CULVER CITY -- Say it ain't so! Weetzie Bat is going through a midlife crisis.

The punk rock loving, thrift store dressing denizen of Los Angeles' West Side is back among the colorful, smog-filtered sunsets and brightly painted boulevards that have long inspired the muse of her creator, author Francesca Lia Block.

But Weetzie, who made her first appearance in Block's breakthrough 1989 young adult novel, "Weetzie Bat," as the anguished teenage girl no one understood, is 40 now. With two girls of her own in college, and her longtime relationship with Max, her "secret agent lover man," seemingly about to crumble, she sets out to find herself among the mystical characters and magical happenings that make up life in Block's Los Angeles.

The author, who is 42 and has a 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, doesn't go so far as to say she's having her own mid-life crisis. But Block, who has described Weetzie as her alter-ego, acknowledges the similarities between her current life and the one on which Weetzie embarks in the author's latest novel, "Necklace of Kisses."

"Things started happening in my own life that reminded me of the world that Weetzie lives in," the trim, dark-haired Block says as she sits at her kitchen table, nervously fumbling with a heart-shaped stone. "And she just decided to come back," she adds with a giggle.

Dressed immaculately, and all in white, the author is surrounded by burning sticks of incense and scented candles, something Weetzie might do. But in her case, Block says, they have more to do with her two rambunctious dogs, a springer spaniel and a beagle, that have been sequestered in her writing room for the course of an interview. They can be heard from time to time clawing fiercely at the door.

"One is really smelly," Block says, bursting into laughter. "I figure I wouldn't want that in the article: 'She lives in a smelly house in Culver City."'

Actually, Block lives in a charming little home of the type that went up in suburbs all over Los Angeles by the tens of thousands in the years following World War II.

She moved here six months ago with her dogs and kids and, when she isn't writing or "schlepping babies and washing stinky dogs" she's busy with preschool and kindergarten activities and visits to the park and the library, which are right down the street. She is living apart from her husband, although she prefers not to discuss the separation.

Her home is also not far from the Hollywood clubs, where in her teens and 20s, Block admits rather shyly, she was a huge punk-rock devotee. Although she also had a hippie sensibility that she believes she inherited from her parents, she notes proudly that she could throw herself around a mosh pit with the best of them.

"I always would drive over Laurel Canyon into Hollywood, into that really juicy, explorational kind of world," she says, naming the winding canyon road that for decades has provided a lifeline for kids from the staid, suburban San Fernando Valley seeking adventure in the seedier, hipper section of town.

But whatever everyone else did after the clubs closed, Block seems to have gone back to the valley and wrote. From her earliest days, she says, "I just always knew I wanted to be a writer."

She had begun composing poetry in the first-grade. Soon after, she was making up short stories as she walked around the back yard of her parents' home.

"I would twirl my hair on my finger and suck in my lip and walk in circles and tell myself stories," she recalls.

"That must have looked a little strange to my parents," she adds, laughing again. "But they were artists, so they understood."

Her father, Irving Block, was a Hollywood screenwriter whose credits include the 1956 cult classic "Forbidden Planet," a science-fiction retelling of Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Also a painter, he illustrated her first book, a collection of poems titled "Moon Harvest" that was published when she was just 16.

Block was still a teenager when she was driving on a freeway one day in the late 1970s and noticed a young woman with short, bleached hair behind the wheel of a pink Ford Pinto. The license plate said "Weetzie."

Ten years later, a literary heroine for thousands of readers, many of them young women like herself, was born in an 88-page novel filled not only with the emotional highs and lows of high school but with mystery, romance and magic, including a genie who granted Weetzie three wishes. (She wasn't allowed to wish for world peace or anymore wishes.)

"I've read a fairly large amount of Latin American magical realist authors. I'm really drawn to that," says Block, explaining the magic and myth that permeate most of her novels. She cites as major influences authors Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia and Isabelle Allende of Chile, as well as the poets Emily Dickinson and H.D. (One of the characters in "Necklace of Kisses" is a poet named Hilda Doolittle.)

Nearly overnight, "Weetzie Bat" gave Block a loyal following of young readers. Her work, which has sometimes been compared to that of "The Outsiders" author S.E. Hinton, discussed such aspects of young adults' lives as sex, drugs, death, suicide, homosexuality, anorexia, incest and broken homes.

"She was one of the first -- and she remains true to this -- to be really honest about what it means to be a kid," says Joanna Cotler, Block's longtime editor at Harper Collins, which has published more than 800,000 copies of her books. "She is unflinching in her empathy for the true angst of being a confused person in a state of continual transition."

Earlier this year, Block received a lifetime achievement award from the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services Association for what the organization called groundbreaking work that "encourages teens to celebrate their own true selves."

Although she dislikes having her work classified as part of the young adult genre because she believes it reaches beyond that narrow demographic, Block acknowledges that many of her fans were teenagers or women in their early 20s when they first read "Weetzie Bat."

Many have grown up with her over the years, she says, and some have turned their boyfriends and husbands into fans, although the author concedes that many of her male admirers are too macho to acknowledge publicly that they read the books.

Her more than a dozen titles include not only the handful of Weetzie books and other novels, but also range to a reflection on motherhood, tales of magic and myths, and a collection of erotic short stories. The latter, she quips, is the one she'll hide from her daughter when she's older.

Her books also paint a kaleidoscopic picture of a colorful, trendy Los Angeles, but also one with a dark side that's never too far out of reach.

"I think the perfect metaphor for L.A., and for my writing, would be sort of smog sunsets," Block says with a chuckle. "They are pink and insanely beautiful. But they're there because of the smog, which is this combination of extraordinary beauty mixed with dark and even deadly elements."