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At 10:39 AM -0700 13/10/03, Mark Weiss wrote: >How do the rest of you deal with the others in your lives who never signed >the contract that allows us the freedom to publish their private lives? I started writing fantasy novels :) - My mother and sister (and my stepmother and perhaps my father, although I don't think he has read it) have never forgiven me for Navigatio, a very loosely autobiographical fiction I wrote some years ago. This book has been persistently misunderstood by practically everybody - I remember getting a nice rejection letter from the people who had the rights to publish it after it was commended in the Vogel awards, saying how much they enjoyed the "historical" bits, notwithstanding the fact that those bits could only very eccentrically be described as "historical", as among other things they featured angels and episodes from Poe and Coleridge. So I guess it's not surprising that my explanation to my family that it was about about _me_ (I being the most fascinating preoccupation to myself) - one of its conceits is that every chapter title begins with A - and the vagaries of memory and fiction, and not about them at all, didn't wash. I can't blame them either, really: their objections were and are fair enough, at least as fair as my right to write about what I like. But it has fed my dislike of narrowly autobiographical readings of work. It is never that simple, or it shouldn't be. Best A -- Alison Croggon Blog http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com Editor, Masthead http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/ Home page http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/