Author: Jonathon

Okay, guys, for those who have let us know that they use the blog as an escape, today ain’t going to be it. I’ve tried not to have the blog reflect some of the headlines, but it feels false. Like I’m writing, but it’s not true. So today, I’ll write what I struggled not to write yesterday.
For those who have written to us to let us know they are personally touched by the tragedy in Virginia, our thoughts and prayers are with you, still. I’ve been thinking why this event has touched me and so many others so deeply. We hear of larger death tolls from Iraq and other parts of the world, daily, or nearly daily. So why is one thing a horrible headline that we sorrow over, but we go on. It does not stop most of us in our tracks, and prey upon the mind. Why are the events at Virginia Tech so much more painful?
I think first, it’s here. Let’s just be honest. We feel for other people, but it’s not us. It’s not happening on American soil. It makes me think how must everyone feel that are living in Iraq and elsewhere. How must they feel when the headlines are living down the road from them. How must every day people feel when the war report is their street?
That is why Virgina Tech has been so hard, I think. It is here. It is a place where we like to think we can send our children to learn and grow, and be safe. We all like to think that academia is a place of refuge. It is that ivory tower that the poet’s speak of. Well, yes, and no.
Anyone who has ever spent time on a campus, knows the ivory tower is also a pressure cooker. But I do not think that the shooter (why do I never use his name? Because I’m tired of people getting famous off of being crazy or evil. Yeah, he’s dead, so the fame is posthumous, but I’m still tired of it.) I don’t think the shooter was driven crazy by pressures on the campus. When someone snaps this badly, it would have happened anyway, at some point. Sometimes people just start looking for excuses, or their minds break so badly that excuses are invented that seem real to them.
I have not read the plays that the shooter wrote and have been posted on the web. I do not intend to. Perhaps if I read them, I too will see what some have said, that his violence was telegraphed in his writing. The fact that he wrote violent plays was a warning sign.
If my family had thought that, they would have had been into a therapist’s office at fourteen. My first completed story was a blood bath. Everyone died, and horribly. Only the baby lived to crawl into the wilderness to die a slow and lingering death. My family did the best thing they could have done, they patted me on the head, said this is great, and ignored it.
You guys know what I write. I would hate for people to read it and say, it reflects what I am likely to do in my real life. It’s fiction. It’s bleeps from the imagination. Please, guys, do not start reading people’s work in college classes and thinking that every person who writes scary or violent is dangerous. The vast majority of us are more harmless than the rest. We vent our anger on paper, not on other people.
We haven’t heard anymore reports of people on campus picking on Asian students. If it’s not happening anymore, I am so glad. Thank you all for being rational in the face of something so irrational. If you guys are picking on people and we’re just not hearing about it, please stop.
Remember the Oklahoma bombing? The news were reporting that it was Arabic terrorists. I didn’t buy it, I don’t know why. It smelled home grown, and it was. The bad guy looked like a thousand other Midwestern guys. But people had already done hateful things to other Americans that just looked Arabic. Don’t repeat that mistake.
Yeah, 911, was people of a certain ethnicity, but the guy who shot up the Lube’s restaurant. The guy who had the highest kill count in a mass shooting until the one at Virginia Tech, was a white guy, nothing but apple pie and America if you looked in his face. The monster doesn’t have a skin color. The monster is always us. Always looking out of the mirror. That is a rule that every policeman learns early. You want the bad guys to look like bad guys, very few of them do. The most successful are invisible. They are usually the guy, or woman, you’d most like your kid to ask for directions if they were lost. The monster hides in plain sight, always.
That last little paragraph reflects some of the reasons I stopped doing research on serial killers for awhile. You start looking at everyone and wondering. Add research on child abduction and pedophilia, and you’ll go crazy. I’ve had three different policemen tell me that I’ve got to chill. That you can’t live on yellow alert, you’ll burn yourself out. It’s a speech they usually give to other cops. Sometimes, I take my work home with me a little too much.
Yesterday was our national day of mourning for the terror that has happened. I tried not to write about how I felt, but I can’t help it. I’m here, and I mourn with my country.
It makes me think, though, how must all the other countries feel when the headlines, the body counts, are in their country? Do they feel like this? It makes all those headlines that you sometimes skim over, real. The people dying are real. The people mourning are real.
As we mourn as a nation, maybe we can try and take away something of worth from all the pain. Remember that different isn’t dangerous. That crazy doesn’t have a color. That as we search for reasons why he did it, we will find none. Not real reasons. Because for every thing that happened to him, that people say, aha, that’s it; the same things happened to hundreds of people and they didn’t get a gun and start shooting.
I haven’t seen anyone try and blame violent media yet; movies, video games, books, just his writing. Remember, that the victims he shot, the people that didn’t fight back, or jump his butt, were raised on the violent movies, video games, books, etc . . . If violence in American media causes the real life violence these students should have risen up in a mass and killed his ass. They did not. They did what most of us would have done. They hid. They blocked doors. They tried to survive. Do not let anyone blame anything for what has happened, for why he did it. Do not let any of the blame be shifted from the person who held the gun. Do not let them blame the person who sold the gun, or the people who didn’t file charges on the stalking. There is no blame anywhere but on the shooter. Make him take the full responsibility. No more trying to blame other people, or other things. Put the blame on the person who does the deed.
If you do the bad thing, then you are the bad person. No excuses, no rationals. Let the shooter take the responsibility for his deeds. Don’t look for scapegoats, when we have a perfectly good mass murderer that truly is to blame.

