety. I visited Jean Lafitte Park, and walked about five miles on duckboarded trails among palmettos and cypress knees, simply enjoying the silence and figuring out how Benjamin January and Hannibal Sefton manage to evade smugglers; enjoyed the more mundane amusement of people-watching on the way back as well. (I'm sorry - I derived a disgraceful amount of amusement from two high-school girls who were trying to convince a young male companion to catch a baby alligator with his bare hands.) New Orleans was just recovering from Mardi Gras when George and I arrived - the trash was still in the streets - and was followed immediately by St. Patrick's Day, which was naturally the occasion for still more parades.!

At Mardi Gras they throw beads. On St. Pat's, the Irish float krewes throw - I kid you not - cabbages and potatoes. (Ow!)

George found a beautiful little bachelor apartment in the French Quarter and we parted on amicable terms.

The following weekend, of course, we were co-guests at LunaCon in New York (an arrangement made before the meltdown occurred). We had also arranged to stay together in New York for four days after the con for a round of editor-lunches, and this went far better than one might have expected, all things considered. I touched bases with the editors of all my upcoming projects: Betsy Mitchell at Warner's for FADING OF THE LIGHT, Shelley Shapiro at Del Rey for DRAGONSTAR, and Kate Miciak at Bantam for the Ben January books. We also had dinner with my agent, Fran Collin, at probably the hands-down best Italian restaurant I have ever eaten at, Forlini's on Baxter Street in what is now Chinatown, though when the restaurant was established nearly a century ago it was still Little Italy.

I also had the chance to re-visit one of my favorite spots in New York, the Old Merchant's House on Fourth Street. Back in 1833, when the house was built, Fourth Street was on the fringe of the open countryside; it was purchased in 1835 by a wealthy merchant named Tredwell who had five daughters - a sixth, Gertrude, was born the following year in the house. When Mr. Tredwell died there were still four daughters unmarried, and of course since it was unthinkable that any of them would get a job, they all continued to live in the house, eking a living on what was left of Papa's money and investments, while the neighborhood turned to slums around them (they couldn't afford to move).

Gertrude died in the house in 1933. It is the only single-family Federalist house to have been continuously occupied as a family dwelling in New York City. In 1936 the cousin who inherited it from her turned it into a museum: they found trunks in the attic containing all the girls' dresses, corsets and shoes and purses with playbills still in them. It's astonishing - and a little eerie - to be there, to look at the things that were ACTUALLY THEIRS: not the usual museum fare of, "This room was recreated and furniture from the same period has been reassembled...."

Since I was there on a week-day there was no tour. It was "self-guided," which meant I was wandering around alone in these old rooms in the dim afternoon twilight, trying not to remember several of the spookier scenes of SIXTH SENSE. It's a lovely old house, beautifully restored: "Just like Papa would have wanted it," is their motto. The bed in the master bedroom, in which Gertrude Tredwell died, in 1936 had the tattered remains of red wool curtains on it: when they cleared out the attic they found THE REST OF THE BOLT OF THAT SELFSAME WOOL. They made the new curtains for the bed out of literally the same stuff. The whole house is like that.

If you're in New York, go see it. It's wonderful.

And eat at Forlini's. That's wonderful, too.

There were the usual joys of New York as well: wandering around Chinatown and seeing the stores with these big boxes of live crabs, tanks of live eels (disgusting!), glazed ducks hanging in windows. Tuxedoed waiters walking to work in the early evening chowing down on french fries out of styrofoam boxes. Strange spooky folks in mismatched garments striding along the sidewalks in loud conversation with invisible companions. Chassidic teen-agers in the upper '80s with tallis-fringe trailing below the hem of varsity jackets.

Saxophone wailing through the cement corridors of subway stations.

An amazing town.

