A MESSAGE FROM BELVA PLAIN:

Last year at about this time I wrote to you, my readers, about the book I had just completed: The Sight of the Stars. I can only say that I truly hope it gave you some pleasure and that it kept you wondering about how it would turn out in the end. Isn't that fundamentally what fiction is all about?

Fiction, to my mind, should be the drama of life, of all our lives: Will that young man come back safely from the wars? Is he as loyal as he seems to be, or will he fall in love with that pretty nurse? If the latter, will his wife ever know about her? These might be the questions: What sort of a person is this writer describing? How is she (or he) going to meet what life has to offer?

Sometimes I like to compare fiction with a lengthy road. There are so many forks, so many highways and winding paths through great, indifferent cities, or then again, small towns, where it is hard to keep hidden the thing that you most want to hide.

Whom will we meet on the road? A lover, a scoundrel, a bandit, or a wise, caring counselor? Perhaps some or all of them. For is not every one of us a blending of traits that come in the genes we inherit from people whose very names are unknown to us?

I love to wonder about people—that woman at the next table in the restaurant, who sits at dinner not talking to her husband: why is she so silent? That teenager who sits there with a sullen face; is he just ill-mannered and spoiled or is he the troubled child of a loveless couple?

A writer of fiction cannot help but be curious. I keep remembering one morning in a hotel restaurant where I was having breakfast during a book tour and how hard I tried to pretend I wasn't overhearing a most interesting—to say the least—conversation. Well, now, I'll make an admission when I tell you that that conversation is reproduced in one of my books.

One thing I will tell to my readers, and it's something that they know all too well: Life is very, very interesting these days, and the older you are, the more surprising it becomes. I am working now on a book that I like, and I have happy visions of people sitting in a comfortable chair next summer, reading this forthcoming novel, Red Leaves.