Author: Jonathon

Difficult writing day.
I finally fled the house this morning and went to St. Louis Bread Co. to have breakfast and write long hand. Jon kept me company, but he could only sit there while I wrote. I’m so lost in this scene I don’t have a good idea to bounce off of anyone.
The book was going so well, then I had two days in a row where my pattern was disrupted. That’s all it takes. I seem particularly fragile to interruptions when the book is in that frenzy state. Two days in a row of not being able to follow my schedule and I am back to a crawl.
Jon reminded me that this is typical for me. It made me go, oh yeah. But it didn’t make the problem go away. After an agonizing morning I got about a page and a half done.
I’ve been staring at that page and a half for awhile now and I have no idea how to get through this scene. Three days ago it was so vivid, so real, so . . . I knew exactly what to do and if I hadn’t been interrupted maybe I’d be done by now, with this scene at least.
I find that pattern disruption isn’t as bad with the comic script because I have Jon to play off of, and we help keep each other going. The book is still all me, and if the only person doing the work has a problem, well, you’ve got a problem.
It’s not the first time this has happened. It won’t be the last, but damn it is irritating.
Now back to working on the Anita Special comic, THE FIRST DEATH.

Okay, not a page to my name yet today. Why?
Because my schedule has been disrupted.
Yesterday I was in a frenzy to write the end of the Merry book. Now I’m lost, floundering, because all I can do is stare at the clock and realize I have only two hours to be somewhere else.
I wish I was one of those people that could use small bits of time well and placidly, but I am not. I am one of those people that needs tons of uninterrupted time to write. Normally, it takes me about an hour to two just to get into the groove for writing.
Yesterday was the exception. Yesterday we were out the door by eight o’clock, walked the dogs, and I was at my desk by eight-thirty. I also got to see dawn, but it worked. By 9:30 I had my five pages done. Which meant I was able to go to get allergy shots and my other appointment after lunch without feeling frantic. A LICK OF FROST has reached the frenzy stage where any interruption makes me want to scream and grab something sharp.
I just want to write and everything is a distraction. It’s a good sign that I feel this way about the book. It’s a bad thing because life doesn’t work that way. Or mine doesn’t.
Life doesn’t stop because the book is on high.
I guess if I was willing to give all my life over to other people, it might work that way, but I can’t. One, I’m a control freak. Two, I have trust issues. Three, did I mention I’m a control freak? But also, I love my friends and family. I want to see them.
Back in the day when I was only doing one book series at a time, I actually had regular time off between books. I could catch up with everyone. My schedule is more like a regular job now with no extended off periods between projects. Which means the schedule doesn’t loosen really.
I’m still struggling with that after about six, or seven years. I still tend to work as if I get those extended breaks. I write in a frenzy when it’s working. I write obsessively. I don’t know how to do little bits. I don’t know how to do it small.
I write large, and immerse myself in the world. Which, considering what I write, is sort of bothersome. I’m better able to separate out character voice from my own when I write Merry, because she isn’t as close to may natural voice. Anita still sounds like me, so it’s harder to step away from the computer and not carry her and all of it with me.
I tend to be depressed if she’s having a hard time in the book. I tend to be anxious if her anxiety is high. But since I’m high strung enough for both of us, I guess it’s okay.
My therapist suggested, could I stop writing such violent things. She thought it might be affecting me. You think?
I’m at peace with the violence again. I think I just needed a time away from the real crime research. I needed to step back for a little bit. Better now.
The sex, well, that’s still problematic. How do I feel about the sex? Sometimes I’m fine with it. Sometimes, I’m ready to cool it down.
Have any of you guys seen the new movie “INFAMOUS” about Truman Capote writing his book IN COLD BLOOD? We just got to see it this last weekend.
It was a different take on the same story as “Capote”. It tried to explain why Capote never wrote anything else much after IN COLD BLOOD. Whether they’re right about the reason, or not, it was Sandra Bullock playing Harper Lee who said the thing that stayed with me.
I’m going to paraphrase a little, sorry. She said, “That Frank Sinatra said in an interview about Judy Garland. That she died a little bit with every song. That’s how much she gave. Writing is like that, you die a little bit trying to get it right. And sometimes you don’t want to do it again, because now you know how much it costs.”
Harper Lee wrote one of the great books of all time, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, and never finished another book. Having her say the words made them all the more poignant to me.
Do you die a little bit with every book? Do you give that much of yourself?
I’m pretty sure that one of the reasons my first marriage broke apart was my devotion to my writing. Is that a high enough cost?
How high a price do we pay to get the book right? How much of ourselves do we give to you, the readers? How much of us do you get? For those of us who don’t hide behind our fiction, for those of us who put bits of our soul and heart on display, maybe too much.
Some days it’s the most glorious thing in the world to write my books. Some days, it is the hardest thing in the world to climb the stairs and sit down and make myself do it.
Today, it’s hard.
I’m stopping now. Gotta go put on make-up and get into something less comfortable. Gotta go put on the game face.

