The French-Canadian SF and fantasy writer Elisabeth Vonnarburg told me several years ago that I had a Voice. That is, a distinctive style. A lot of people, and some very good writers, don't. I don't think I can get rid of that Voice, however I tried. So, no, probably this can't be re-written in "simpler" style. I'm pretty sure the internal arbiter just wouldn't come at it, one day's considering time or no. Probably, I add ruefully, because it all began with picturing something by moonlight, and moonlight is in itself a powerful transmogrifier. I consciously wanted to convey that effect.

As for having control over how a story comes to you, no, I have none over how the donnee, the seed or opening section arrives. I take it how it comes and go on from there. In this case, though, style and content were much more powerfully welded, and much more "poetic" — condensed, figurative, rhythmic, high on alliterative devices, etc. — than my openings often are.

So you were thinking about the moonlight? That's how the inspiration for Amberlight came to you?

Sometimes a novel is born because of a person, or from history or an incident that sticks in my mind because it holds unanswered questions. Why did such and such happen? How did this person come to do that? I think Amberlight began, as other novels did, with undirected right brain activity. That is, not alpha-state, but one where anything can happen; a sort of ground-zero-field reverie.

My first fantasy novel, Everran's Bane, began with the sentence "Nobody knows where the dragon came from." My alternate-NQ SF novels started with a really vivid Cinerama dream of which I only kept fragments, including the novel's title: Following Eurydice.

I do know what the kick-off images for Amberlight were: thinking about describing a city by moonlight, which instantly morphed into Daulatabad, the amazing Indian medieval fortress — it's pre-Moghul — and then some of the huge granite boulders beside the road up our coastal range. Those, combined with the Daulatabad wall that's built into the hillside, so you have to cross it by tunnel, became the first image of the qherrique.

You begin the novel by describing wedding plans gone awry. You also create a character Tellurith who is in the act of healing. Very good places to start in writing a feminist story, I think, because of where it leads the reader and of course the characters.

There's one of the things the right brain, aka the Black Gang — I stole the term from a Lois Bujold text — the powerful, concealed, multiple core of the whole process, takes care of. Continuity, overall thematic significance, even imagery, I don't consciously think about, often, till after the end of the draft. I once kick-started a novel by doodling fragments of poetry that stuck in my head. After I finished, I went back through the notebook and for a whim, listed all those images; then I checked the text, and there they were, every one, though I'd never consciously put them there. When the first draft starts, the Black Gang choose the opening counters, and they see that it coheres from then on. The wedding and the rescue were, so to speak "default choices." Second paragraph, after getting moonlight, Amberlight, qherrique. What happens then, and to whom? And why? Name's Tellurith, she's been to a wedding. Keep writing. The stream was running. I kept writing, like they said.