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I’m sitting here typing this with the window in my office open so I can hear the chorus of toads from our water garden. Last year there was one loan toad. Poor fellow. This year there are more. They are serenading me as I type. Too cool that.

Five pages on A LICK OF FROST. Three pages on the comic for the Special Anita Blake and Edward script.

Though I’ll have to cut some of the dialogue. The older and wiser Anita keeps popping into the dialogue with Edward. I can’t help it.

I’m writing Merry in the morning. The comic was taking some of the edge off of wanting to start the next Anita book, but the next Anita book is set in Anita’s present. The comic is way back when. One of the reasons I don’t do prequels is that I’m all about what’s happening now. I’m not nostalgic. I don’t think wasn’t it better when. Now is better.

It was somewhere between book six, THE KILLING DANCE, and book eight, BLUE MOON, of the Anita series that her world became so dear to me. So dear that I miss it terribly when I’m not working with it. Maybe Merry will hit that magical moment, too. But it’s not going to be book six. A LICK OF FROST is a lovely book and I’m having fun, and cool stuff is happening, but it still isn’t the compulsion to write that Anita is for me.

Maybe when I hit book eight for Merry her world will call as strongly to me as Anita’s does now.

I guess I’m the same with fictional characters that I am with real people; old friendships are best; long term relationships are what appeal to me. I’ve only known Merry for about seven years. Anita’s been with me for more than fifteen years, if you count books. If you count her first short story, well, we’re talking twenty or maybe even twenty-one years. That’s a long time to live in someone’s skin.