Paulette Jiles's Blog

Will be out in October, at least that's what it says on Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

It's in the copy-editing stage and the editor's assistant says that the copy editor was so taken with the manuscript she finished it early. That's good news.

So I have started another, a kind of sequel.

I now have a website, if you Google or Bing 'Paulette Jiles, Author', you should find it.

Frank's biography of Dostoyevsky must weigh several pounds but I love it. Reading at night with two cats, one on each side of my head like furry purring earphones.

Must order House Of The Dead, regarding his five years in prison camp. I can't get enough of Russian/Soviet history, what's wrong with me? So grim so fascinating. The 'totalitarian high baroque sleaze' as was said of Montefiori's Court of the Red Tsar.

A friend reader of my new mss. points out that I consistently overuse the compound past, gerunds, and passive voice.

Somebody stop me! Before I gerund again.

Four inches of lovely rain washed all the Hill Country of its dust, a thin sliver of moon in a clear sky tonight. Now, Pepperidge Farm milanos and Dostoyevsky.

'Time Bandits' --- there's a thirty second-or-so bit that can go by before you know it; my favorite; when the dwarves Fidgit and Strutter and Og and Vermin end up in Napoleon's drunken party when he has just looted treasures in his Italian campaign.

Grubby 18th-century musicians hot and tired and drunken Napoleon calling out for more music --- Fidgit says' We have a musical revue to do for you, Nappy Sir'.

All right, let's see it.

Vermin or one of the Time Bandit dwarves hands the musicians the sheet music, then the bit begins.

18th Century violinists, clarinetist, in sweaty frilled shirts with wine stains down the front and waistcoats --- the music is 'Me And My Shadow'.

Musicians stare at the score and turn to each other --- WTF??? 'What IS this?' And then, wonderfully, start to play 'Me And My Shadow' sort of in the style of Boccerini or Telleman. It is PRICELESS.

I have not yet got the Internet helpful guy over yet to show me how to post pictures here. I was thinking of cutting them out and pasting them in this post square but he says that doesn't work.

Which is what it was called for a long time. Now it has a title; Lighthouse Island. A dystopian novel which has allowed me the fun of building a dystopic world.

I've been reading a lot of dystopian and science fiction to be sure I don't inadvertently steal somebody else's ideas but it is not possible.

Living through this Texas drought has been grimly helpful in describing a world running out of water, run by enormous bureacracies, (Agencies) where although it is seriously overcrowded there is no Internet, cell phones or those basic structures which allow for our cell phones and computers.

Based on the old Soviet Union where people are happily taken away by jolly agents who pretend they are all going to a wine tasting. Then the arestees are shot. They don't even get any wine.

Nadia is an orphan who would like to fall in love with something or somebody. Dry times, love dessicated to a kind of thin leather substance. This is an overcrowded malevolent Steampunk world of the very rich who are allowed to have cats and dogs and Water Features and then the lower-downs where Nadia fans herself in a dreadful little PR office. She decides to escape arrest and walk beyond the apparently limitless city. To a television advertisement. The advertisement is a vacation spot for the elite, called Lighthouse Island.

things fly up as if they were animate, sleeves fill up with wind and gesture. I used this in Enemy Women --- the matron's dress, hanging out to dry in the prison yard, filled with wind and told Adair 'Come with me now!'

I have a blog presented to me with a generous gesture from Goodreads and I am not sure exactly what to do with it except to not look it in the mouth.

I suppose news of myself would be appropriate.

I am working on a piece of dystopian fictioon now with my editor at William Morrow; it is titled Lighthouse Island. It is very long.

When I am not doing that I am trying to survive the drought here in Texas. I have two horses and a donkey and there is not a blade of grass for them in all my pastures. So it is hauling hay for me, in 100 degree heat.

Very well this is enough for a first try.

fictoon for fiction. Perhaps the first is something like the pigoons in Oryx and Crake.