Author: Jonathon

I didn’t get a single page done today on either book. Had a photo shoot for St. Louis Magazine. It’s part of an article they’re doing on me. No, I don’t know what issue the article will be coming out in. Darla may know, but she’s long gone home for today. The photographer and make up artist were nice and very professional. They took pictures of me by this very cool gargoyle in the City museum. We took some fun ones, and some serious ones. We’ll see what the magazine decides to use. But, by the time we got home it was about 3:30. Trinity was at scouts, so we had a little time. Since the chances of any work being done were slim, we bit the bullet and went to the make up counter. I’ve been having some issues with my make up. It’s drying my skin out, and just isn’t quite right. So we went to the mall, to a make up artist and brand that had been recommended to me, by someone, who like me, doesn’t wear make up everyday. I figured if she liked it, maybe I would. Jon went with to hold my hand, and help me remember how to do everything. Turns out, I’ll need the help, because I am certainly suffering from TMI (too much information). I always feel that way when I get new make up or girl stuff. Guns never seem to confuse me as much as make up.

Stuck on Merry. My own fault. I took the weekend off. I know better when a book is close to the end. But tomorrow I will go to the new office and spread it all out on a table. I’ll write long hand. I’m in the end game. I know where we’re going and what we’re doing with some plot variations. But it will take some long hand brain sweat to get it going again.
What did I do since I was like way stuck? I allowed myself to work some more on the next Anita book. The one after DANSE MACABRE. I’ve got about a hundred pages of it. I reread what I’d done up to that point. Made some minor changes and wrote about four more pages. It felt so good to write on it. So very good. This book is so ready to go. It’s like trying to restrain a horse that wants to run. You can feel it quivering underneath you. Feel it’s muscles straining. Feel it asking you to give it, it’s head. To just let it run. I want to let it run. I want to slack the reins and let this horse go. I want to ride as fast as it can go, and feel the world rush by. But not yet, not yet. Have to hold the reins tight for a little longer. Almost done with Merry, alright, like a hundred to two hundred pages almost done. That’s almost done for me, last third of the book.
Strangely, though, even though I let myself work on Anita. It seemed to knock something loose and I think I can work on Merry tomorrow. Good.

The dragon won yesterday. I ended up quitting work early and climbing into a hot bath to lick my wounds. Today was the first day, really, back to work since the great computer disaster. Yeah, we got the data back, but it will still live in infamy, at least for me. Today I got nine pages done. The most I’ve managed since we got everything back. Somewhere near the end of page nine the tornado sirens went off, and I totally panicked. I yelled for help, and Jon had to unplug my computer, because I was afraid to touch the damn thing. My phobia of tech has taken a major backslide since the drive failure. But we have the pages safe on the hard drive of this computer, and on two different portable drives. We’ve checked and it’s there, so it’s okay. No, that trembling in the pit of my stomach doesn’t believe it, but I’m trying. We took the computer and the dogs and everyone who was still in the house and went to the basement. Thankfully, the rotation of the thunderstorm didn’t turn into the tornado they thought it had. The computer is plugged back in on my desk. Everything is printed off and saved. But strangely the whole running for the basement thing has taken the muse out of my mood. So I’m done for the day. The dragon didn’t win, but I took some serious hits. I’m going downstairs, and join Jon on the couch. I will sit and sip water, or tea, and be covered in dogs. I’m going to watch Miss Marple. I tend to watch mysteries when I’m trying to relax. When especially tense I like something cozy. Miss Marple is pretty cozy. So, I’m off.

I didn’t get much done yesterday. I tried, but it was just no go. I did a business call with my editor late in the afternoon. Susan was talking to me about the short story collection, and when I could do the intro pieces to the stories. But during the talk I told her about our computer problems in the last few days, and that I was having trouble getting back to the book. (It’s not her book by the way, Susan is my editor for Anita.) She made a very smart observation, that I didn’t trust my computer anymore. She was absolutely right. Heck, I barely trusted the tech before, but now . . . It feels like everything I write is going to vanish into the ether and never return. I write a few sentences I hit save, and wonder did it really save, or is just fibbing to me like last time. Now that I know what the back of my head is doing to the front, maybe it will help. I know when the revaluation came it was a relief like a weight had been lifted. I could breathe again. We’ll see if it actually translates into pages. I think I will begin my day with long hand, and once I get enough to prime the pump, I’ll switch to the computer. We’ll see how it goes.