Weekly Update
February 28, 2000

Unfortunately, when a writer says, "things have been sort of busy," all it usually involves is a big pile of paper and a lot of staring into space. I'm coming down to the wire on DIE UPON A KISS - a book whose starting-date was delayed for a couple of months because of my work on MAGIC TIME with Marc Scott Zicree - so it's looking like I'll have to go into that sort of holed-up mode that writers sometimes do, to get a project finished. However, unlike some writers I've talked to, I at least will not alternate doses of qualuudes and amphetemines in a motel room for thirty days. (I read the book that got written that way and it's pretty good.)

Thanks to everyone who's written in. I will say, in answer to one note, that I try to be fairly careful about avoiding the Dreaded Expository Lump, otherwise known as the Mitchner Effect: "I paid for this research so you're jolly well going to read it." Maybe that comes of writing fantasy - world-unfolding rather than world-building. Maybe just of seeing everything as a movie. I started out as an historian, but a lot of history I learned as a child exactly from reading historical novels, some of them fairly sleazy. I came to perceive history as one giant, fascinating novel, with hordes of characters and lots of stink and gilding. Some of the best history teachers I had - thank you Liz Blair, thank you Jeffrey Russell, thank you Charlotte Brockway and Bruce Haines - had, I believe, the same perception of the subject. It was like time-travel.

Someone asked about Callista from my two Star Wars novels, a character of whom I'm extremely fond. Actually, when the illustrator for the cover of CHILDREN OF THE JEDI asked me what Callista looked like, I said, "If I had to cast her, I'd cast Uma Thurman." Except maybe with features a little sharper and a little stronger. I'm not sure she'll be back in any other Star Wars books written by others than myself, though I'd certainly enjoy writing another and bringing her in. At the moment I'm not scheduled for one.

Regarding the Elder Droon, Morkeleb, being a dragon, has destroyed lots of things in his lifetime. I'll get into that, probably, in the third book of the current trilogy, DRAGONSTAR - which I'm told my agent now has a contract for, after delays caused, I think, by the merger of Random House into Berttelsman Publications.

March is going to be a time of journeys and changes. I'll be in New Orleans for a week doing research for DIE UPON A KISS (mostly squishing around looking at bayous); then home for long enough to do a load of laundry, then to New York for Lunacon, 24-26 March. George and I will spend a few days after that having lunch with editors in New York City and looking at teensy little dioramas of cities in the Natural History Museum, and re-acquainting ourselves with the menu of the Brooklyn Diner on 58th Street. (Every time I'm in the place I think about the Valrhona Chocolate Pancakes - and every time, I chicken out. There are things humankind was NOT meant to tamper with.)

My agent also tells me that THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT and TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD are going to be published in Russian.

Weekly Update
February 1, 2000

It's very nice, after years of having the cast of FADING sitting around the mental locker-room drinking coffee in their bathrobes, to finally see these people, and go to this place. And of course, once I started writing about it, it immediately looked different than I'd thought.

I'm also informed that KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN goes on sale today. I'm looking forward to that, too. It's a bleak book, and a dark book, but it has some of my favorite stuff in it, and I'm very much looking forward to starting on DRAGONSTAR (in my copious spare time.)

I'm sorry about the cliffhanger ending. That sometimes happens. I assure everyone that everything will be all right. (You know I wouldn't REALLY do that to John!)

Thank you to everyone who wrote in to the Site in the past couple of weeks! Yes, I will eventually write another vampire book. I have ideas for it already - where it takes place, and what they're trying to accomplish - but the thoughts aren't quite ripe yet. Does anybody remember the book in the L. Frank Baum Oz series, TICKTOCK IN OZ? There's a fellow in it who has a book tree (making him the most educated man in the kingdom.) If you pick the books from the tree before they're ripe (the covers are still green), you can read them, but the plots are sort of dull and obvious, and the dialogue is unconvincing, and the illustrations are cheap and crummy. If you wait til the covers turn red, then the dialogue is snappy, the plots are exciting (and presumably the research is correct and you don't have Transylvanian vampires speaking to each other in English, or people using guns that have both a cylinder and a clip.) God knows what you get when they're overripe. H.P. Lovecraft?

