Wow, I would love to learn more about Khayyam. I thought I would see him in the Summer Anthology but he wasn't. I miss him.

So it's for when the story?

Ieshwar

You don't seriously intend to retire Khayyam soon? The boy needs to have something nice happen to him. And an opportunity to do something proactive.

"Earthquake weather," as I understand it, actually comes from Northern California -- from the 1906 Fire and Earthquake in San Francisco. The day (April 18, the birthday of both my kids)was preternaturally warm and sunny for the season. And still and muggy, I gather. So unseasonable weather, or unusually hot weather, got called "earthquake weather." I don't know the history of how it got applied down south, but you guys have enough temblors to build your own folklore on.

There's always a little shaker somewhere nearby -- if you can't find one anywhere else, you can always check out Hollister!

I do plan to retire Khay. He irritates me as a character, in the same way that Jake does, in that he has personality traits that, while I express them myself, I hardly ever tolerate in people I meet. In Khay's case, he has a lot of angst. I don't do angst well. Now that I think about it, the only time in my life that I really had any angst to speak of was when I moved out of Los Angeles, at age nine. Not since then. Not even after getting raped, when it would have been permissible to be a little maudlin, I didn't give in. I was bat-shit crazy yes, but not angst ridden. I'm willing to bet Khay found it hard to deal with his own sexuality, tried to fight, agonized over whether or not to tell his parents, until his brother came out and made the question moot.

This is mostly why I didn't use him in the summer anthology. He didn't have anything to say (that, and Rainy Day just isn't something I associate with summer, this summer's weather notwithstanding).

Listen to me, talking like Khay is someone real. I need to have more sex.

I don't see Khay as angsty. I see him as dour, yes, and grumpy, and possibly ambitious (he doesn't have time to fool around, so at the first note of complication he bugs out and goes back to -- studying!). He might be more interesting to you to take up when he's older. He's not going to change for a long time. But when he's out of college -- probably grad school for him, don't you think? something more intellectual than engineering, more practical than linguistics: maybe international relations, or agrarian policy, or something -- and firmly established on the first rungs of his career, it would be fun to zip the rug out from under him.

"Rainy Day" really did not do it for me as a summer topic either. And it's much wetter up here than it is down there: we used to get one real storm every summer, but I don't know how much actual water that produced.