conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Aiden, Jarrod, Aiden's with the genre: Teen & Young Adult, Literature & Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'Wonders of the Invisible World'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.. Start with the sentence 'Wonders of the Invisible World
  And ever since, I continue to see her at World Fantasy Conventions whenever we both happen to attend'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Wonders of the Invisible World
  And ever since, I continue to see her at World Fantasy Conventions whenever we both happen to attend. Through the years these cons have become the only place where I can spend time with people I don't normally get to see. Writers, artists, editors and readers from different parts of the continent (and the world!) gather in a hotel in some major city to...well, mostly sit around in the hotel bar and schmooze with each other.
  And that's how I know Pat outside of her stories. Every time I've seen her at a World Fantasy Convention she remains soft-spoken and charming, gracious and articulate. And a little shy, too. Or is that me, still smitten with one of my literary heroes after all these years?
  Though really, as I said earlier, you're best off to dive right into the stories collected here. They might surprise you because she doesn't always write the gentle fantasies with which she's usually associated. Her contemporary settings (which can have a little bit of a darker edge) are a perfect contrast to her gentler fantasies; she does both so very well.
  I am the angel sent to Cotton Mather. It took me some time to get his attention. He lay on the floor with his eyes closed; he prayed fervently, sometimes murmuring, sometimes shouting. Apparently the household was used to it. I heard footsteps pass his study door; a woman—his wife Abigail?—called to someone: "If your throat is no better tomorrow, we'll have Phillip pee in a cup for you to gargle." From the way the house smelled, Phillip didn't bother much with cups. Cotton Mather smelled of smoke and sweat and wet wool. Winter had come early. The sky was black, the ground was white, the wind pinched like a witch and whined like a starving dog. There was no color in the landscape and no mercy. Cotton Mather prayed to see the invisible world.
  I cleared my throat a little. He didn't open his eyes. The fire was dying down. I wondered who replenished it, and if the sight of Mather's bright, winged creature would surprise anyone, with all the witches, devils and demented goldfinches perched on rafters all over New England. The firelight spilling across the wide planks glowed just beyond his outstretched hand. He lay in dim lights and fluttering shadows, in the long, long night of history, when no one could ever see clearly after sunset, and witches and angels and living dreams trembled just beyond the fire.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As they grew closer to the hidden object, Damaris heard the sound of hammering. The shrouds, great lengths of sailcloth, bulged briefly and oddly here and there, poked by mysteries within. The work must be finished, she realized, pleased. The scaffolding around the fountain was being dismantled.
  The guard slipped between shrouds. Another plank clattered down; they heard laughter among indignant shouting. Then all was silent. The guard reappeared, held apart the shrouds for them.
  There were indeed, Damaris saw: downed tools, swaying planks hammered half free, clinging to others by a nail, the rubble and dust of the sculptor's final touches to his masterpiece. He was still there, tinkering with the very top of the fountain, while he knelt in the basin below it. He grinned down at the minister, saluting with a brush, half his face masked with marble dust.
  There were four broad basins, all scalloped and festooned with carvings. The largest, at the bottom, was a twenty-foot platter of pale yellow marble veined with cream. Three mermaids rose to their scaled hips out of the water in the center of the basin, their upraised arms holding the second basin, smaller by five feet. The exuberance of their poses, their alabaster breasts and dancers' arms, was mitigated by taut muscles the sculptor had chiseled to surface beneath the smooth skin. He knew how hard they worked to hold that ton of marble. Their serene smiles made nothing of it. The basin they held was sea green. Three porpoises, slightly smaller than the mermaids, danced upon the surface of the sea, balancing on their noses the third basin, a pale sky blue. A single rosy fish leaped out of its center, a carp by the look of the sinuous fins, standing on its tail and bearing the highest basin on its head. That carried the emblem of Obelos: the white fluted pillar with the water-blue orb upon it. The carp basin also held the sculptor, who was carefully cleaning the ring of holes in the orb, out of which water would rain in a perfect halo to overflow its basin and cascade into those beneath it.
  Master Ainsley, who was staring at the massive stonework, closed his mouth with a click of teeth and lowered his head. The sculptor, blowing softly into the holes, had an ear cocked, Damaris noticed, toward their voices.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The day itself was quite delightful. During the month after the wedding, we spent a week looking for a house to rent, flew back to the Catskills to close up my house and say goodbye to friends, get Dave's possessions into a moving van, and then took off back across country in separate cars—Dave in his sleek black jet-propelled Talon, and me in my gerbil-driven Chevy Metro, with two cats in the back who were so totally not amused. We couldn't dawdle; the moving van was somewhere on the road with us, making for the rental house. As with the wedding, most memories are blurred. Others are indelible. The rear end of the Talon. The tornado in Iowa. The rear end of the Talon. The eerie badlands of South Dakota, full of ancient, sleeping gods. Losing sight of the rear end of the Talon on the empty, rainy highway across Wyoming. Realizing that I had been married for scarcely three weeks and I'd already misplaced my husband. The devious places the cats found to hide themselves every morning in motels—under blankets, under beds that seemed riveted to the floor—to avoid being put back into the cat-carrier. Driving up a gentle slope in Montana and finding myself at the top of a dizzying mountain in Idaho, with nowhere to go but down, and the rear end of the Talon so far ahead of me I thought it would be in Oregon a day before I got there. Driving from the gentle, tangled woods of the Catskills, with their modest slopes of 3000 feet, into the spectacular vastness of the west, where mountains look down at you from 10,000 or 14,000 feet, shrug a few boulders, and ask, "What did you expect?" A friend, visiting me once in the Catskills, commented of them: "Mountains higher than these are unnatural." But I'm half-Swiss; my forebears came down out of the Alps to settle in Oregon, and I knew why: they felt at home.
  Another indelible memory: waking very early on the last morning of our journey, our first morning in Oregon, turning on the news while the coffee brewed, and watching the twin towers fall.
  Later that day, stunned and groggy, we reached the town where we would live, tracked down the key to the rental house, and settled in to wait for the moving van, which we had managed to outrace. I'm not sure how long it was afterwards—I think it was after we finally got a bed and pots and pans—when I began to consider seriously the Looming Deadline.
  Certainly the Looming Deadline provided the crucible in which inspiration and imagination fused to give me what I needed. But none of these things—money, experience, deadlines—answers the question I was asked, because the question was not about inspiration or ideas at all.
  The question was about drive, motivation: What possessed you to write eight or ten entirely different fantasies in ten or twelve years? What compels you? How could you? Why would you want to? Ever since I was young, the imagination, like the raw stuff of magic, has seemed to me a kind of formless, fluid pool of enormous possibility, both good and bad, dangerous and powerful, very like the magma in a volcano. And I envisioned myself sitting on top of this mountain of magma, spinning it into endless words, visions, imagery, controlled and useful, to keep it from bursting out in its primitive shape to devastate the landscape. At first, I felt very precariously balanced on top of my private volcano, spinning word and image into tales as quickly as I could to keep up with the unstable forces I was trying to harness. Lately, I've been feeling rather at home there. The magma level has gone down a bit; I've done some satisfying work. I can slow down, maybe, take a longer time to think what I want to make now. What I set out to do about fifteen years ago was to write a series of novels that were like paintings in a gallery by the same artist. Each work is different, but they are all related to one another by two things: they are all fantasy, and they are all by the same person. That's all I wanted to do. And now I'm reaching the end of that series.