I'm having a Moment, and I'm going to indulge myself. No meatspace names, please.

I've been taking a break from Cruel Sister; ahead of schedule, I treated myself by rereading Rock & Roll Never Forgets.

You know what?

I am so damned proud of the Kinkaid Chronicles. There is not one single thing about these books that doesn't make me proud.

I'm proud of these characters. I'm proud of their story, their life, their consistency. I'm proud that I can take the reader who's never been there backstage into rock and roll, without smearing it on one hand, or glorifying it on the other. I'm proud for the humanity of these people, that they live and die with their own selves and mistakes, the way we all do. I'm proud there are kickass stories going on.

I'm proud of being able to write Bree, annoying and too damned saintly sometimes and remarkably stupid about certain realities. I'm proud of being able to see her. I'm even prouder of having John Kinkaid finally figure out how to see her - it's what should have happened in the real world, and I doubt it did, for all the love and all the need and everything that did and didn't happen.

And I'm proudest of John Kinkaid, of his voice, of my ability to hold it and send it out into the universe, giving him voice again, giving him my own kind of life back, when I wasn't strong enough to stay with the original and help him keep the real thing. I'm proud of how clear he is, of that fact that my friends who knew the original inspiration recognise him with no effort at all in these books, recognise his inertia, his perfect honest unconscious charm, his essential kindness, his emotional laziness, his complete lack of malice, his illness, his fragility, his musical brilliance as hot as a meteor shower.

I wrote them as a kind of therapy, but they're a whole lot more than that, and a whole lot better than that.

I'm proud of these books. They ought to be on shelves. They're so readable, it's ridiculous.

I'm glad you're proud...I would be, if they were mine.(Of course, they couldn't be.) There are parts of my work that made me do that, but not the whole thing yet.

It's - weird. I've had books sniffed at for major awards, published around the world, yada yada.

None of them ever brought this up in me, at all. These are a whole new deal for me.

Deb, you should be enormously proud, both of what you accomplished and the stories and characters you brought to life. Good on you for recognizing it.

And a big old "yes ma'am" to the "they're so readable, it's ridiculous" thing. My feelings exactly.

And a big old "yes ma'am" to the "they're so readable, it's ridiculous" thing. My feelings exactly.

What AmyLiz said. I flew through those puppies and I. Want. More.

They are very likeable characters, and very readable stories. Very much worth being proud of.

Y'know, I sat down tonight and re-read the Rock and Roll for the first time since the post-partum fog (mine, not the bookwriting one, so as we're clear) lifted.

Previous to that, I'd been sorting things, and re-read the first few chapters of Eyes in the Fire.

It's weird to see the complete difference in voice, which is something I don't see when reading Eyes and then reading, say, Weaver--both of those are obviously the same writer, same voice. With rest-of-your-work and Kinkaid, if I didn't know they'd been written by the same person, I wouldn't have guessed. It's not a simple matter of using first person POV for Kinkaid--I've read things you've written in first person that are still very much in the voice seen in Eyes or Weaver.

Kinkaid's voice is far more powerful, more immediate. In some respects, comparing the two voices is apples and oranges, or leather jackets to tapestries.

I know you're not big on having things slotted into genre, so this is more for filing with info-for-your-agent: the first book--as I've only read the one--really had a lot in common, in terms of my reader response to it, with books I've read lately that have the word "suspense" printed on the spine.

Anyhow, yes, needs to be on shelves. Lots of them. Especially the ones at the supermarket that say, "Bestsellers: 20% off."

Plei, you are one majorly discerning woman, you know that?

And this, about the difference between the Chronicles and everything else I've written, is what I was hoping for. Because I did my damnedest to channel his voice, rather than imposing my own. That was the single most important thing I was aware of during that manic glorious 9-week explosion of two novels, 165,000 words, the books I wanted to write: keeping his voice clear, and there, and his.

You pulled it off for sure.

You pulled it off for sure.

Yes. This. And it had nothing to do with British idioms (though I suddenly realized that the brief natter before Nice Piano version of "Jingle Bells" includes the exclamation "Gordon Bennett!" and it made me laugh and laugh once I identified it).

JP could have been an American Southerner, with the attendant idioms, and he would still have had that same strong, clear voice. No question. He could have been a Punjabi immigrant, and again, same strong clear voice. His voice came from who he was, not where he was from.

(I know that no one suggested that his strong voice was a result of regional dialect/idiom -- I just wanted to point that out.)