Mother Nature decided to break all our hearts this last week by blessing us with perfect early summer weather: sunny, warm days and deliciously cool nights. It will be hard to leave this place, we’ve all grown to love it. Not to mention accustomed to daily two-hour hikes through the mountains, nightly gourmet meals, glorious sunsets, excellent company, peace and quiet and redwood-scented air. And the occasional game of homemade twister (see photo below).

On the subject of our Mother, Djerassi is home to a profusion of interesting flora and fauna. There are bobcats, mountain lions and coyotes (none of which I’ve seen — probably for the best). My sightings so far include an owl, a Great Heron, a hawk, and many, many deer, birds, hummingbirds, snakes, iguanas and salamanders — little auburn-colored things that come out in droves during the rains, so that the paths literally seem to be writhing, and it’s hard to take a step without crushing one. And the ubiquitous ticks, which we check for religiously after our hikes, and one of which took up residence on my stomach last week.

But by far the most fascinating creature here, deserving of its own paragraph, is the humble banana slug, pictured below. They are without a doubt the most repulsive creatures I’ve ever seen, more cringe-inducing even than the giant water bugs in Texas. Six slimy inches long, a putrid shade of yellow, with a shape resembling…well. But my respect for banana slugs increased greatly after learning more about them: They are mighty defenders of the redwood forests, because they consume competing seedlings. They can rappel from trees by spinning a slime cord from the mucus plug at the end of their tails. They are hermaphrodites who mate in pairs (each banana slug has both sets of equipment). The mating ritual lasts up to twelve hours, at least half of which is foreplay. Sometimes they are unable to disengage afterwards, requiring them to gnaw off their own penises, which later regenerate — but still. And finally, if you lick a banana slug, your tongue goes numb (tempting as it was, I didn’t test the veracity of this).

Saturday it got very hot here, and Susan, Jeremy, Ben & I hiked down to Bear Gulch Creek and took a dip in the extremely bracing water — during which it must be said that the guys shrieked louder than the girls — after which we picnicked on the banks under the redwoods. And yes, it really was as perfect as it sounds, right up until the moment I almost had a heat stroke on the hike back. Ah, how I hate being such a delicate flower…

Last day: our own James Huang contributed a sculpture to the place, a sort of tennis court to nowhere which he constructed in a creative frenzy in the last five days, and we all celebrated with bubbly and munchies at the site. On the way, we actually came upon two banana slugs mating! It was a sight to see. I’ll spare you the pics, but see below for a photo of the spellbound watchers.

Home now. Reality feels rather harsh.

As always, or almost always (excluding Yaddo in January), the time has flown here. We have an unusually lovely, supportive & cohesive group, which has created a fertile creative environment for us all. And the landscape is so inspiring, especially now that the chilly, gray, misty-moisty weather of our first two weeks has finally lifted. Hard to believe that these 580 spectacular acres are just for us eight artists, but apart from occasional sculpture tours and other events they host here, we have the run of the place. I’ve been hiking in the mountains almost every day. Goodbye, buns of tapioca, hello, buns of steel!

The second week we all did show and tell for each other every night after dinner. The three writers — myself, poet Susan Briante, and Jamaican novelist Patricia Powell (who is my bathroom-mate) — read from our work. James Huang gave a slide presentation of his whimsical and astonishingly diverse sculptures. Jeremy Zuckerman played his compositions, which range from the score for Avatar, The Last Airbender to wholly original and unexpected pieces that are hard to describe — I’ll call them digital manipulations of natural sounds. Beth Howe shared her painstakingly rendered sculpture, drawings (which are drawn with thread instead of pen or pencil), and bookmaking. Benjamin Levy, the gazelle amongst us, danced for us and showed us some of the pieces he has choreographed for his dance company, LEVY Dance. And finally, media artist Maggie Cardelús, who sadly is leaving us today to return to Milan, showed us her work, which involves slicing up photographs and using the cut-outs to create these stunning pieces that defy description, some 2-D and some sculptural. I’m thrilled because Maggie made a piece from a photo of me — see below, where I am pretending to be a tree — and has promised me a copy of it. I will miss her, but I now have a friend in Milan, always an excellent thing.

This place is spectacular. A 1,200-acre eyrie in the Santa Cruz mountains, just 8 miles (but a good 30 minutes, on account of the twisty single-lane mountain roads) from Palo Alto. The residence was established about 30 years ago by Carl Djerassi, a Viennese chemist and writer who earned the money to buy all this magnificent land by inventing the Pill, God bless him. He is in his 80s now and still has a house on the property. Apparently he occasionally drops by to visit the residents. I would love to meet him, if only to thank him for keeping me child-free all these years.

