"Mimic" came to me as a series of images during a shakuhachi (Japanese wind instrument) concert, and I struggled for years to get the story right.

Re: tornadoes--I too spent parts of my youth in tornado country (no one realizes how many tornadoes hit Pennsylvania), and had one touch down a little over the length of a football field from our house (I was asleep and couldn't figure out where the train was, because we didn't have any tracks near us). As far as Ri's concerned, there's nowhere she can really get to that's safe in time, so she may as well watch.

::pats Conan the Librarian on the back::

Thank you.

Chinese dragons have antennae.

And so, my darling dears, we come to the end of another tale. Wasn't it full of buttercups and birds and rainbows in May?

Yes. I have class issues. This is the first book where I was finally able to express my realization that I'd been writing about the upper classes when I have such issues about them in our world.

Mark, I'm delighted to have caught you flat-footed, even though I was just following my reading in crime and criminals. You continue to make me swoon, you excellent, excellent man.

I like the hot summer storms in this book. They rub our nerves raw as the heat builds up to them; they make us jump and impatient. We always feel something bad is just over the hill. And in cities, in the close-packed poor neighborhoods, the heat wears on everyone. It's the time for fights over small things and big things and hopelessness.

I remember the Watts riots, though we were nowhere near them--we were waiting for riots in San Francisco. And I remember the Harlem riots. Summertime, a hot baking summertime with air conditioners a lot scarcer than they are now, and a lot of angry, poor people who had lost something important to them or who were just fed up.

Mark, I'm so honored by your compliments and those of people here. I do like to show what people can accomplish when they choose to work together, when they choose to set aside their old rivalries for an important cause. And I do like to show them at their most human, like Goodwin and her husband. To my mind, if we know our heroes are human, we know we can aspire to be heroic, too.

La la la la la . . . .
::sashays off::

Hell, it never occurred to *me*!

I think, whatever the sex of the person it''s aimed at, it's the underlying message that that person is an object, and a throwaway at that, an object to be used for the most violent, loveless, toy-in-the-hands-of-a-violent-child, treatment, then dumped into a garbage bin. Thus such attacks on gay men by straight ones, on trans folk, on women, and even by women on other women. Rape turns a human being with rights, dignity, and a mind of their own into a throwaway piece.

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!