The last  few days have been amazing for the traits in some of the heroic characters you have created have suddenly burst to the surface of my awareness. Even though I am an aging female I am beginning to feel the stirrings of  a strength that I know to be quite masculine. I must admit that some part of me has always been aware of this inner masculinity but I have never owned it before because I felt ashamed of such stirrings, but now the authority within your writing has acted as some type of release which has enabled me to accept this hidden part of me. This is me….this is who I am….but also I am a mother, a grandmother! A sensitive caring female – all in the same body –  isn’t this remarkable?  These soft, caring attitudes are in some of your heroes and I feel this a vital aspect of your writing for you have managed to bring to life a soldier who is both tender and loving while being fiercely courageous. He loves, and he kills. This does not fit within the stereo type of
present day behaviour; our identities, our fixed roles, our politically correct behaviour are all conditioned responses, taught to us from childhood.
It is not the killing that I admire – in fact I still loathe the sight and sound of battle –  it is the essence of a man who will face all kinds of abominations because of his ethical courage and his sense honour. This is the essence that I am responding to. My feelings as I think about your fictitious heroes are quite ambiguous for they are not the normal romantic dreams of an infatuated female, they are not lusting for him but lusting to be him. It is as if your books have awakened a sleeping part of me….not able to show its face until I understood  the magnitude of the layering within in the human psyche. Although delightfully addictive, it is adding to my confusion about human sexuality and the close association with reincarnation and the mystical life that shimmers just below the surface of this reality. If we live many lives then I have a memory of being a Roman Centurion in the 1st century England. Seems much of what is within each of us is hidden from the conscious
mind so revelations about other dream-lives existing behind this life are exciting. If there are missing pieces within me, then this must be so for everybody?
Later. The timing is impeccable, for last night as I was grappling with this confused though delightful  identity crisis, I watched  Australian Story on the ABC (Australian TV). It gave an account of a soldier who has also been a writer and a politician but who now works as an aid to the head of the Military in Canberra. He was courageous and intelligent, wielding a great deal of power, yet he was unhappy in his male body so eventually he changed – and showing the same courage – he has become a woman – a women who now feels very happy within this new identity. Maybe this Australian is also balancing out his/her mystical life in this extremely physical way? Maybe your ability capture the essential nature of these courageous men of honour also stems from past memory? This amazing story has come to me just as I am beginning to taste some type of masculine expression but the synchronisity is not really a surprise for it often happens, but  it has made my personal insights even more
confused. His experience is not mine, for I have no want or desire to change gender. This is why the concept of androgyny comes to mind. Maybe it is what we are all seeking, a balance within between gender duality?
I see that we were born in the same era.  I was born in 1938 in Australia, far from the battles that you write about, but of course the diabolical history laying in our records is waiting to be told.
I am also a writer, although words seems to have dried up over the past few years and I offer thanks for your work.
Lyn Willmott