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AE: Now that you've moved Gilbert and Phillip and Claire to Hollywood, is that the setting you would stick with in a fourth novel?
JK: I don't know where I would take them next. My impulse would be to try another one out here, only because I [set] two in New York because I was living in New York, and I like my characters to be where I am, only because I understand the geography of the world they're inhabiting. For instance, I would love to take them to London, but I haven't spent nearly enough time there to have a sense of where they were--I'd be just terrified of making one mistake after another, just in terms of the geography of the place.

So I'd jump at the opportunity to live in London or the English countryside, [because then] I'd say, "Okay fine--now I can take them here because I've got the lay of the land, I understand how things work and how things are laid out. I could convincingly write a story that unfolded here."

I loved the idea of doing a Hollywood comedy even for my second book, but I thought, "I haven't spent much time there. I'm sure that everything I write is going to be so inauthentic, so chock-a-block with hideous mistakes, that I'd rather not even try to go there.

AE: What are your plans for the meantime?
JK: Right now I have series on the air, Out of Practice, that [has been on] all through the fall on Mondays and stars Stockard Channing, Henry Winkler, Jennifer Tilly, Chris Gorham, Ty Burrell, and Paula Marshall, and we were doing very well with that. Our ratings were climbing every week. But they needed the slot to launch the irresistible Jenna Elfman in her new sitcom. They tried that, and that hasn't gone terribly well for them, but they are bringing up that [show] on Wednesdays at 8:00, leading off their Wednesday schedule. Until we see how that runs out, we have ten or eleven original episodes--we're just shooting the last of them next week--and then those will start airing in March.

Depending on how well that goes, the show will or won't be back for a second [season]. Once we finish [shooting] next week, I'm going to sit down and decide exactly what I'm going to do with this waiting period between now and May when they decide if the show if coming back. I'd love to do another book, but it's hard because I don't know exactly how free my time is going to be.

Of course, [My Lucky Star] was written over the course of many seasons, because I was working on Frasier for most of it, and I only had--as I say in the afterward to the book--a couple of weeks a year in which to work on it. I spent a year or two just outlining it, writing page after page, eighty or ninety single-spaced pages of just plot notes.

But again, you'd have four or five weeks in which to work on it, and then you go back to TV. I always thought that I could not really mentally juggle doing both at the same time. A lot of people would say, "Can't you just write your book on weekends?" And the answer to that is, no, actually, when you're running a TV show, the weekend is when you're writing scripts.

AE: On the other hand, you had a certain luxury of time to allow that very complex plot to come together.
JK: Yeah, it did help, because I think the plot [for My Lucky Star] was a little more Byzantine than for the first two. It did help that there was all that time, as with the first book, for the details to simmer. In the middle of thinking about something else--in the middle of writing a script, say--"Oh, I see! That scene should go there instead." I'm not sure it would have come together in exactly the same way, had I been completely free and tried to write the book in a period of just a year or two, which is what I did with my second book [1992's Putting on the Ritz] -- that's the only one of the three that I actually sat down and wrote unencumbered by other responsibilities.

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