In any case, yes, there will be another vampire novel (probably two), just not immediately. I will probably, eventually, return to Darwath also, but that's farther in the future. Someone asked about THE QUIRINIAL HILL AFFAIR, which was published in paperback under the title SEARCH THE SEVEN HILLS. (I've never understood why neither St. Martin's nor Del Rey would use my original title. What's wrong with calling a book about the Early Christians THE BABY-EATERS? That's what the Romans called them.) Try ABEBooks.com. They specialize in used-book searches. Bibliofind.com is another.

One book I did not write was something called CoDa which someone said she saw listed under my name. The only CoDA I know about is a 12-Step Program for Co-Dependents Anonymous: people who are obsessed with their partners to the exclusion of their own or anyone else's well-being. I have the feeling that what the questioner saw was a mis-print or a catalogue code for something else.

Weekly Update
Jan 17, 2000

Anyway, even since the Tuscon World Fantasy Convention, the route has changed considerably. That is, the route is the same - you get on I-10 in Santa Monica and plow east through the desert til you hit Phoenix - but the roadside attractions have altered. Barbara Peters, owner of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, asked me to come out for a one-day mini-conference on Historical Murder Mysteries, with Lindsay Davis and several other writers of historical mysteries. The conference itself was lovely. What a delight to talk about history and research and fairly obscure historical figures like Akhenaten and Sir John Fielding with people whose eyes don't glaze over. And if you're ever in Scottsdale, definitely visit the Poisoned Pen bookstore! It's huge - and great. (And has gargoyle lamps on the back.)

But equally delightful to me was the road trip. Nine hours of driving through these vast lizard-colored expanses of sand, rock, and jumping-cactus, intense crystalline light, listening to "Northwest Passage" and watching the chewed-up-looking mountains of the desert rise and then sink away. Passing the same cars, the same trucks, over and over again every time I'd stop at a Rest Area, like that strange old film ROAD GAMES. On the drive back it rained. What a scent! Magic.

People chide us, here in L.A., about our rivers. At least we have the decency to pave ours. The ones in Arizona are all bushes and sand and tire-tracks. Once you get past about Banning, they start to advertise the Rest Areas 20 miles ahead, just so they have something to put on the signs. Of course, when you see a sign saying, STATE PRISON. DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS. REST AREA AHEAD you do not feel much like getting out of the car no matter how tired of driving you are. (Another sign announced, STATE PRISON - WILDLIFE WORLD ZOO, wording to which I thought they might have given a little more thought.) A farmer in Buckeye, for reasons best known to himself, has erected a plywood cut-out of a 30-foot tall infant sitting in the middle of his field. And in the burnt wilds of Maricopa County there was a lone sign saying, 762 ACRES FOR SALE. Cheap, I bet.

But the treat of the trip was the Cabazon Monsters.

I remember seeing them looming out of the twilight as a teen-ager, when we'd drive back east, or later as those karate car-caravans would pass them by. A few miles east of Banning, in the miniscule town of Cabazon, there was a small roadside inn and beside it, a larger-than-lifesize brontosaurus with a little museum in its tummy, reached by a stairway up inside its tail. (On the desert side of the dinosaur there are two gable windows and a fire-escape, but you can't see this from the freeway.) Later a somewhat unconvincing-looking T-Rex was added - unconvincing by daylight, that is. Comic writer Len Wein and I stopped there on the way back from World Fantasy Con at eight or nine at night, and saw the thing floodlit against the backdrop of those lightless hills, it is disconcerting how spooky the thing actually looks.

Driving out to Phoenix this time I passed the Monsters, and saw that the Wheel Inn had been joined by a Burger King and a Sizzler, cutting off the creatures from the road. Cabazon had also grown. Remembering the dilapidated dinosaurs from the WFC trip - Len and I ate at the Wheel Inn and spent some time walking around the silent, deserted creatures - I figured if necessary I'd get a Diet Coke at the Burger King, if Burger King now owned the land they stood on.

