Author: Jonathon

I’m not sure the dragon won today, but I certainly feel like I’ve gotten chewed around the edges. I have a page for the whole day. It seems like every time I gain any speed on this ending I get interrupted with some bit of publicity for a different book, or with some mundane topic that can’t wait. I’ve been nearly done with this book for so long. I’ve never been this close to the end and not been able to cross the finish line for this many days. What is wrong? Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever had this many different projects in so many different stages of completion before. Each stage demands attention like trying to give birth to a newborn while you’re teaching a toddler how to walk, an elementary age their A, B, Cs, a teenager how to drive, and a college student how to be independent. All the above while still in hard labor with a baby that just doesn’t seem to want to see the outside world. I am just not very good at multi-tasking. Yet, my career has reached a point where it is a skill that I must acquire, and become proficient at, and like now, not later. Frankly, I don’t know how to do it. Nobody is good at everything. I am one of those people that is best when I can concentrate completely on one task at a time until it’s complete. It has been years since I had the luxury of actually seeing one project through before the next one needed attention. I keep thinking I’ll get better at it, but instead I seem to be getting worse.
The dragon didn’t win today, I didn’t get to fight him long enough for him to win, or me to loose. I think the dragon is on the hill bored, because I start up the hill, but keep getting a message from the castle before I can get up to the cave on top. If there is a prince to save up there, he’s toast, because I’m never going to get there. Or that’s how it feels today. Maybe tomorrow will be a better and more productive day. Hope so, because I am getting majorly discouraged. The slow pace has made me begin to doubt the climax of the book and start changing things. Changing stuff before the first draft is complete is death. You will be consumed by your own doubts, and second guessing. Full speed ahead, or I loose my way. One of the reasons I write so quickly is that slow does not work for me as a writer. Slow gives me too much time to change my mind. I end up rewriting things that don’t need it, taking out scenes I do need, or putting in things I don’t. This is the freaking end of the book, I know what needs to be done. I know what happens, damnit. So why I can’t I get there, because about the time the book is rolling there’s a phone call, or some God awful important thing that needs my attention. The real problem is that it does need my attention. I’ve fought for control of as much of my career as possible, well, the price for that, is you have to control it. So bitch and whine though I may, I wouldn’t be happy if I was out of the loop. I certainly wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t have the control. No, that would make me severely unhappy. But . . . I am puzzled by how to balance it all. I feel like one of those Circus acts where you balance the plates on the long poles and run from plate to plate keeping them spinning. Right now, it feels like the line of poles is so very long that there is no way to keep them all spinning, no way to not have some of the plates come crashing down. I can only run so fast. Today, it was not fast enough. Today, I have a page, and almost no progress on a book that is due in less than three weeks. I worked very hard to have the deadline for this book moved up. To give you guys the book in June instead of October of ’07. But I thought I was days away from the finish. Now I’m stalled, and I can’t seem to get up the hill. I’ve gone from having months to finish this book, to weeks, and I am paying the price for the change. I am tired, and I have lost faith. Lost faith in the book, in myself, in the plot. Every writer does this, but usually my low point is somewhere close to the beginning. The beginning didn’t give me any trouble because I had written the first chapter months ago. I should have remembered that the book has this moment, all books have it, that moment when you don’t believe you can pull it off. After twenty plus books and there still, always, that moment. A moment when you think you have failed before you’ve even really tried. I should have understood that if I didn’t have this moment early, I would have it late. Strangely, I feel better having written that. I had forgotten what was happening. I had forgotten that this is the moment of despair that every book has for the writer. This book fooled me. I was so close to the finish line, so close, that I thought, well, finally I’ve gotten to that point as a writer where despair does not come to you, and wail like a banshee on your shoulder. I was too confident, and that’s how it suckered me. I thought I was safe, but every book has it’s moment of despair. I can think, oh, that’s what this is, I’ve done this before. I’ve done this twenty-two times before. I’ve been in this dark place many times. It is an illusion. There’s nothing wrong with the book. It hasn’t failed. What has failed is the writer’s nerve. That part of us that gives us the courage to sit in a room alone and make stuff up out of whole cloth, and be brave enough to share it with other people. Brave enough to put a little piece of yourself out there for others to enjoy, or hate. It takes courage to fight the dragon, and sometimes the dragon has a wizard helping him. The wizard sends ghosts and banshees to cry in our ears, that no one will want to read this, that this story does not work, does not hold together. The despair says, this time the magic did not work. This time if you climb the hill to the dragon’s cave you will be destroyed, because the book in your hands is not real, and will not shield you this time. But it is not true. There is nothing wrong with your book, or you. The despair is a trick to see if you can push past it, and conquer what you fear. This will be my twenty-third trip up the hill. I know I can do it, because I’ve done it before. Tomorrow I will get up. My husband and I will get our kid off to school. We will walk the dogs. Then I will come up here to my office. I will put on my armor, I will say a prayer, and I will run up that damn hill.