Jon’s roses just arrived. One of the things that charmed me about him was that he enjoys getting flowers. I like a man who lets me be charming. I also got him one of those red lions from Hallmark that purrs and vibrates. It was too cute. There were other things, as well. We have the kiddo tonight so some of the planned events will have to be rain checked, or children checked as the case maybe. All you parents out there know what I mean. I’m off to the new office to try and write out this scene long hand. It’s the scene that was interrupted by the great computer disaster. Not surprisingly I’m having some trouble getting back into the swing of things. It’s also a fight scene instead of a love making scene. Not very Valentine in spirit. Happy Cupid’s Day, I’m off to try and keep Merry and the gang alive. Dangerous chapter.

It wasn’t a virus. It was a physical failure of the computer hard drive.(Jon here – The Diagnoses was one of Physical dammage to the drive. The Read / Write arm failed and began to dig into the disk platters.) Bad, very bad. Without DriveSavers® we would have lost the hard drive and the data on it. The data that had me panicking was the first half (yes, completed first half) of the fifth book of the Merry Gentry series, and more than a hundred pages of the next Anita Blake novel. As I wrote earlier all our back ups had failed. My main computer was so riddled with data miners and spy bots that it may be the reason why neither book saved to my personal hard drive. We’ll never know for sure. Jon, Darla, and Jack (her husband and hardware guru) updated the protection software on both my computers. My fault for refusing the updates because it would impede my progress on whatever book I was on. If you don’t listen to your tech people then you only have yourself to blame. All the computers have the latest and greatest protection upgrades now.
If DriveSavers® had not come to our rescue I would have lost almost four hundred pages. All our back ups failed at once for my books. Other things managed to get on portable back up but for whatever reason the books did not. So thank you DriveSavers®, you saved my books, my deadline, and me from a nervous break down.

A package arrived today with the DVD restores of the crashed HD from the server. The data was recovered and is all in good shape. The hard drive had a physical failure and there was actual, physical dammage to the disk platters. The fact that they were able to recover the data at all pleases me.
The long and short of it, the files have been recovered, work will be progressing once again.