So many thoughts for a blog today, but I’m going to try to stick to the thought that you guys keep telling me this blog is a vacation for you. A break from the bad stuff. So no bad stuff today.
Eleven pages of FROST. So close to the end. Knock on wood, it looks like I may actually finish the book early. Like a month early. Of course, that’s just the first draft, so it’s not really finished. So, I guess, it’s not finished early. Never mind.
The first draft is rougher than normal, so it will take longer than normal to make it finished. You either pay at the beginning of a book or at the end. I guess I decided to pay at the end on this one. Oh, well.
We’re also terribly close to being done with the comic script. At least in first draft of the book and finished of the comic we’ll be done at the same time. Then I’ll get to go back through FROST and fill in those descriptions that I skipped. Names I couldn’t quite remember. Cut the cast in a few scenes, so that the bit players aren’t so numerous.
If I could finish and do like a kamikaze rewrite. Read marathon session. Then it could all be done at the same time. It might be worth it to have the boards actually clear of work for a few days.

We’ve heard from some people at Virgina Tech. That they do indeed use my blog as an escape. I’m sorry that yesterday’s blog wasn’t an escape for you. You do have our prayers, and will continue to do so.
There is also a blog below this one that is about what’s happening, but for those of you who want an escape and not more discussion about headlines; this blog is for you.
I got seven pages done today on A LICK OF FROST. We are teetering on the brink of loosing one of the major men. One of the people Merry cares about, deeply. I had to stop today before it was a done deal. Now I have to decide whether to pull a rabbit out of my hat and save him, or whether to let the plot take the turn it is fighting to take.
I usually get into trouble when I fight my plot or characters. I also know that I’m tired. Physically and emotional drained. I hadn’t recovered from writing THE HARLEQUIN when I had to set down and begin this book. It’s called deadlines folks. I’m successful, beyond my wildest dreams, but it comes with deadlines. I’m big enough now that I could say, wait for me, and they would wait. They wouldn’t be happy but they’d wait.
I am strangely loath to do that. I missed some deadlines when I was going through my divorce. Something about your world falling apart and remaking itself just sort of upset my apple cart. With two big book series, and I mean big in page count as well as how it’s doing, you get behind and you never really catch up. So now that I’m sort of caught up, I don’t want to get behind again. Especially, simply because I’m tired. It just doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to disappoint you guys, or myself.
I put a preview in the back of the last paperback, DANSE MACABRE, one as a sort of movie preview of THE HARLEQUIN, but also because it was a way to let you guys see a major portion of the next book way early. I am going to put some of the book up on the web site, but having trouble finding a chapter that doesn’t give away either the mystery or a relationship plot. I’m so bad at sharing without over sharing that I may get Jon and Darla to help me vote. Heck, I might even get my editor Susan to give a suggestion.
You guys do realize that you don’t have the complete first chapter in the preview, right? It’s only part, because it’s like a movie preview, bits and pieces, scenes. I was going to put in the rest of the first chapter on the web site, but a lot of people have asked for something completely different. A different point in the book. If you want something completely different, I may only be able to give a partial chapter, or a scene, because of plot over sharing.
I’ll try to decide this week and have Darla put it up next week. Or maybe this week, if we can decide on what to share.
We finally have Edward on stage again. He’s always so fun to write.
But I’m getting a major Edward fix with the comic special that Jon and I are writing together, because it’s one of the first times Anita and Edward work together. So I get to do lots of scenes with them. In fact, I had to cut a bunch of dialogue, because I just loose my head when Edward steps on stage. I always have to cut a lot of cool dialogue. He just has a way with words.
One of the many things Jon brings to the collaboration is an ability to keep me on track and keep track of how much space we have. I’m used to working in hundreds of pages. A comic script is under forty for each piece. Well under. It’s the shortest thing I’ve written in years. It’s both nice and hard.
One of the good things about a series is you can save outtakes for possible use later on. Good Edward dialogue is always nice to keep around.
Anyway, we’re off to bed. Dinner is done. Dishes are washing. The kiddo is tucked in bed. Just put the dogs to bed, and the day is done.
Our toads came back to our water feature. We were afraid the cold had killed them, but there are even more now than there were before the freeze. Go figure.