I got up this morning, glanced out the bathroom window, and thought, holy shit, it snowed last night. I know the temperature was dropping but how cold did it get? Then I calmed down and realized it was just a really heavy frost. But it did blanket the roofs like a young snow, glittering in the early light. I left Jon to snooze. He’d requested a little more sleep. I’m fine with that. Sometimes it’s nice to be the first one up in a quiet house. Okay, the dogs are howling to be let out, and so it’s not so quiet, but I’m the only biped up. I throw on one of Jon’s wintry coats, and out the dogs and I go into dawn light, and a frost that is every where. The leaves on the ground are edged with it, outlined and decorated it with the white crystal lines of it. The leaves on the plants hang heavier with the weight of the cold and the ice. It’s not just a frost, it’s a killing frost. I’m suddenly thinking of Merry and her world. I’m thinking of our Killing Frost. I’m thinking of him as I stand there with Pip tugging on his leash. I breathe in the cold air with that winter bite to it, and I’m thinking of Frost. He comes to me as if his name sake conjured him. I can almost feel his arms, how tall he is, how solid, how strangely real. I stand there with a herd of pugs around my feet, and the big puppy like a black giant amount them, and I’m faraway in my head. Yet, again strangely, I am very present. I am noticing the way the frost touches everything. I breath it in and try to remember the taste of the air, the feel of the heavy frost on the leaves. How it melts if you touch it with your finger tips. It turns to ice, to water, at the warmth of my fingers. If you’re careful you can brush it, delicate and unreal, touch the ice, touch the first breath of Winter’s cold, but if you linger too long, touch too hard, the frost melts, is destroyed. My touch, my warmth, destroys it, like some delicate work of art that you’ve rubbed too hard. I stand there and think, this is Frost’s namesake, this is what he is, what he became. This first death, this first harbinger of the winter kill. The sun rises and where it touches the frost melts, fades, dies. In the shadowed places the frost lingers. Like Frost, himself, who found refuge of a sort in the dark and shadow of the Unseelie court. I stand there in the morning light, and think of him. I’m not completely done with the current Anita book. THE HARLEQUIN is almost finished, but not quite. It’s unusual, nay unheard of, for me to get distracted this close to the end by another book, another world. But I’m thinking about Frost today, as stand surrounded by his namesake. I think winter will be a good time to write the next Merry book, or maybe it will just make Frost’s part easier to write. Some writers would be going, no, don’t think about another book before you’ve finished this one. I think it’s a good sign. MISTRAL’S KISS the fifth Merry book will be out in December, but the sixth book, is moving liquid in my head. I think by the time I take my two weeks off, I will be ready to sit down and write. Frost is in my head trying to tell his story, or his part of the next story. I actually know less about what will happen in book six than I ever have with a Merry book. Once, that would have bothered me, but not now,now it feels like freedom, as if I’d over plotted, over planned. Sometimes it’s nice to fling yourself into space and let the words catch you. I’ve spent a few books clinging to the ground, but it feels like it’s time to go to the top of the big top. Time to grab the trapeze again, and soar. Time to let go and see who catches me. Today, it feels like I know whose hands would be there waiting to pull me into his arms. Frost is talking in my head, not in words, but in touches, the way his hair feels against my face, all tactile and touch. I get writers asking me how do you make your characters so real? I try to answer. I talk about needing to know the hair color, eye color, height, skin tone, all the building blocks, but in the end it’s the way their smile lights their face. In the end it’s that I know how it feels to have Frost’s arms wrapped around me from behind. I know the feel of his body. I know the texture of his hair, and how it looks in different kinds of light as it spills around his face. I can feel him. I realize that that is often the way for me. I felt Jean-Claude’s shirt slide across my skin. It is not about something cold and distant. I know my characters the way you know your best friends, and in some cases your spouses. I choose the word spouse carefully here, because I’ve talked to too many people that see lovers as causal. I am not causal with my characters. I know them as you begin to know a spouse. That day in, day out, familiarity, that you need to truly KNOW someone. The feeling fades as the frost fades. The leaves and grass are just wet now. I cannot feel him as I did, but I know now the sensation will come back. I’ve had such vivid sensory memory with Anita and her crew, but never with Merry. I’ve had to fight to know Merry and her people. Then suddenly, as suddenly as the frost itself, I can feel him. I know the others will come now. The door is open.