Returning this afternoon through the beginnings of the rain, however, I was delighted to find that the Monsters were bought about 7 1/2 years ago by a very nice fellow named Ken Garland, cleaned up, given a new coat of paint (Rex now has the Spielberg/Jurassic Park color scheme of green with brown stripes and Dinny has a sort of yellow tummy), and, best of all, made into a sort of park called Dinosaur Delights. There are lawns around them where last I saw just sand and gravel. What used to be a little "museum" in Dinny's interior is now a gift-shop - whose proceeds keep Garland from having to charge admission - and Rex (who has a door in his hip that used to lead up to a viewing-platform, I think) now has red-and-black glass light-up eyeballs that glow and rotate.

I bought two coffee-mugs and a poster and drove on my way feeling absolutely delighted and at peace, having seen this memory of early years, not falling into decay like the house I grew up in, but restored. It's good to know silliness survives in the world.

Weekly Update
Jan 3, 2000

(The Sitemistress notes here that she cannot seem to find said glyph, so we'll all have to imagine that it's there).

I'm not sure I even sent off the Weekly Update describing being taken off the airplane at Baltimore by the paramedics -- and carried past the disconcerted representatives of the Darkover Grand Council who were there to meet me -- with oxygen tubes up my nose. God bless them, they tracked me down to the North Auburn General Hospital in the wilds of the Maryland countryside (not far from Blair, I'm sure) and got me out of ER at about one in the morning: I'd passed out on the airplane, owing to traveling while sick with the flu and taking everyone's very good advice about swallowing an antihistamine before getting on the plane so I wouldn't have horrendous problems with air pressure changes. I became, naturally, extremely dehydrated, my blood-pressure dropped off the scale (though they assure me I never lost the carotid pulse -- they evidently couldn't find one in my wrist), and I turned a fairly scary color. Lots of in-flight drama.

But after that fairly shaky start, the Darkover Grand Council was a very fine convention: well-run, good people, and the Hallelujah Chorus sung in the indoor pool area at midnight one night - beautiful! My agent came up; I stayed an extra day and took the Metroliner up to New York, had lunch with Kate Miciak, who edits the Ben January series, and was able to talk to Betsy Mitchell from Warner Books, who will be working with me on FADING OF THE LIGHT (if indeed it keeps that title). FADING will be published by Warner, and should be more fun than is legal - I am looking forward with huge delight to starting work on it. JUST before I got on the airplane I got word that Del Rey gave the go-ahead for DRAGONSTAR, something which had concerned me greatly considering how KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN ends.

Then I came home and it was Christmas. I always look forward to Christmas, because, as everyone knows, on Christmas Eve at midnight all animals in the world obtain the power of speech that they may praise God (since animals were the first witnesses to Jesus' birth in Bethlehem). I keep hoping they will, but every Christmas Eve all they say is, "Is it lunchtime yet?" and, "Rocky gets more wet food than me."

The day after Christmas the motherboard of the Big Computer burned out and I've been working for the past 10 days on the laptop, which now thinks it's January 4, 1980.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Weekly Update
Nov. 5, 1999

What's happening to me is I'm comparing final draft - on which I worked for a year, on and off, with first draft, about which I'm still making decisions like, Is Consuela a nice person or is she rotten and vile (or do I need her in this scene - or in this book - at all?) Things look different when you're writing an outline, roughing in how things might go and talking about people half of whom (or sometimes all of whom) you've never met. Depending on how long it's been since you turned the outline in, you may have rearranged your thinking or learned more facts about coal-mining or had an absolutely fatal fight with the person on whom you WERE going to base that winsome hero. I recall on one occasion writing an outline for a Star Trek novel which said, And then these four guys take over the Enterprise. Two years later, when it came time to ACTUALLY WRITE this scene, I read that outline and wondered, How the HELL do they do that?

As they say in writing classes, "With a mighty leap...."