End of the day. Twelve pages on FROST; three pages on the comic script with Jon.
Time to think about dinner. Time to wind down for the day.
It was a lovely weekend. I started the day feeling refreshed and ready to ride up that hill for another try at the dragon.
Now, the fight is over. I won today, but I took some hits. I’m tired.
I didn’t mean to do twelve pages on FROST. I kept thinking I’ll just write until I get to this point. Just reintroduce the goblin twins; Ash and Holly. Just describe the red-caps. Just . . . well you see how it went.
Sometimes I write the way I use to run, back when I jogged. I’d say, just to that stop sign and then I’ll stop. But I didn’t stop, because then I’d pick a new land mark. Run just until you get to that rose bush, then you can rest. Run just until you get to the end of that driveway, then you can rest. But I’d seldom actually let myself rest until I got back home.
Was that lying to myself? I mean, I know me. I knew I wasn’t really stopping. I guess it was just the best carrot I could come up with. I’m pretty good at dangling the carrot just out of reach, but not so good at actually giving it to myself.
Yeah, I’m pretty bad at rewarding myself. Really good at work though.

This was the quote of the day from Jon’s Google page:

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. – An English Professor

Gee, and I thought my old Writing Prof in college was cruel. She was, but not in writing. Never anything I could take somewhere and prove she hated me.

For those who don’t know, I was kicked out of my college writing program by the head of the program. She told me I’d never be good enough publish. I’d never make it as a writer and that I should just give up now. She was much more complete on her listing of my shortcomings as a writer then I am being here. It was a long talk. She reduced me to tears and sent me out into the world to fail.

But her major reason for asking me to leave the writing program was that I was, "A corrupting influence on the other students."

It wasn’t the sex. I wasn’t really writing sex in college. But I was writing horror and dark fantasy, and heroic fantasy. The stories that I’d offered to get into the writing program at the college had all been horror. They accepted me, then she, the head of the program, decided she could fix me. She would show me the error of my ways and convince me to give up this evil genre writing.

When she realized not only could she not convince me to write something else, but that the other students in her upper level writing class were beginning to write genre, too, she decided I had to go.

So, she called me into her office and tried to destroy me a writer and as a person, really.

People ask, have you sent her all your books? Have you shown her that you did succeed?

That wasn’t her point. She didn’t try and destroy me as a writer because I couldn’t write, she sought to destroy me because I could. She tried to make sure I would never write again, because she feared I would go out and do exactly what I have done.

Corrupt millions.

Mwuh-ha-ha-ha-ha

Eat that Dr. Bush.

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.

Jon and I just got back from seeing the 300 at the theater. Our friends who had seen it were split down the middle. Half liked; half did not. Jon and I both liked it.

It’s well worth seeing, and definitely will loose something on the small screen. It’s one of those movies that to get the full effect intended by the director and everyone else involved, including Frank Miller, you need to see it big. Because it’s a big movie in that old time, old Hollywood way. What do I mean by that?

I mean it’s spectacular. If someone dies, he dies spectacularly. If someone rides a horse it’s done in slow motion. Heck, deviant sex is done spectacularly. There were things glimpsed in the tent of the Persian King Xerxes that made me queasy. But it was spectacular, and creepily erotic. (I didn’t actually see anything in the tent that I didn’t know existed, but just because I know people may do it, doesn’t mean I want to be reminded.) It was a brief scene, but I’m more likely to remember anything that disturbs me, and write about a version of it later.

The battle scenes were amazing. Though, Jon and I cannot argue with the New York Times review when it said that the Spartans obviously had better gyms. I haven’t seen that many six packs outside of a liquor store. But they were pretty.

The Queen and the politics back home in Sparta get a lot more play in the movie than in the graphic novel, and that worked for us. It added the human cost sort of like the wife half of the story line for the television show THE UNIT. (Recently saw it on DVD, and both of us loved it.)

The Persians were the enemy of the Spartans and the story is narrated by a story teller who is Spartan. Which explains why the Persians, the enemy, are monstrous and deviant. It is traditional to make your enemy evil. Because only in making your enemy evil can you kill them with no regard, because they are not human to you. This modern idea in the West to make everyone human, everyone nice, and try to get along, is a very, very modern idea.

I tried not to buy into the movie completely, but by the end they had me. I shed tears for the pretty warriors, and we understood why a line at the end was a curse and not a blessing, if you were a Spartan man. “May you live forever.” Live forever, instead of dying a beautiful death.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everybody. Did you see the St. Patrick’s Day poster that Brett Booth did of Phillip? It turned out even better than I’d hoped. But as cool as the poster is, I’m not thinking about St. Pat. I’m thinking about finally being able to talk about the Anita special comic.

Thank God, I finally can talk about it. Not being able to was driving me nuts.

I write what comes into my head, especially when I blog. Because I couldn’t talk about the comic special uber-secret Anita project, I kept coming up against a blank wall in my head. I wanted to talk about what Jon and I were doing in the afternoon, but I couldn’t, not until it was ready to be announced. It was soooo hard.