This is the blog to skip if you are personally involved with the Virginia Tech tragedy. Also skip this blog if you are wanting something more upbeat and cheerful.
Okay, you’ve all been given sufficient warning, here goes.
We’re hearing reports that some Asian students on campus are getting threatened. I know everyone is scared, but do you really think you can spot the bad guy by what he looks like? Trust me, you can’t. This particular bad guy was Korean, and so looks different from the run of the mill student at Virgina Tech, but it was accidental that he doesn’t look like every other student. He didn’t go crazy because of this ethnic background. Remember there were Asians among the victims, too.
The shooter went crazy because he went crazy, because he was crazy, not because of what he looked like. Crazy comes in every color and flavor of human being on this planet. The vast majority of serial killers are white. The vast majority of college rapes are done by the person that looks just like every body else. Most bad guys don’t stand out from the crowd. Most monsters look just like everyone else. That’s how monsters survive, by blending in.
We’re also hearing that the shooter was reported for stalking, and other weird and frightening behavior. That is the exception to the rule folks. So, please just because someone is different don’t automatically assume they are the bad guy, or they are the crazy ones. Please, don’t start picking on people. In the midst of all the fear and sorrow, be kind to one another.
I guess that’s the main message today. Be kind to one another. Don’t let fear and grief turn you into a monster, too.
Remember that crazy doesn’t have a color, or a religion.

I see this blog as a vacation for you guys from the hardships of the day. But today is not going to be a vacation from the news, because I, like many of you, can’t stop thinking about the day’s headlines.
My heart goes out to all who were personally touched by the horror that occurred at Virginia Tech. I have read the papers, checked the web, watched the news, as more information has come in. It is yet another senseless tragedy.
I have no words of wisdom. No quote that seems to help. I have nothing to add except my own sorrow, and that we add our prayers to those of so many others today.
It is events like this that make me feel that somehow my job isn’t as important as it might be. I am always reluctant to take up time from real policeman, real firefighters, real nurses, real doctors, real EMTs, the real people who help us in our times of need. I always feel like I should apologize for taking up their time. I write about tragedy, they deal with it for real. When the real stuff hits, I find fiction cannot compare either in pain or triumph with fact.
They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and that can be true, but truth is also more painful than fiction, and that is always true.