I’ve tried to write several blogs over the last few days and found them all wanting. I’m putting this up not because I think it’s that great, but because most of the readers of the blog say they like something on a regular basis. Everyday would be best. But these little pieces of writing seem to take a lot out of me sometimes. I haven’t written today because it’s a grown up weekend. Trinity is at her father’s. We slept late, much to the dogs consternation, and had a wonderfully languorous morning. So why, with the morning starting so well am I vaguely depressed? I am simply not good at taking time off at home. I feel better if I work. But if I work too much with no break then I feel bad, too. It is the on-going balancing act between my muse, my workaholoic self, and my loves. I don’t just mean my husband, love and sex, I mean everything that brings joy to my life. The dogs need their weekend trip for socilazation, and I enjoy it, most of the time. Pip and Jimmy have had two semi-serious dog fights this week. If this keeps up I think we’re going to take Pip to the vet and see if anything is hurting on him, some physical cause for this renewed dominance struggle. We’d been free of it for months. There I go again, taking a fun outing with the dogs and making it dire. Taking fun and making it serious. I do have a tendency to do that. My grandmother’s influence, I think. That woman could put a bad light on even the happiest news. She was one of the most profoundly negative people I have ever met. It made her own life miserable, and stole much of the joy she might have had in the people and things around her. I strive to not do that to myself and those around me. As one fan said at an event, I was the most cheerful pessimist she’d ever met. That’s pretty accurate. When you finally realize that something in the way you were raised is destructive to you, and you try to fix it through therapy and just acting, as if. Acting as if you are a more positive person than you truly are, well, it works. My daughter is one of the most positive people I know. A delightful mix of happiness and cynicism. The cynicism must be genetic. Though, she, like I was as a child would rather believe the best than the worst of those around her. Life taught me to expect the worst, and if it doesn’t happen, great, but at least you’re prepared. I say all that, to say this; Trinity is very positive and upbeat, the total opposite of my attitude. She is a little testament that I decided when she was under two to act, as if. As if I wasn’t negative, as if I was happier than I was, as if I didn’t expect everyone I met to hurt me eventually. I acted as if, in thought, word and deed. I remade my interactions with my child, so that she grew up with a mother that loved herself, loved her, and loved their friends, etc . . . It worked. I see her running through life so bright and shiny and I wonder, would that have been me at her age if life had been less cruel? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll never know.
I remember myself as a solemn child, painfully shy. At the viewing for my Aunt Beverly, who passed away very recently, friends that hadn’t seen me for decades, and never as an adult, talked to me. They recognized me because of how much I looked like my mother. My mother who died young and tragically. Strangers came up and told me how vivacious she was, how full of life and joy, and how she never met a stranger. They were talking about my mother, but she was a stranger to me. I was six when she died. I do not remember her, not in that way. Some of them met my daughter when she wasn’t running off and entertaining her younger cousin, helping distract the eight-year-old from the grief that will catch up soon. Her beloved grandmother snatched away, so suddenly. Trinity ran up, hugged me, and anyone vaguely related to her. Then she’d be off, and these women, these long time friends of Aunt Bev, who had lost their very dear friend, would say, your daughter is just like you at that age. So full of life, never met a stranger, so talkative, so social. They were talking about a stranger. I do not remember that child. That was me before my mother died, and that child died with her. Her death left me quieter, more serious, more cautious, and most of all with a profound sense that the world was not safe. That anything horrible could and did happen. Some of my relatives joined in, echoing this idea that I was like my daughter, social, out-going. I don’t remember it that way. The women who recognized me from my, apparently, profound likeness to my dead mother, told me how beautiful she was, and that I was beautiful like my mother. What do you say to that? I’ve never thought I looked that much like my mother, I mean, yes, we look alike, but not that much. But here are strangers, that saw me last at five or six, but they knew my mother, and from that resemblance they picked me out.
I grew up with my Grandmother calling me my mother’s name almost as often as my own. The last time I saw her alive she called me, Susie more than my own name. My Aunt Bonita tried to stop her, but I told her, it was okay, I was used to it. I was always the ghost at the banquet for my grandmother. I was a living, breathing reminder of what she’d lost in my mother. But my Aunt Bev’s funeral was the first time I realized that there might have been more than one reason for my grandmother to try to keep shoving me into my mother’s shape. Do I look that much like my mother? She was the beautiful one, everyone agreed. But I was never told I was beautiful. I wasn’t the pretty one, she was. I bought the family mythology like most children do. One sister is the pretty one, another is the sensible one, another is the black sheep, and I was the smart one. Since I didn’t believe I was pretty I better be smart, and work hard. I have no words to express how hard it was to have these grief-stricken, well-meaning, women tell me how much I looked like my mother, and how beautiful she was, and I was beautiful like her. Why would that bother me? I don’t know, not exactly. I told them, I am over a decade older than my mother was when she died. They were surprised. I suppose that was a compliment to me and how young I look, but that’s not how I took it. I don’t know how I took it. I’m still processing a lot of what happened, and is still happening. All I know is the childhood that even my family remembers, I have almost no memory of. I remember feeling utterly safe, and I know it was when I was very small, but it is a brief memory, and most of my life has been spent in fear. Fear of the great bad thing happening again. Those of us who have a ‘train wreck’ early seldom completely believe in the safety of the universe again. We know better. Strangers, relatives tell me I was a happy child. They tell me my mother was beautiful and vivacious. Like me. I do not believe either of these things about myself. I don’t even remember my mother as they do. I remember her as beautiful, yes, but sad, social and friendly, but I saw her when her public face wasn’t on, and I remember her as sad. Beautiful and sad.