We have a great group: two fiction writers, a poet, a choreographer, a composer, a sculptor, and two visual artists whose work defies categorization. A lovely bunch, all grownups, no narcissists or snooty entitled types or crazy misanthropes (all of whom do tend to crop up with annoying frequency at artists colonies). The staff is friendly and helpful, and the food is excellent. Chef Dan makes us dinner M-F, and there hasn’t been a less-than-scrumptious meal yet. He keeps the fridge stocked, and we forage for breakfast, lunch and weekend meals.

I’m working well here. I’ve been waking early for me, at around 8:00. I shower, have breakfast, read the Times and start writing at about 9:30. I work for several hours, cobble together a quick lunch, then continue writing till 5:00 or so, at which point I take my reward for my labors in the form of a one- to two-hour hike around the property with some of my fellow residents. There are pathways throughout that lead through stands of towering redwoods and across rounded green mountains that look like perfect hobbit dwellings, and around every turn one discovers amazing sculptures by the many artists who have been here.

Happiness is the ability to saturate oneself in extreme beauty, sore leg and butt muscles, a full stomach, good company, and 3 pages of new prose daily. That’s my current definition, anyway.

My British publisher, William Heinemann, flew me across the pond for the Galaxy British Book Awards, a black tie affair held in the grand ballroom of the upper-crusty Dorchester Hotel. I was nominated for Best New Writer of the year. Alas, the honor went to British author Tom Rob Smith for his novel Child 44, but I had a splendid time that night even so. They had a red carpet complete with paparazzi for us arriving authors — “Look here, luv! Smile swee-har!” — at which I did my poor best to channel Angelina Jolie and look insouciant and glamorous. After the ceremony we all drank champagne and danced till 1:30 in the morning, for which my head and feet paid dearly the next morning.

Apart from that, I had the luxury of some free time in London, a city I haven’t been to in twenty-five years. The first night, my lovely editor, Jason Arthur (pictured with me above), took me to a veddy traditional British establishment called Shepherd’s, where, surrounded by lots of red-faced, middle-aged men in three-piece suits who all looked like prime candidates for gout, we feasted on English favorites such as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding (me) and kidney-something-or-other (him, and I tried very hard not to watch while he ate it).

Friday I had lunch with my old college friend Susie Schoenfeld, then spent two hours (or was it three?) primping for the awards ceremony that night. Saturday I slept rawther late, then had lunch and a nice browse at Harrod’s with another former classmate, Laura Wood Cantopher, after which I went to Fortnum & Mason, where a beautiful young man in a black morning coat escorted me round the store while I picked out items for a “bespoke” (meaning, custom) gift basket for the Heinemann team. Dinner Saturday night at the home of my dear friend and fellow writer Nick Rankin, whose new non-fiction book, Churchill’s Wizards: the British Genius for Deception, 1914-1945, has sold an impressive 15,000 copies in hardback. Kudos, Nick! Regrettably absent was Nick’s wife Maggie Gee, who’s currently working on her autobiography at an artists’ colony in Scotland called Hawthornden (where I will be myself in October). She also has a new novel out, the magnificently witty, moving and incisive My Driver, which I had the great honor of blurbing. My first blurb ever, actually.

Sunday I walked my legs off, beginning at the Random House corporate apartment in Marsham Street, up the Thames past Whitehall and Downing Street (which is gated off and presided over by very serious-looking blokes with machine guns) to Trafalgar Square. Paid my respects to Lord Nelson, then spent a happy few hours with Rembrandt, Botticelli, Velasquez, et. al. in the National Gallery, after which I went to Evensong at Westminster Abbey. Adored the singing of the men’s/boys’ choir, could have done without the praying (and in fact, I must confess I left before the sermon began). Walked all the way back to the flat, had an abysmal meal that night at one of the only open restaurants I could find in the area, then collapsed. I’m writing this from the plane home. Wish I’d had another week to explore this marvelous city, which I adore, despite the mostly execrable food. Must visit again very soon.

The paperback edition of Mudbound was released March 17, so I’m touring again. Last week I did a three-day whirlwind pass through the Midwest, with events at Anderson Bookshop in Naperville (a Chicago suburb), Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor and Harry Schwartz Bookshop in Brookfield (a Milwaukee suburb). Wonderful shops all, especially Harry Schwartz, which I’m sad to report closed its doors today. Like many independent bookstores, they got killed by the one-two punch of amazon and the economy.

