"Hi there, this is Anne Rice. It's September 12, 2002, and it's a beautiful day here in New Orleans. I think there's just a touch of fall in the air, and people are sort of dreading winter coming on after all of this delicious hot weather. The garden is chocked full of tropical flowers, and plants, and the banana trees are thick and waving in the breeze. And everywhere you look there's life, and it's absolutely beautiful.
I want to thank you all for your wonderful prayers and well wishes for Stan. I told you last time that Stan has a brain tumor - a glioblastoma stage 4. He's doing very very well. He went to Duke University to see Dr. Henry Friedman, who's very into aggressive treatment of glioblastomas. Stan came back very happy with the program there. He's also working with excellent doctors here. He's in radiation and chemotherapy and he has an electric wheelchair up in his studio and he's painting everyday, and the radiation is not knocking him out, and he's just doing extremely well. Again, I want to thank you for all of your prayers and your well wishes.
I'm writing away, my book is really late. I'm up to about Chapter 21. This is the book that will be published in 2003. BLACKWOOD FARM is coming out in just a few weeks, and I'm very excited about it. As I've mentioned to you before, the main character is Quinn Blackwood, who is new to the Vampire Chronicles. I really enjoyed his voice because it's a very southern voice and this a very southern novel. I feel Blackwood Farm is almost a state of mind, it's more than just a place, and I love it very very much.
I haven't been out of the house in weeks. I've actually missed mass 3 times because of just not feeling up to going but I'm, going to go back. I know many of you probably don't care very much about this, and are not very interested; but I was reconciled in the Catholic Church in 1998, and it's had an inevitable affect on my writing. I wonder if it's not something almost impossible to decode. When I first tried to appraise what was happening, I felt that the church had done a violence to my consciousness. But now I think it's sort of a wonderful violence. It's sent me in new directions and different paths and made me confront things that I hadn't confronted in maybe 30 years. I think what fuels your writing as you go on is a continued spiritual search. You never get burned out because that spiritual search won't let you get burned out. You never get satisified because you can't really know the inevitable and the infinite. You can't know those things.
I'm reading alot of theology and history, particularly of the 1st century after Christ. I'm trying to understand how did things historically lighten? What did Christianity mean to the Pagan world? You know I write about these things. In BLOOD AND GOLD I wrote about this. I had the vampire Marius pondering these questions. I guess I wrote about it in INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. I'm always on some sort of metaphysical quest. I've recently been puzzled by 3 words:. ontological, epistemological, and hermeneuical. I really don't know what they mean. I look them up in the dictionary and get the definition, but I just don't know why anybody would use those words to say that. It's kind of fun being as stupid as I am, really. It's kind of fun.
Anyway, I can see that I've taken up about 5 minutes of your time so I'm going to get off. I wish you well, I send you my love. Thanks again for your prayers and thanks for your cards. Thanks for everything. If you're writing, write. Be happy at doing whatever you do. I love you. Take care."