In any case I'm extremely pleased with SOLD DOWN THE RIVER, as indeed I am with DEMON QUEEN. The weather is cooler, I'm feeling much better (whether my problem was stress or a low-grade flu virus it seems to be abating) and I may even start hiking again - I trust the pictures came through okay? I turn the heater on in the office in the mornings and when I have to switch it off again to leave, Rocket the Flying Kitten gives me her Academy Award-nominated performance as The Little Match Girl about to freeze to death on the rich lady's doorstep.

The hiking, of course, will stand me in good stead the next time I go do research at UCLA, whose parking situation gets worse every time I go there. Last time I went I took my bike on the back of the car - mostly because of the fatigue problem -- but ended up having to carry it up several flights of steps anyway. Still, where else can you find several volumes dedicated to popular tunes of the 1820s and '30s?

All best - Barb

Weekly Update
October 25, 1999

I hugely enjoy hearing how other writers write, even those maddening ones, like my husband and Harry Turtledove, who can turn out award-winning novels in the first draft with just a couple of touch-ups. (My first drafts stink.) Another writer told me, "In the first draft, it's as if the characters are all sitting around in their jeans and sweatshirts reading the script. Subsequent drafts supply setting, costume, and the expression in their voices."

Someone asked me about the sequel to DRAGONSHADOW, which will be KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN - I just got queries from the Del Rey production department about it, so it should be out in (I think) spring. I understand the offices of the entire Random House complex are moving, so God knows what's actually going on. I realize, looking back on both DRAGONSHADOW and KNIGHT that they ARE very dark, grim books - possibly because I was going through some of the grimmest stuff of my life while I was writing them (and GRAVEYARD DUST). Although I did have a lot of fun with the cyberpunk sections of KNIGHT: John Aversin chasing demons around deserted subway tunnels in command of a flock of geeks. I am also becoming very fond of the Demon Queen as a character, horrible as she is, and look forward to starting on DRAGONSTAR.

In the meantime I'm working on DIE UPON A KISS and enjoying the research - opera in the 1830s, which means I get to watch Mozart operas and am trying to find detailed plot summaries of some of the sillier opuses (opae?) of the genre which involve the Devil masquerading under the name of Bertram, and plot resolutions requiring Vesuvius to erupt on-stage.

Weekly Update
October 11, 1999

Fortunately, about two years ago I set up the study with an Eames chair and a lap desk (and my favorite painting, a print of a Boucher nude of probably Madame de Pompadour, over the monitor), so it's all very comfortable and I can sit here most of the day without feeling awful. The fatter of the two cats watches me all day waiting for me to stand up so she can sleep in the Eames chair (which George and I refer to as The Command Chair); the kitten (who will be two at the end of this month) just hops up on the monitor itself.

I did get a request for what Antryg and Joanna have been doing - I hadn't realized it was 8 years since DOG WIZARD. I'd intended to get back to them after DRAGONSHADOW - actually, there's another stand-alone fantasy in there, too, called THE FADING OF THE LIGHT that was part of the original DRAGONSHADOW contract - and just after I finished DRAGONSHADOW, literally the day I was going to take the manuscript to get copied to send, I was biking along the street and realized I'd neglected to tell about 2/3rds of the story. I phoned my editor and got contracts shuffled around - FADING replaced by KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN (John & Jenny III) - and the contract for DRAGONSTAR (John & Jenny IV) got tangled up in the buy-out of Del Rey.

So the answer is: Yes, I will get back to Antryg and Joanna (whom I've missed). Yes, I will get back to Asher and Lydia and Ysidro (whom I've also missed). I just couldn't resist writing DEMON QUEEN and its sequel.

George just came downstairs (this is George Alec Effinger, by the way - Hugo- and Nebula-Award winning science fiction writer) to ask, "Will you finish my book for me?" (He's on Chapter Two) We're trying to teach the dogs to ghost-write but it's slow going, since mostly all they want to write about is how good dirty socks smell.

Not technically a Weekly Update, but a question-and-answer from September that I found amusing.