I’ll confess that I used to have a bad amazon habit myself, but being on book tour and meeting so many lovely, knowledgeable, passionate indie booksellers has caused me to mend my wicked book-buying ways. If we don’t support our local bookstores, we soon won’t have any, and then where will we go to hang out and browse, and who will be there to say, “You have got to read this book, Hillary, I know you’re going to love it”?

So, dear readers, please renounce the anonymous online megastores, spend the few extra bucks and buy from the bookstore around the corner. Which in my case is the wonderful Oblong Books of Rhinebeck.

It doesn’t get much better than this: 750 people (749 women and one man) who not only love literature but buy hardbacks came to the Long Beach Convention Center on February 21st to hear me and six other women authors talk about our books. The event, sponsored by a group called Literary Women, is in its 27th year and is a sellout every single year. Amusingly, we shared the Convention Center that day with two other groups, see signs below (it was not difficult to tell who was with whom). The ladies of Literary Women were very gracious hostesses, and a splendid time was had by all. And did I mention it was 70 degrees and sunny? Heaven.

This is a beautiful, rambling, historic place, storied to a fairly intimidating degree. My scribbler forebears at Yaddo include two of my literary idols, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin, as well as John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Rick Moody, yadda yadda yaddo. And then there’s little ole me, eking out my few pages a day of RED.

Apart from the usual muse-wrestling, it’s been a pretty uneventful 10 days. We’ve been snowbound for most of it, with highs in the teens on balmier days and lows well below zero most nights. Except for breakfast and dinner, which we eat together in the mansion, we’re all basically hunkered down in our studios. I have a lovely suite, a bedroom and study/sitting room separated by a full bath, in a small house which I share with a poet and a visual artist. The house, which is called Pine Garde, has a fireplace in the living room, which I’ve taken advantage of on many nights. They take excellent care of us here, though it’s not like the old days, when servants would bring breakfast trays to the rooms of late (and presumably hung-over) arisers.

We have a quartet of composers (an unusually high number), with the bulk of us being visual artists and writers. We’ve been between 14 and 20, though I gather that number grows much larger in the summer months. My old friend Doug Wright, a playwright & screenwriter, is here, which has been great fun we haven’t seen each other in a couple of years.

Saratoga Springs is a pretty little town, and when I get stir crazy or start to run out of wine & munchies, I dig my car out from under the snow and drive in. This place is known for horse racing and hot springs; people have historically come here to gamble and “take the waters.” Which Doug and I plan to do next week at a local spa.

I’m about halfway through the book now. Since I’ve been here I’ve invented a plague, a new villain and a vigilante group that makes the Klan look like a Boy Scout troop. (RED, it seems, is going to be an even more cheerful book than MUDBOUND.) My heroine’s currently in Dallas, and it’s been fun imagining my old stomping grounds, somewhere around 2040.

A few facts about Switzerland I bet you didn’t know: They have bomb shelter capacity for all 7.5 million Swiss citizens, secret hideaways all over the countryside where people can go in case of nuclear attack. Switzerland has four national languages, German, French, Italian and Romantsch, and dozens of local dialects, owing to the alps, which kept people from traveling outside their little isolated valleys for centuries. Swiss foxes now carry some sort of horrible, mad-cow-like disease which destroys your insides and doesn’t manifest for up to 10 years (we were warned from eating any low-hanging fruit the foxes may have shat upon). And the Swiss didn’t give women the vote until 1971. Yes, that’s a 71 at the end, not a 17.

I’m writing this on the plane home — sitting next to a woman with a 3-month-old infant in her lap, so I suspect it will be a very long flight indeed — feeling a bit blue to be trading the beautiful château with its lush gardens and spectacular views of the alps for my tiny, half-renovated, unlandscaped (and unlikely to be landscaped any time soon) house in Tivoli… Yesterday and today were heartbreakers, naturally — glorious, sunny, 80 degrees, the air so clear we could see Mont Blanc (highest peak in Europe) in the distance.

I think we all felt a bit triste to be leaving today. We could not possibly have wished for a more congenial group. There was Claude, the celebrated French novelist, elegant as only a Frenchwoman can be, but so kind and warm we all got teary-eyed saying goodbye to her; Maggie, who not only has a gift for writing beautiful fiction but for making everyone around her feel special; Nick, her husband, English gentleman extraordinaire, bringer of pillows, lifter of heavy objects, cheerful doer of many dishes, walking encyclopedia of information both useful and arcane, occasionally long-winded lecturer on matters historical, and court jester whose jokes kept us all in stitches; Grazyna, who was a late but essential arrival, and whose fiction (which none of us were able to read, alas, as it hasn’t yet been translated into English or French) is very popular in Poland; and finally, Khaled, our resident Egyptian and philosopher, who (it must be said) did almost no dishes whatsoever but charmed and fascinated us with his tales of Cairo.