Hey,
This is an informational post. I’m doing it because Laurell’s hands and lap are full of our 60lbs lap dog.
Laurell wrote an introduction to the second volume of Schlock Mercenary, Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between (hereafter SM:TBB). You can still pre-order the book, and it will ship out on by the end of next week.
Laurell did the introduction because Schlock Mercenary is one of the comics we read every morning. It is one of the things that is getting her out onto the internet and actually doing email and things.
Check out Schlock and then get the book.

No, we’re not making special T-Shirts for the New Orleans Trip.
I promised a lot of people that I’d post where Laurell and I got the shirts we wore at the signing in New Orleans.
We got them from OffWorld Designs, at Archon. You can find their shirts at several other online sites, and at a lot of the Science Fiction Conventions.
Laurell wore the “Evil Keeps me Young” shirt from the Gothic section.
I wore the “Reanimate” shirt from the Gaming section.
We also got Trin the “Girl Genius” shirt from the Girl Genius section.

Eleven pages today. Yea! I got most of it done before Charles arrived with his toys. It was fun to play with everything. It’s made Jon and I really look forward to the gun shopping trip. The 1911 was just fun. Nice and meaty. Not useful for out fitting anyone in the fight scene, but some weapons aren’t about practicality, some are just about the way they feel in your hands.

Earlier today I hung up a sign that said, “Today the Dragon Won.” I didn’t have a page to my name. Yeah, voting took some time, and we had a business meeting, but when I sat down at my desk there was nothing. I’d had a good eight pages yesterday, and today, I just wandered around the scene making no progress. I did not know what to do. I’d built the villains of this book to such a point from almost their first mention that they are these uber warriors. That these are the vampires that the vampires themselves fear. Now here I was at the final battle, and I didn’t know how to live up to the promise. I mean it’s Anita, Edward, Olaf, Remus, Claudia, I mean we have all the really good fighters in my world. We have Edward for God’s sake. What can be more uber than Edward? So instead of beating my head against the wall I first visited Jon in his office. We managed to spill a large cup of hot tea all over his desk. After we cleaned up the mess, I wandered back to my office. I’d been planning on calling Charles. We had several things we needed to discuss with him about comicon, some research trips, lots of stuff. Also when you’re stuck in the middle of a fight scene you can do worse than call up a friend who is ex-military and cop. We talked about this and that. He’s bringing over some potentially lethal toys tomorrow to see if I get inspired. You never know. He’s got stuff I don’t. I’m trying to outfit more than just Anita here. We are so over due for a gun buying trip. Got off the phone from Charles, wandered over to Darla’s office. She gave me the advice, “Just stop for today. Let your subconscious work on it.” That’s when I hung the dragon won sign up, and took a bath. A nice, hot, soaking bath is never a bad thing. I’m listening to a book on tape in the tub right now, Rex Stouts, A FAMILY AFFAIR. It’s a Nero Wolfe mystery. Some combination of hot water, being clean, finally letting myself relax, and hearing someone else’s words clicked. I had one of those ideas that you go, why didn’t I think of it before? It will loose me some pages to rewrite the scene, but I think, I think, I may have the direction we need to go. I think. I won’t truly know until I try writing it tomorrow. It will either work, or it won’t. I hope it works. I think it will. I can’t tell you the idea because it would be like a major spoiler, but I thought I’d share that sometimes when you’ve spent all day beating your head against a scene, sometimes walking away for a few hours isn’t a bad idea. I know, I usually say never give up, but sometimes walking away isn’t giving up. Sometimes you just need a little distance between you and the scene so you can see all your options. You get blinded by the plot you’ve planned and when it refuses to flow, you get stuck. Walk away, let your mind cool down, and sometimes the muse goes, wait a minute. What about this idea, remember this idea from earlier in the book? Why, yes, I do remember that. That’s a good idea. We’ll see just how good it is tomorrow morning. Wish me luck.