I did eight pages this morning on Merry, but the chapter ended so that the next chapter begins, or is entirely, a sex scene. I’ve learned through hard experience never to end the day’s work where the first thing in the morning I’m facing a sex scene. I have no idea what mood I’ll be in come morning. Maybe I’ll be thinking about sex, maybe I won’t. But I certainly won’t be thinking about it by the time we have breakfast, get the kiddo off to school, take care of the dogs. Pippin has got to have a longer walk, or he’s going to start eating some of the other dogs. By the time all that is done, the odds of being in a sexy mood is sort of small. So I’ve learned some insurance. Insurance in this case is doing at least a few sentences of the sex scene, or preferably a few paragraphs. Just enough to get through the foreplay, or to have the actual sex, whatever it’s going to be, in progress. I find it much easier to write a sex scene if I’ve left the choreography in mid-dance, so to speak, then having to come up with the entire routine cold. So I’m back to Merry, and trying to drag a few sentences more out of myself today. Frankly, the eight pages tired me out, and if I hadn’t left off with sex as the next thing on the list I’d be done for the day. I’m tired, but tomorrow morning when I sit down to write I’ll be happy I made myself start the scene. So, a quick writing tip, and I’m back to it.

This was a blog I wrote Monday, or late Sunday. Meant to put it up, but just didn’t manage it. So here it is.
I remember now why I need to write Merry every day with no stops. Because Merry is like a lover, that you still love, but not as much as the husband that has your heart and soul in their eyes. Every book makes me love Merry and her world more, but no fresh love can compare with a relationship of a decade. Not when that relationship has met my needs so completely as writing Anita does. I am not one of those people who thinks that first dates, the beginning of a relationship, is the best part. I dated when I wanted to, but I find those first fumblings to be sort of boring compared to the relationship after it’s been tended, after it’s had a few hard knocks, and it still works. Nothing excites me as much as a long term love. Merry is still new to me, and thus, she’s like a new lover. You still don’t know each other completely. You still have those awkward moments, that it takes years to work smooth. Maybe by the time I hit book eight with Merry, it will be like it was when Anita and I hit BLUE MOON, her book eight. That was the point when I totally fell in love with Anita and her world. I’ve found the other landmarks of series building have been true between the two series. Book four was magically, the book that I finally felt comfortable in the world. The book where the characters talked to me more freely. Book six for Anita was a turning point for the series, and the character, but if Merry has a turning point in book six, it will have to be a very different turning point. It will be interesting to find out.
But now, it is book five. Not quite the magic number of six for me, and four is past. The world is working, but the characters do not capture me as much as Anita and her crew. It’s the difference between five years and fourteen. So much learned about each other, so much shared. Merry is still finding her way, and I with her. I made the mistake yesterday of listening to Anita’s background music when I exercised on the treadmill. Of course, I got the first copy of MICAH, hot off the presses, and I found myself reading it, and reading the first chapter of DANSE MACABRE that’s in the end of it. The book reads well, I got caught up in it. But it was a mistake to read so much Anita, to think so much Anita yesterday. Today I got up thinking about book fourteen, not book five. When I sat down to work, it was Anita who spoke to me, not Merry. I thought, what harm could it do? I could just get the notes down. Yeah, right. Who was I fooling? So, I made myself stop, and reread the plot outline for this chapter of Merry. Even if I make only a few sentences today, it will make tomorrows work day easier. Some progress, before Anita’s world rears back up and overwhelms me. I am not easily turned by a new face. I usually prefer the old. Old friends, long term loves. Heck, I have a pair of jeans that are about as old as my daughter. They are so soft, so wearable. They are so not in style. They don’t even look good anymore, but I love them. I love the way they feel. Sadly, there’s a hole along the thigh seam, which means I only wear them sparingly, because one wash day, they will be gone. I’ve delayed long enough, back to the fight scene. If it was an Anita fight scene I’d know what do, and how to do it, but Merry in a fight scene still puzzles me. I’m outta here.
I got six pages done. Cool. It reads well. It’s writing well. I just need to keep my head down, my blinders on, and keep concentrating on this book until it’s done.