Thanks so much, @jayna, I appreciate your kind words.

I'd love to have seen Le Guin, and Anne McCaffrey too. Such amazingly talented, wise and humorous women, and fairly close in age, I wonder whether and/or how often they came across one another. I'll bet those would have been some deeply fascinating conversations, don't you?

One funny aside, for some reason I always thought that Le Guin was a British writer, and was a bit shocked to learn that she was actually born and raised in Berkeley, California. But she shared my love of the redwoods, and of the natural environment as a whole.

And it's even funnier to me when I think of McCaffrey, also an American writer, who actually did emigrate to Ireland in 1970. Perhaps somewhere along the line I got them mixed up, at least as to that detail.

Both women were hugely influential in my own writing, as I tend like them to go deep into detail, rather than sticking to generalizations.

Of course, verbosity can be its own curse, and the editing process can be quite painful, as you well know. ;-)