L.A. gets rain. People don’t think of the rain in L.A. if they don’t live there. We get a lot in the winter, and the rain in Pasadena near the mountains comes down hard on our little paper-roof stone home that stays wet and cold no matter how many fires we burn in the giant hearth of the old stone fireplace.

Clouds have blown over our ancient eucalyptuses and collection of live oaks on our property and beyond the canopies of the hundreds or so ten-to-fifteen-feet-tall birds of paradise on our weird little often-photographed property.

I think of this house as the Lapvona house. It is where the novel was written.…