A weekend alone just Jon and me. A real weekend alone, not on vacation or some business trip, but actually a whole weekend alone at home. Ahhh!
Tension just sort of flows away. I think I am just getting socialized beyond my body and mind’s ability to be happy about it. People, just like dogs, have different levels of socialization that they are comfortable with for extended periods of time. Jon and I aren’t hermits, but strangely the e-mails and phone calls for the comics; two publishers, which means you have two editors, two publicists, plus everyone’s assistants, plus my agent and her assistant . . . that’s a lot of talking.
Jon and Darla try to take most of it, but they can’t take it all. Some decisions have to be mine. And also Darla works from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon. (Her choice.) So there are two hours in the afternoon where Mary is done doing comp controller stuff for the day and off to pick the kiddo up from school. Darla is gone home. (Contrary to the way people send stuff to her here, or try to call, she doesn’t live here.) Jon and I are in the office working on the afternoon project. (Right now the comic script for the second half of the Anita Blake special, “The First Death,”.) So interruptions are not helpful to the creative process. It’s one of the reasons working in an office drove me crazy before I left corporate America. When I concentrate, I concentrate, and even a few minutes of interruption can be disastrous.
But this is Sunday morning. I told Jon to sleep in, I’d take care of the dogs and getting tea brewed. I have not turned on a radio, or a television, or anything. I guess blogging itself is an interaction with people, but it’s quiet, and it’s my choice. It’s not like you guys are beeping me on the computer to demand my attention. I get to sit down and blog in the quiet at my own pace.
I actually had to have Jon turn off the functions on my computers in my office so I could not get or receive e-mail or instant messenger. That little balloon popping up in the middle of me writing was incredibly distracting.
I do all e-mail from the ‘office’ computer in the kitchen. It’s the only area that everyone has access to, since Mary and Sherry both need it, too. We’re thinking about moving it somewhere else but no one has come up with a good place for it that is as convenient for everyone else. But as all computers must, it attracts paper and work, and it begins to creep through the kitchen. This idea of a kitchen office sucks unless you have a surface dedicated to it.
I am sipping the first cup of tea of the day, and enjoying the silence, and the strangeness of being actually alone. Unless the dogs count, if they count, then I am truly never, ever alone. But somehow dogs are not the same level of intrusion that even your best friend can be. Dogs do not demand the things that people do. I guess that’s why they are so relaxing.
When you get a puppy you have a window of weeks to socialize it. If that window is missed, then the dog can have a life time struggle with interaction with people. My days as a child were mostly just my grandmother and me. Very quiet, very scheduled. Sometimes I feel like a puppy that missed it’s socialization period. No matter how much I love my friends and Jon’s family, and how much fun I am having with the comic book and the script. No matter how wonderful the news is from New York and elsewhere. Sometimes it gets a bit too much.
I guess the quote I’m thinking of is:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:”
It’s the first two lines from William Wordsworth’s poem THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US.
I hadn’t read the whole poem in awhile. It’s worth reading and like all good poems worth rereading. Poems do not change, but we change as readers. It was the beginning of the poem that made me think of it, but today it is the end that makes me like it all the more.
“. . . I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”
I’ll have to get my book of English Romantic Poets back out. Time to reread. Time to rediscover, or make new discoveries.
Poems and books do not change, but the reader changes, and finds new messages among the old.

We have power, or rather didn’t loose it yet. I can’t explain it but I know that somewhere in the process of getting the generator that we will loose power. So I’ll blog while I can.
I got over the hump with the scene that was giving me such fits. How?
By throwing out the chapter; by destroying the scene that wasn’t working.
Once I finally let it go, and rewrote it completely it worked. Cool.
Then I did the next day’s work and I ended the chapter with a main character very hurt. Hurt enough that I made a note, is such and such dead for good?
I got up this morning to that note on my computer. No wonder the writing isn’t going well.
I could loose some of the minor men, frankly, as a writer the extended cast is getting to be a burden, but the main guys. The core group, that is a different thing all together. The person now lying on the floor in Maeve Reed’s house is not someone I ever thought we’d loose.
I’ve debated all morning.
I finally realized that I was willing to let him go. I’m tired. Physically, emotionally, every way. This tiredness comes to almost every book, a point where I just want it done. It is a dangerous point in a book this almost desperate weariness to be done. If you are not careful you will make choices that you will regret later. There is almost always a point of desperate weariness where you simply want done. Ironically for me, it is almost never close enough to the end to be the end. It’s close to the end, but not that close.
I’m frantic to be done, but there are too many pages left to do a marathon session and be truly done. But I know that if I’m not careful I will end up finishing the book sooner, but having to rewrite it from the point where I got frantic. Because I will inevitably make a choice that makes it quicker to finish, but not better. So then, I’ve actually cost myself time, because an extensive rewrite is needed on the last third or so of the book.
It’s that old saying, haste makes waste. Too slow, drives me crazy as a writer. I spend a great deal of the last part of any book balancing those two instincts. Fast enough to finish, slow enough to make the right choices.
I also should never have left a note at the top of an empty page, “Is such and such dead for real?” It was almost guaranteed to make the writing grind to a halt. I know better than that. I know never to end at a difficult point without at least throwing a few sentences out so that the next day begins with something, a beginning.
Sometimes I write like I’m building a bridge across a huge chasm. I lay a few boards at a time, then I can see a little more, and I move by inches or feet. Putting that note in front of me as the only thing on the next page was like stepping up to the bottomless chasm with nothing but empty space between me and the next side. I know that I need at least a little rope, a few boards, something so that crossing that emptiness looks a little more possible than impossible.
There are three kinds of scenes that I never want to start with a blank page the next day: sex scenes; fight scenes; emotionally powerful scenes. A blank screen for either of those three is bad thing for me. But yesterday I didn’t know what to do. I was caught off guard by the potential loss. I hoped that getting away from the computer for awhile would help me decide, or give me the courage to see it through. But no, I just got up to that awful note and stared at the screen.
This feels strangely like that moment near the end of CIRCUS OF THE DAMNED where I’d planned to kill Jean-Claude off. When push came to shove, I could not do it. Now, all these years later, I’m glad I didn’t do it. Anita and I would have missed him. The series would be completely different. There, having written that, helps me think, at last.
The man lying on the floor, so hurt, is too valuable to us. We would weep for him, Merry and me. Me, being tired and wanting the book done, and wanting more control over the plots, by that I mean . . . Well, with Jean-Claude he was taking over the plots more and more. I wanted him not to do that and was willing to kill him to stop it. With Merry it’s just the sheer number of the men. It feels stifling and difficult. I need a smaller cast, but killing people arbitrarily is not the way to do it. Just as killing Jean-Claude would have been wrong, this character would be too missed to loose, I think.
So hard to know for certain. I think I will write the scene from two, maybe three plot of views. (Yes, I did mean plot of view, not point of view. I know my point of view, it’s Merry. But through the same set of eyes you see things differently if the plot changes. So I will do three different plot of views.) Dead, not dead, and metaphysical. Or sort of a combination of all of the above. We’ll see which one flies, but at least if I write them out, see them, Merry’s reaction, I’ll be better able to know what is needed here. One of the things I love about fiction is that you can kill someone today and bring them back tomorrow, with no one remembering that they died yesterday, because they didn’t. I have the power to go back in time and change things. God, I love that. If only it worked in real life, eh?

