[owleye]

the food?? :confused:

[Gemini]

:eek: how could you have missed the ridiculous amount of adjectives that accompany every meal??? :eek: :D

[owleye]

oh yes the food.....

[alison]

Nice and also interesting to read this thread... yes, I do think food is very important... ;) But maybe the most important thing to me in writing the books is the characters. They have to feel real to me in order to write them. It can be a little annoying, ie, when they start doing things you don't expect (and that does happen surprisingly often).

You might be interested in something a friend, another writer and critic, wrote to me after finishing The Gift (I'm sure he won't mind me rudely posting this) - I found it a very moving response, not least for how it gets to what for me is at the core of what I'm trying to do -


Perhaps you will believe me if I say that what makes you so gifted as a writer of fantasy is remarkably close to what makes your poetry so compelling. There is no good fantasy without an immense capacity for sorrow--the sorrow in the passing of delightful, cared-for things that you describe as the sorrow of the bards. And I have learnt to respect in you and in your poems your own unconsoled alertness to the sorrow that wraps our joys and so should not be surprised to find it in The Gift. It lets you dare terrible things, like the so sudden death of Dernhil which took my breath away, both by its unflinching logic and its cruelty. I suppose fate is the dimension in which fantasy must move. Yet it wasn't even that, or such moments, that caught me off guard. I happened to be reading of the arrival of Maerad and Cadvan in Innail and as Maerad is cared for by Sylvia, I suddenly found myself weeping, embarrassingly, unguardedly. It is strange how the thought of care can be so deeply moving, an index, perhaps, of the ways we become inured to brutality so that the lifting of the weight of pain suddenly unleashes the longing for that place in which, as Sylvia says, no one is unworthy of good care.

[Mrs. Cadvan]

Damn straight. ;)

[owleye]

yup rthat stright

[Ellaktum]

here, here...

I, admitidly, only bought5 the first book beacause I thought the cover was nice. After starting it I couldn't put it down, I nearly forgot to do everything else i.e. sleeping, eating, washing... breathing. but not quite. luckily I got the book about two months before the Riddle came out in the UK.
And for two weeks before the book came out I was in W H Smiths nearly everyday making sure they'd have it on the exact day it came out, to which they kept saying... yes, of course we will.

Bu5t the didn't, they's missed an order collection thingy and so I had to wait an extra WEEK cause I'd already paid for it.

It was WELL worth the wait.

[owleye]

hmmmm, i think the day i got it i didnt sleep

[Becks]

I believe that I, Becks, did not go to sleep until 2pm...........I had been reading it form 8am the previous day......

[Ellaktum]

I decided against my better judgement to sleep and then decided to bring it with me to school the next day.... it got confiscated in science..... apparently the school frowns upon reading under the desk???