Jean discusses Still Time on West Coast Live.

This week’s podcast continues our three month-long discussion of King Lear with a slight detour and an interview with Jean Hegland, the author of the Lear-influenced and -infused novel, Still Time. Plus, a new contest!

Windfalls can be the unexpected gifts that opportunity and good luck occasionally shake down upon us from the sky. Windfalls are also those fruits loosed from the tree, their ripeness untasted, that fall heavy from the limb and rot by the trunk. In Healdsburg-area author Jean Hegland’s new novel, Windfalls (Atria Books; $25), both the great deep surprise of good luck and the terrible waste of letting that which is ripe go wasted are closely observed.

Jean Hegland’s first novel, “Into the Forest,” sold about 14,000 copies for Calyx Press of Corvallis, Ore. For seven years’ effort, Hegland made about $7,000 and was delighted.

“It was more than I had hoped for,” she says. “I was very pleased with what had happened with the book.”

But around Thanksgiving 1996, a bidding war erupted between Bantam and Ballantine in New York over her futuristic paperback about two teenage sisters getting by in the woods without food, water, utilities or either parent.

Way out in the forest, where a publisher would never find her, Jean Hegland spent seven years writing her first novel.

It wasn’t planned, and it wasn’t for the half- cent an hour that worked out to be the wage. One night when she couldn’t sleep she made up a bedtime story. By sunrise it had a plot and an ending, and by breakfast she was typing it into her computer.

One of the year’s most fascinating science fiction novels has nary a starship or extraterrestrial in any of its 193 pages. Instead, novelist Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (Calyx, 1996) takes as its subjects Nell and Eva, two intelligent teenage girls trying to survive in an isolated house in the heart of a redwood forest, while outside society gradually falls apart and reverts to chaos. Nell and Eva’s priorities aren’t to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; they’re to figure out how to grow their own food, keep healthy, and defend themselves in a world suddenly gone low-tech and savage.

Jean Hegland’s novel “Into the Forest” started as a paperback from a broke nonprofit press in Oregon and ended as a hardbound from mighty Bantam Books in New York. Another paperback edition is due in the fall.

This amounts to a publishing miracle for Hegland, who labored for seven years at her home near Healdsburg. Rejected by a dozen literary agents and as many small presses, Hegland’s manuscript found a champion in Calyx Books, a women’s press in Corvallis, Ore.