We are going to be without power today. Trying to make things convenient for the next power outtage will make the next few days very inconvenient. So, in case I don’t get a chance to blog again for a couple of days I just wanted to let you guys know that we will be without power.
Technology, ain’t it grand.

I’m listening to Christmas music today. Anyone who has been reading my blog for awhile knows what that means.
It means, the writing is not going well.
Merry usually writes to Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, Thornley. But when the writing slows down I switch to musicals. Yesterday it was Peter Pan. Today, Pan ain’t doing it.
Today, it’s Christmas carols. Sigh.
A LICK OF FROST is almost done. About a hundred pages out. It’s unusual to hit a wall this solid this late in the game, but it does happen. Unfortunately.
I’ve got this great last line that’s been staring me in the face for days, and I have no idea what happens next. This means several things. One, that I’ve just been so disrupted when the book was hot that it’s cooled. Two, that no matter how cool the last line is, it needs to go. Kill your darlings. Three, that the entire scene is a rabbit hole that will lead me down the garden path instead of to the end of the book. Four, that something is wrong with my approach to the scene or this part of the plot. Something so wrong that my subconscious is rebelling until I figure it out. Fifth, sometimes a book just goes cold. If that’s the case then it’s like trying to rekindle a fire that’s gone down to ash. There’s a spark in there somewhere, you just got to find it, and coax it back to life.
Today, my goal is figure out if the scene needs to go. The last paragraph needs to go. Or whether I need to back up even further and cut this part of the plot entirely. I don’t see how to cut this part of the plot, but it was originally supposed to go after the scene with the goblin twins, Ash and Holly, so maybe it needs to go second as originally planned. Sometimes it’s that simple. I’m off to try to find out if the solution is simple or difficult. I’m hoping for simple.

It’s afternoon and I’m back in my office for the second writing session of the day.
Jon is sitting behind me at the other desk. He’s going over notes for the comic, while I continue to out line the rest of A LICK OF FROST. It’s the true end game so I need to see what’s left, and what still needs to be done before we hit the last slide to the end.
When the notes are done for me, then we’ll work on the comic script. Because I’ll need to let the notes for FROST percolate overnight.
We’re drinking tea out of two of the souvenir mugs we got at Disney World. A huge crow just flew by the window. Big enough that I’m wondering if it’s a raven. We do get them here. The grackles are beginning to mob the huge black bird. Which I guess is fair since the crows mob any hawk they find.
Hope your Easter, or Ostara, was lovely. Ours was very nice. Dinner with Jon’s family. I must have been good because the bunny got me a Dove fairy bunny. It’s so pretty I hate to eat it.
It’s probably Trinity’s last Easter where she ‘believes’ in the bunny. She asked us the question this year. Is he real? Really real? We actually answered this question last year and she didn’t like the answer. Our reply this year was, “Do you really want the answer?” She said, “No, I don’t.” So we didn’t answer it. I think she believes that if she stops believing in the bunny that she’ll stop getting a basket of goodies.
Blue Jays have joined the mobbing, and it is a raven. A raven bigger than a Cooper’s Hawk, but a little smaller than a Red-tail, but not much smaller. Big, black, bird.