Vote tomorrow. Just vote. I won’t even try to influence your vote one way or the other, but please, God, vote. Remember that elections are what countries do instead of revolutions. It’s a bloodless way to change your goverment. Don’t let the political climate get you down. Your vote counts, damnit. I swear to you that if enough of us get out there and vote we will change things. There are some races out there so close that a handful of votes could make the difference. If you’re unhappy with things, vote. If you’re happy with things, vote. If you don’t give a damn, vote. Vote, damn you, vote. Don’t waste the opprotunity that other countries are dieing to have a chance at. Vote.
Your vote is your liscence to bitch about things.

I did five pages yesterday, and it was all done after dark with one small lamp on. Done after I’d gone up to my office for just a few minutes for something else. The book moves in my head, calls to me, coaxes and bullies me. I don’t mind. If I can manage not to be interrupted in some major way maybe this mood will see me through to the end of the book. I hope so. I don’t know about everyone else’s muse, but mine is pushy. She’s no shrinking violet. She’s an up in your face, grab you by the shirt and drag your ass to work kind of girl. Just the way I like ’em.

Am I the only one that’s still feeling the effects of New Orleans? What effect? Well, inappropriate thoughts that want to come out your mouth as actual words, and do. I’m not usually that good at quippy double entendres, except on paper, but there must be something in the air in New Orleans that gives you this questionable ability. (It has to be the air and not the water, because none of us used tap water while we were there. We met a local that had been hospitalized from giardia recently. Not at a major hotel, but we decided not to chance it.) So something in the air makes you a little more verbally quick on your feet, and most of the quickness is all the stuff you normally don’t say out loud. But something about New Orleans takes that little conductor in your head that goes, yes or no, on what you’re about to say, and ties him up and puts him in the closet. Or at least Jon, Charles, and I noticed this effect. I even noticed it with Florence. But I thought once we got home it would fade. It really hasn’t. Is this some permanent change in my defenses. You know, those walls and gates that keep all the things you’re thinking from slipping out. I don’t know whether to be afraid, or relieved, if it stays. I started by blaming Charles, because he is very quick on his verbal feet, and only our friend Richard could keep up with the double entendres. Jon and I get better at quips in pure self-defense. But here we are a few days away from New Orleans, and only e-mails from Charles, and still those thoughts slide through my head. They dance around my lips, and come perilously close to spilling out. Is it anything that’s not true? No. Is it anything that I need to share with that many people, um, no. I have been reduced to utter silence by the presence of my own child, because thought after thought is inappropriate in front of her. The inside of my head is still echoing with an energy from the Big Easy. Heck, I didn’t even drink while we were there. So what is it? What is it about New Orleans that just makes you come back, and be a little looser in your own skin?

End of the day. Tired. Only eight pages today. It felt like it should have been more. But when I did the page count that was all. Good pages, I think. We’re almost through the metaphysics to the fire fight beyond. I actually came up with a way to have the climax just about some really viscous magic, but we have Edward. You have to have something for Edward to do, and he doesn’t really do magic. He’s psychically sensitive as most of the really good monster hunters are, but that’s not the same thing as being able to fight with pyschic ability. So we gotta have a fire fight. Weapons must be drawn. Complicates my life, but gives everyone something to do. A little more metaphysics then fire fight tomorrow. Okay, maybe another day of metaphysics, then fire fight. Came up with some really cool ideas today. We’ll see how many actually get on stage, and how many go in the out-takes, or to do later files.