Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died, a close friend said Sunday. She was 58. Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and died Friday, Howle said.

She received many awards, and in 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a "genius" award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years. Butler described herself as a happy hermit, and never married. "Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing," Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. "For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the ’60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community."

"I've stopped writing. 2005 has been the first year of my life when I haven't written a line," the Colombian storyteller who revolutionised Latin American literature said in a rare interview with a newspaper at his home in Mexico City.

Garcia Marquez, who galvanised the world with his 1967 epic One Hundred Years of Solitude, is to be guest of honour at Britain's Hay on Wye international literary festival, which opens today in Colombia's Caribbean port of Cartagena, the writer's birthplace. "In practice, with the experience I have, I could write a new novel without any problem, but people would realise that I hadn't put my heart into it," he told Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper, which will publish the interview on Sunday.

Garcia Marquez's first volume of memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale, became a bestseller when it appeared in 2002. It was while working on the second volume that his creative juices dried up, he admitted. He blamed personal problems - now 78, he has been suffering from lymphatic cancer since 1999 - and, more prosaically, computer difficulties.

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A hero in his homeland, Garcia Marquez's legacy is cherished in the sleepy jungle village of Aracataca, his model for the imaginary Macondo of A Hundred Years. The village lies in the heartland of guerrilla territory, today's manifestation of Colombia's seemingly endless civil war that formed the political backdrop of the author's greatest novel.

Thirty days and 713,416,694 words later, National Novel Writing Month is officially over.

NaNoWriMo, as it's known, is November's month-long writing marathon during which writers each attempt a 50,000 word novel. The competition that began in the Bay Area in 1999 as a lark between a small group of friends has grown exponentially each year since then. This month, nanowrimo.org reported that 59,000 people around the world participated in the literary journey, with 9,700 reaching the 50,000 word goal and "winning" the contest. Three of those 59,000 scribes are right here in Napa.

Napan Mark Hiza has "won" his second NaNoWriMo, finishing with 50,104 words, and earning an official nanowrimo winner certificate. His novel, "The Long Journey," begins with a blast:

"Another day starts with a salvo of gunshots, a deafening noise so regularly heard that most people in this neighborhood of mixed two-story brownstones use it as an alarm clock." Hiza's novel continues, telling the story of an encounter between a mysterious Italian woman and an inner-city emergency room doctor.

"It feels to me like it's a big trick. You come here," Black says, referring to Los Angeles, "for magic, and you get snake oil instead. It has all the glittery lights, and it's very bright. It’s like a big, grinning idiot of a city. It beckons you and then just doesn’t deliver."

"It's not the edge of the rainbow, but it's certainly the edge of the continent," he says of Los Angeles. "It's the last bastion of the American dream, the place where hurt people come, the place where failed people come, hoping to be fixed and loved, hoping that this city – this magic place – will afford them the kind of opportunity they didn't have elsewhere, to find redemption. ... I still believe that in the barrenness of L.A. there is magic. I wouldn’t live there if I didn't."

A trip to the Southeast Asian country of Burma (also known as Myanmar) inspired her new novel. With it, she created a story involving 12 Americans who are like herself in various ways and whose lives intersect. The story ultimately explores human-rights atrocities in Burma — a subject many readers might not want to confront. "I decided I should write a story that would seduce people," Tan said recently from Portland, Ore. "Suddenly, you can find yourself very quickly submersed in the unfamiliar." "My hope is that they enjoy the story and that they remember Burma," she says, when readers hear of the country that was renamed Myanmar after a military regime took control.

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At the workshop 20 years ago at Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Tan had a dozen or so pages about a Chinese girl and her mother. Giles told her that there wasn’t a consistent voice in the story, and Giles went through it and noted about a dozen places that could be the beginning of a short story. Giles told Tan to pick one and write that story, then repeat the process for each. Tan simply said "OK." "Hardly anybody says, 'OK,'" Giles says. "Instead of being horrified, I was so excited," Tan recalls.

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"Even if I was violently opposed to what she’d suggest, she was often right," Tan says of Giles. "She’s tough. She just cuts to the chase."

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Tan says she likes that Giles bluntly delivers criticism and that she knows how Tan works. Tan writes profusely and then starts shaping and directing her story. "I’m more like a sculptor than I am watercolorist," Tan says. Tan also likes that Giles comes to her writing with unselfish motives. "She’s not concerned with the marketing issues or the commercial side of publishing. She’s concerned with the work," Tan says.

Van Allsburg got a further push when he discovered a two-sided board game in a 1906 Sears catalog that he was paging through one day. "It made me think that there could be two games in one box," said Van Allsburg in a recent telephone interview from his home in Providence, R.I. "One side could be the game with jungle perils. Maybe the other side could be an outer-space game."

Thus was born "Zathura," Van Allsburg's 2002 sequel to "Jumanji." "Zathura," which has been made into a just-released children's movie, picks up where the first book left off, with the quarrelsome Budwing brothers finding the game left in the park by the "Jumanji" characters.

When the Budwings begin to play the game, however, they discover that their house has been propelled into outer space. The brothers soon learn that they have to call a temporary truce to sibling rivalry and work together if they want to successfully fight off space aliens and get back to Earth.

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Van Allsburg likens having a film made from a book of his to "selling your home. ... You just have to hope they don't tear it down." "I think that, in the scheme of things, I've been lucky. I understand that, as a creator of picture books, I'm not providing filmmakers with a blueprint. All I am providing is a little inspiration."

A London production company is planning to bring 44 Scotland Street - first published as a serial in The Scotsman - to the small screen, while BBC Scotland is working on a serialisation of The Sunday Philosophy Club, the 57-year-old writer's 1994 novel in which the amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie investigates the suspicious death of a man at the Usher Hall.

Jan Rutherford, the author's agent, said: "Sandy is very excited about the two new projects." The Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella has already bought the rights to McCall Smith's The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Richard Curtis, who directed Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral, is to write the script.

"I revisited the short story and decided that maybe there was a book in it," Hosseini recalls, leaning against the thick cushions of his living room sofa. "It really started off very small."

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"That it would reach this kind of readership is pretty stunning," says Hosseini, wearing a striped button-down shirt and white pants. "It's still pretty weird."

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Hosseini, 40, is surprisingly modest for a first-time novelist who has enjoyed such phenomenal success. He's still getting used to his newfound fame, and says he never intended to be a writer. "I always loved writing, but I really just did it for myself because I enjoyed the act of writing and creating stories," says Hosseini, speaking English with only a slight accent. "I never wrote with the aim of publishing. ... Now I find myself doing it for a living, at least for the time being." Hosseini and his wife, a Silicon Valley attorney who is also of Afghan descent, speak to their children in both Farsi and English and maintain close ties to the San Francisco Bay area's Afghan community.

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Hosseini comes from a large, prominent family in Kabul. His father was a diplomat and his mother was a teacher. He's the oldest of five children raised in a secular household. And while there's no single childhood event that haunts him, Hosseini says he always felt guilty about his privilege. "I was raised in an affluent life in a very poor country, and you always have that sense of guilt about your own good fortune," he says.