The farmers must have finished their fertilizing because the week was blessedly merde-free. Last Sunday we gave a reading which was attended by about 30 locals, including many members of the Geneva-area writing community. I read from Mudbound, and the Mississippi accent seemed to go over well (though it’s quite possible none of them understood a word of it and were just being kind). Worked all week, then celebrated the seven hundredth and some-odd Swiss Independence Day on Friday. We all decided God must be Swiss, because after a dreary day of pouring rain, the heavens cleared miraculously just in time for the fireworks. We climbed to the top of a nearby hill and watched them go off all around the lake. Lausanne’s were the most spectacular, but even the smaller villages nearer to us had their proud displays, each trying to outdo the other. Then on Saturday I went with Khaled to Lake Geneva, and we spent the day toodling around by boat. We had lunch in a charming medieval village called Yvoire, on the French side of the lake, and basked in the beautiful weather and views. It was the first day I didn’t work and a welcome respite from Red.

All in all, a splendid residency, the best of them all so far. If only they didn’t make you wait ten years to reapply..

It must be said that life in a beautiful château, with a staff to cook, shop, clean and mow the lawn, ain’t half bad. I’ve been writing a lot (a lot being a relative term, I average about 2 pages a day) and Red is coming along nicely. The book is so dark that I’m very glad to have lovely surroundings to escape to after spending hours in my right-wing fundamentalist dystopia.

In the ten days we’ve been here the farmers have harvested the wheat in the field below us and made the stalks into big round bales which dot the fields picturesquely. All this bucolic charm does come at a price, however: the smell of merde that wafts up from the surrounding farms and vineyards (which are apparently in full-bore fertilizing mode) is so noxious some days that I have to shut myself in my room with the windows closed. Still, it’s beautiful here. The roses and giant hibiscus bushes are in full bloom, and the grapes in the vineyards are coming on, though we’ll miss the harvest, which is in September. They grow cold-climate grapes here: Gamay, Pinot Noir and a varietal I’ve never had before called Chasselas, a light, refreshing white which is almost a bubbly. We drink it every evening on the patio as an apéritif before dinner.

I haven’t had many adventures here — the villages within walking distance are small, quaint, and dull — but I’ve been very content to hang at the Château and write. Sunday evening we’re giving a public reading here, and Monday night we’ll go into Geneva to dine at the home of one of the foundation’s board members. We’re all still getting along, thank heaven. We speak a hilarious mixture of French and English, often within the same sentence, but it seems to work.

Signing off from (somewhat malodorous) paradise.

I’m here at a marvelous artists colony in a small Swiss village called Morges, near Lausanne and Geneva. What an exquisite place this is. A big, pink, every-so-slightly shabby house perched in the mountains overlooking Lake Geneva. The château has a rich, fascinating history. It was the summer retreat of a famous German publisher named Ledig-Rowohlt, who published — and translated — many celebrated authors for the first time in German after WWII, e.g., Faulkner, Camus, James Baldwin, Updike, Thurber, etc. Harold Pinter refused to let anyone else translate his plays into German. Nabokov, who was a neighbor, was a frequent visitor here, as was Henry Miller, a few of whose watercolors (G-rated) adorn the walls of the living room. My office or study was Ledig’s library, and I write each day surrounded by books and by the friendly ghosts of all the writers who sat in this room. Ledig’s widow established this place as a writers’ retreat 12 years ago. And here we all are.

There are six of us: myself; a delightful English couple, Maggie Gee and Nicholas Rankin — she’s a successful novelist in the UK, he’s a former BBC journalist and non-fiction writer; a bestselling Arab author named Khaled Al Khamissi; an utterly charming and gracious French novelist in her 70s called Claude Pujade-Renaud; and a Polish novelist, Grazyna Plebanek, who just arrived last night but seems lovely. No jerks or serial adolescents in the bunch, for a wonder, and everyone is incredibly passionate about ideas and books and film and culture. The people at the château are very generous and take excellent care of us. The only way I know I’m not in heaven is that I have to go down the hall to pee.

I’ve done little this last week but recover from jet lag — harder than usual for some reason, but I’m almost there — and write. I think that’s how it will go. Three weeks is such a short time, and my creative juices are flowing here. I will venture into Evian and Lausanne one day toward the end, and perhaps take a boat ride on Lake Geneva, but apart from that and daily walks in the countryside, I’m going to work. This is the perfect place to do it, and after having lost a month at home with the dreaded bathroom renovation, I’m eager to make progress on Red. That’s my job now (she said, pinching herself).