Your tropical may vary. Anything with a humidity over 40% looks tropical to me these days. He was all over Cali: Big Sur, LA, some inland.

Anything with a humidity over 40% looks tropical to me these days.

The Jamaican side of me is agape at this. For tropical I require an actual rainy season, and non water-conservative natural flora. Certainly nothing officially described as semiarid, as LA is.

We don't get fireflies out here, no. It's damned near the only thing I miss, other than Peanut Butter Tandy Cakes.

(deep breath)

SQUEEEEEEEEE!

We're cleaning out the office, I mean, as in, complete cleanout, including all the stored cartons.

Know what we just found?

Two cartons - FORTY EIGHT COPIES - of the original hardback of "Plainsong", still in the wrappers.

I am seriously considering selling them on ebay, seven bucks a copy, ten bucks autographed, plus shipping.

Opinions?

After 7 years in a drought, one's weather perceptions get wonky. During storms, people actually come outside and look up and go "Wow, rain."

deb -- I think that sounds like a good idea.

After 7 years in a drought, one's weather perceptions get wonky.

Oh yes. I remember mid-seventies in SF, extreme drought, water rationing, the whole nine yards. We got a summer shower - rare even in wet years, since we have a specific rainy season and that isn't summer - and everyone on the bus?

Applauded.

I call them lightning bugs and fireflies. I don't know why--both names seem to be common in this area.

"Lightning bug" is used in both Pennsylvania and Connecticut? Huh. I always thought there was a North/South split, but I guess not.

Here in western Arkansas they are "LAHT-nin bugs," and the one time I called them "fireflies" everyone turned and gave me a long hard look. Then my cousin said, "Oh, right, your Mama was a Yankee, wasn't she?"

Firefly and lightning bug is interchangeable in my part of Pennsylvania, which is 7 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line. Southernisms may well have crept in, but in our part of the world we don't draw attention to such things. Apparently back in Civil War days it was the In thing to do to tell whichever "recruiter" stopped by, "Oh, no, we're part of West Virginia, we're not joining the Pennyslvania units" or vice versa. "Go away and leave us alone" seems to be the unofficial motto.

Wow. Wow wow wow.

We've just found another very amazing box in this office.

All of my original manuscripts. ALL of them.

The Goldsmith and The Apprentice, my first book and its sequel, which was offered on (and turned down without consulting me first) by my first agent. It never did sell after that.

A Flying Circus, about two little aliens who want to go to law school, and a lesbian couple who learn how to use a kind of space travel called lightlag, and creatures called Camadrian Flyers.

Plainsong. Fire Queen. The Man in Room 909, which remains one of my alltime favourite of my own, and which was designed, really, as a screenplay (there is one), for Whoopie Goldberg, but I think she's too old for that particular role now.

Fire Queen. Still Life With Devils. And Then Put Out The Light. Eyes in the Fire.

They're all there, each in its own manuscript box.

I'm almost in tears. Good ones - just, awed. They're all there.

Wow.

Oh, Deb, that's wonderful!