A forum for those burning questions you've longed to throw at that quizzical queen of impudence, that alliterative animal, that twisted mind behind the Uppity Women books: Vicki León!

Got your own question for Vicki? Submit it to email box . Regretfully, we must decline sexual fantasies and personal research requests due to lack of time and libido. The best queries of general interest (or maybe just the funniest) will appear in future editions of Author Hot Seat.

Dear Vicki,
got very interested in Chiyome, the Japanese rent-a-ninja entrepreneur you wrote about in Uppity Women of Medieval Times. Then I got frustrated because you stopped after barely 2 pages! That's not enough info! What gives? —Teed off in Texas

Dear Teed,
You think you're frustrated? How'd you like to be a writer as verbose as I am (ask for an autograph, and I write a novella), and be confined to two stinken pages for a towering figure like Joan of Arc, Gracia Mendes, or Hatshepsut?

It's the publisher, not the author, who determines a book's format. A great cover and a winning format are two of the main ways in which a new book (read: snowflake) hopes to win a nanosecond of attention, given the brutal avalanche of 50,000 other new books that blanket bookstores each year.

The book format for the Uppity Women series revolves around food, my favorite subject. I lay out a smorgasbord of 200+ women, from all walks of life and with all kinds of stories, giving you a taste of each. My goal is to make these women so vivid, so tasty, that you'll come back and fill your plate with deeper knowledge about those that intrigued you. To kick-start your search, there is bibliography in the back of each book, and resource pages for more info.

Yes. I know. A bibliography for each woman would be ideal. It's much needed. So far I haven't talked any publisher into doing a book of that length and complexity. Any takers out there? Yo, Teed?—Unabashedly yours, Vicki León

Dear Vicki,
Your material is great, but I have to say that your writing style grates on me. Women went through some pretty gross things in the past—plagues, witchhunts, early death in childbirth, religious martyrdom. How dare you make light of all that? —Outraged in Oroville

Dear Outraged,
Somewhere in that great graveyard where unloved manuscripts go to die, you'll find thousands of pages of mine. They represent the first books I wrote on women's history. They were serious, lengthy, very much in earnest, full of windy generalizations, and written in that oblique and dry passive voice so often found in scholarly works.

That was a mistake. I am a historical detective, not a scholar, although I admire them very much (and my book collection is second to none when it comes to tomes with the smallest type and the largest quantity of footnotes).

Luckily, after several decades of rejection, an idea came to me: why not rework my material in a style that more closely reflected the spirit of the women I was talking about? Impudent. Earthy. Ironic. Full of the guts and glory of my subject matter—and leavened with as much wit as I could muster.

Once I started down this road, my approach brought another revelation. I started seeing more and more parallels between women's lives of long ago, and our lives today. Good grief! I howled. Our foremothers were relevant!

So I drew more comparisons from the past to things of importance in our lives. The result? I call it my "around the water cooler" delivery—a casual, slightly subversive style that is the essential Me talking to You as a friend would. This may enrage you at times. But isn't that what are friends for?—Brashly yours, Vicki

Dear Vicki,
I've read quite a few books on ancient and medieval times. Your books often don't agree with them at all! Why is that?—Puzzled in Pocatello

Dear Puzzled,
Writing history is a bit like an archaeological dig. The best stuff is usually way down at the bottom. We call them "primary sources." Things like writings from someone who lived in that era. Then there are non-literary things that provide insight: items like coins, inscriptions, graffiti, grave objects, and more. In college, I learned how to dig down to the primary sources for a given era--to collect as many pieces of evidence as I could for a given woman, even when they are contradictory. (And invariably, they are contradictory!)

It's a lot easier to write history if you use secondary sources. Just as at an archaeological dig, there's more stuff lying around from the (more recent) 19th and 20th centuries. However, if you get most of your material from 19th century writers, you're also getting a lot of Victorian male biases about women at the same time.

See what I mean? It's no surprise that my books often arrive at different conclusions. Just know this: There are no absolutes in history--no black/white, right/wrong. The best we can do is to examine as many versions of an event or a life as we can, and then take our best shot. That's what I've done.—Philosophically yours, Vicki