Now, I can say with a clear conscious that the afternoon project is the Anita Blake Special comic, and Jon and I are writing it together. He sees script in his head better than I do. I write dialogue better. He understands comics and how they are arranged on a page better than I do. I have an incredibly disciplined work ethic. He reminds me that it’s still supposed to be fun.

I must say after a morning of being alone in my office with only my own thoughts for company to work in the afternoon with someone else on a project so different is very refreshing. I don’t mean it’s different simply because it’s Anita and not Merry. Since I working on the next Merry book in the morning. I mean it’s a different medium. A different type of story telling. Just different enough to reignite some enthusiasm that had begun to grow pale inside me.

I still love my work and my books and my characters, but it is work. Working on the comics has helped remind me how it felt long ago when it was new. It’s funny how even something wonderful can grow ho-hum if you don’t come at it with a beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is a term from Buddhism, or Zen, or both. It means to be always new when you look at something, even if you’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m pretty good at the beginner’s mind, but in the last little bit, the last few years, I’d begun to loose that newness.

Jon has been so excited. It’s been harder on him not sharing with people because for him comics isn’t a late love. Comics has always been one of his first loves. It’s been something he wanted to write and work in, as a job. I didn’t realize how much of a front runner dream it was to him until we started working on the GUILTY PLEASURES comic. His knowledge of comics has been invaluable. I’m getting my feet under me now, but at the beginning I found it all very confusing.

This new comic will allow me to write about something that many of you fans have been asking about for years. You wanted a prequeal to GUILTY PLEASURES. You wanted to see the first time Jean-Claude and Anita met. Her first time working with RPIT. Her first time meeting Edward.

I couldn’t do it for you, because I can’t write Anita without knowing everything I already know about her and her world. I can’t unknow things. In a novel I’d be doing all that interior dialogue and reactions, so since I couldn’t write a younger Anita whose reaction to everyone was new, I couldn’t do a prequeal.

But comics are different. You don’t do much interior dialogue. A few wiseass comments, but other than that it’s just dialogue and pictures. It means that in this medium I can do that prequeal. I can have Anita and Jean-Claude meet because I don’t have to delve too deeply into her head. I can show one of the first times dealing with Edward without having to fight not to know he’s not quite the bastard we think. Comics has freed me up to show some of the early stuff you would never have gotten to see any other way. It’s been pretty cool.

Also, I don’t have to describe a room, or clothing. I just say what the room looks like in a general way, and describe the clothing a little. The artist does the rest. It’s been very nifty. And that’s on the original comic book of GUILTY PLEASURES. Brett Booth has been doing an amazing job.

For the special we are working with a new artist, Joe Phillips. The only way for Brett to have done both the regular comic and the special was if we could clone him like in the old BEWITCHED television series, where they were always making two of Darren when he was over worked. But since we can’t make more of Brett, we need a guest artist. That’s Joe.

So, finally I can tell you what we’re doing in the afternoon. Now you know. I hope I don’t have to keep another secret like this for awhile. I am simply not good at it. I so would be a bad spy.

“The First Death”

You asked for it and now you get to see it.

This July, Laurell K Hamilton, Dabel Brothers Productions, and Marvel come together to give the fans a look into Anita Blake’s past.

This July will see the release of a two issue limited series that take place almost a year before the events in Guilty Pleasures.

In the comic you will get to see the first time Anita and Jean-Claude meet. Anita’s first time inside Guilty pleasures, her first serial killer case, and a very early encounter with Edward.

Scripted by Laurell K. Hamilton and Jonathon Green
Art by Joe Phillips
$3.99 for 40-pages of story in each issue.

Look for it this July.
posted by Jonathon at 4:31 PM  

I did a bad thing the last time I worked on A LICK OF FROST. I ended a chapter, and the beginning of the next chapter is a sex scene. I know better than to stop writing and leave a sex scene as the first thing to write in the morning. Even a few sentences help get me started. But an empty page with sex . . . When I stopped, it made sense. The characters were ready and I was ready, now it’s like doing a lot of good foreplay but having the door bell go off before you can get to that next part. You have to get up, answer the door, take care of some business, or something, and don’t get back to the bedroom until a few hours later. The foreplay was too long ago, and it’s all to start over. Sigh. So instead of working on the scene, I’m blogging. Maybe I’ll do that interview that’s due. Or the next Newsletter. There are all sorts of things I can do that are work, but will allow me to avoid the scene. I learned years ago to do just a few sentences anything to continue the heat, so when I sit down the next day, I’m not staring at blank screen. I’m not a rookie. I knew better, but I’d done thirteen pages, and I was tired. I vow to remember that next time no matter how tired that I just need a few sentences on the next part of the scene. It doesn’t even need to be sentences that stay in the scene. It can be bad notes, but something to prime the pump and not have to stare at a blank screen.