The Thorn Birds (86 page)

She slid her arms around his neck, sank her fingers into that satisfying hair. “Oh, if you knew how I’ve longed to do this!” she said. “I’ve never been able to forget.”

The cable said:
HAVE JUST BECOME MRS RAINER MOERLING HARTHEIM STOP PRIVATE CEREMONY THE VATICAN STOP PAPAL BLESSINGS ALL OVER THE PLACE STOP THAT IS DEFINITELY BEING MARRIED EXCLAMATION WE WILL BE DOWN ON A DELAYED HONEYMOON AS SOON AS POSSIBLE BUT EUROPE IS GOING TO BE HOME STOP LOVE TO ALL AND FROM RAIN TOO STOP JUSTINE

Meggie put the form down on the table and stared wide-eyed through the window at the wealth of autumn roses in the garden. Perfume of roses, bees of roses. And the hibiscus, the bottlebrush, the ghost gums, the bougainvillaea up above the world so high, the pepper trees. How beautiful the garden was, how alive. To see its small things grow big, change, and wither; and new little things come again in the same endless, unceasing cycle.

Time for Drogheda to stop. Yes, more than time. Let the cycle renew itself with unknown people. I did it all to myself, I have no one else to blame. And I cannot regret one single moment of it.

The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follow an immunatable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thron enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.

I was too young to know how to write when I started writing—[that is to say,] in my head. Once I knew how to write with a pencil, nothing could have stopped me. I don’t think I ever thought of it as a talent to write books; I just loved to write.

First, you have to enjoy writing and, after that, at least in the case of writing novels, I think most people write to supplement their incomes. I certainly started writing professionally to earn some extra money. [In terms of advice on how to become a professional writer,] try to plan your writing career so that what you produce is something a publisher thinks people will want to read. [One way to test that is to actually write the book:] I am one of those writers who writes the book before negotiating with a publisher.

I’m about the same as I always am: obsessive, nitpicking, and oblivious to the outside world.

It feels dreadful.

That is not a question I can really answer. I get an idea for a book and I go with it, but I don’t usually get the same [sort of] idea again.

Never show what you write to the people who are closest to you.

I do most of the editing—that is, the framing of how the book is going to be and how to express it in prose. Once I have the book in late draft an editor at the publishing house takes over and edits it again. [But the editor can’t change much:] The writer of a book has to approve every change an editor suggests. Sometimes an editor has good suggestions to make; at other times the writer may not agree with the editor’s comments. In the case of the latter, then the writer wins.

A Creed for the Third Millennium
. I’m very concerned about the world population explosion. (I set
A Creed for the Third Millennium
in the U.S. because I lived there for fifteen years and I view it very well. It also suited the theme of the book to situate it in the U.S.)

I wrote
An Indecent Obsession
because I was interested in exploring a situation wherein one woman was in control of a group of men.

I didn’t have to “get back to writing": I never stopped writing. The only thing that I did vow was that I would never write
Son of Thorn Birds
—and I never have.

I love doing the research and I like my facts to be correct. Provided that I am writing fiction, there is still plenty of room for a writer to use her imagination.

I am an old war buff. There is very little that I don’t know about the mechanics of war, whether it is war in the time of Julius Caesar or war in the twentieth century.

When writing fiction I think the writer always feels close to the main characters. For myself I always love my villains as well.

Father Ralph.

I moved to Norfolk Island [off Australia’s east coast] twenty years ago from the United States because the very few remaining members of my family were growing old and I wanted to be closer to them. I also was living on my own and wanted to continue living on my own, so I was looking for somewhere safe for a famous woman to live and that’s how I wound up on Norfolk Island.

Adapted from “A Current Affair: Live Chat with Colleen McCullough,” November 5, 1998, on the occasion of the publication of Ms. McCullough’s biography of Roden Cutler, V.C., and posted, at the time of this e-book publication (June 2003), at http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/stories/114.asp.

Colleen McCullough enjoys worldwide renown, and her novels are bestsellers in a multitude of languages. She is the author of
Tim
(1974),
The Thorn Bird’s
(1977),
An Indecent Obsession
(1981),
A Creed for the Third Millennium
(1985),
The Ladies of Missalonghi
(1987);
The First Man in Rome
(1990),
The Grass Crown
(1991),
Fortune’s Favorites
(1993),
Caesar’s Women
(1996),
Caesar
(1997); and
Morgan’s Run
(2000). She lives with her husband, Ric Robinson, on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific.