Author: Jonathon

Monday, frantic as always. Our daughter said it best, as she was dragged out of bed, “Can’t Monday be part of the weekend.” We all seem tired, and abused from the allergenes in the autumn air. Tour is less than two weeks away, alright closer, but I can’t think about it too much, or I tend to panic. The deadline for A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT looms ever closer, and I feel like I’m in one of those nightmares where you run and run and get nowhere. Illusion, but that’s how it feels. More and more interviews for INCUBUS DREAMS. We’ve got the first television spot, on schedule. Which means I’ve got to practice the make up for it. Never trust to a local show that they will have make-up and a competent artist on hand. They tend to only cary base for the host’s skin tone, which means I usually end up looking orange. So I’ve learned to do my own. But there is a definite art to make up that covers enough for television, but doesn’t look like clown make up on the street. A very fine art. My admiration goes up and up for the make up artist. Much, much harder than it looks.
Just listing it all makes me tense, and frantic. I did not have time to go to my altar and meditate. I did not have time to pray. But that old saying is true, when you are busiest, most frantic, that is when you need most to take a moment and find your center. Find a quiet place inside your own mind where you can listen to that still, calm voice. I took twenty minutes out of my busy day. I lit some candles, some incense, and spent the first five minutes telling myself and deity that I didn’t have time for this today. I actually ate my cereal while I was trying to calm down. Then somewhere in all that frantic arguing with myself. I calmed. I took a deep breath and let it out. I tried to accept that all this is happening, and it’s okay. Meditation and prayer aren’t about changing what’s happening, not always, sometimes it’s more about changing my attitude towards what’s happening. So often in life, you can’t control the events around you, and that always makes me anxious. Even if the events are good ones, I don’t like being this in the hands of others. I never have. But good, or bad, sometimes you can’t change what’s happening. But you can always change how you deal with what’s happening.
I took twenty minutes out of my day, to remind myself I’m okay, and that the frantic stuff isn’t really the point. I meditate before I pray because I need to quiet my mind before I can listen to what’s being said. Like turning down the white noise. Right this moment, I’m calmer than I’ve been in days. I’ve meditated, I’ve prayed in that time, but I did it hurriedly, begrudgingly, as if talking to deity is a duty, and just one more thing on my already over loaded to-do list. Today, I didn’t rush through, like a hurried prayer said by memory that no longer truly has meaning. Today, I took twenty minutes, to truly be in sacred space. To remind myself that it’s all sacred space. That deity is always with us, even when we can’t hear their voice, or feel their touch on our hand. The voice is still there soft, and clear. The touch is still there, waiting to catch us, or hold us, if we allow it.

I’ve added some new pictures to the LKH Misc. Gallery. They are pics of the hole in our back yard, where the new addition is going in. After a year, We’re finally moving forward on it.
Cheers!

Hey, just a line to say that the problem with the archive not working is fixed. It took me almost two weeks of glaring at the settings to find out what had happened. I had one (1) setting that published the archives to a folder that nothing pointed to. But now it is fixed and I’m on to other thecnical problems, like trying to set up several web sites with different Domain Names, to run of one server. There is a reason I never did well on my MCSE exams….
But ta for now.

Yes, we did the dread deed again. Darla and I went shopping. Jon had to stay home and try to get our cable internet whatever to get ready for the lines to go underground, as opposed to above. He actually didn’t mind missing the shopping. It tends to put me in a foul mood. Brave Darla.
But good news. Darla had seen a new store in St. Louis that specilized in not big girl sizes, but sizes in the medium range, but designed to favor women with curves. I often find myself too small for the plus size stores, but too curvaceous for the regular stores. I am one of many women that is sort of caught in the middle. Darla had seen a write up in the paper about the new store DAISY CLOVER. It’s located in the town of Old Orchard which I thought was Old Webster, but I was wrong. The store is located on Big Bend just past Webster University. I found more skirts and blouses that fit me in a shorter space of time than any trip to any mall in years. The owner, who’s name I’ve forgotten, sorry about that, was very nice, very knowledgeable. She explained the mystery of why some shirts are so thin they can’t be worn without another shirt under them. Darla and I had been wondering why shirts had gotten so thin. Some of them are not meant to be worn without a tank top under them. The nice lady owner was very patient in explaining the mysteries of the current fashion trends. Pink is very in this year, everywhere I go, but if it’s a color that suits your skin tone there are some great pieces at DAISY CLOVER. There are other non-pink items, because I bought quite a few. She had some nice jewel tones, true reds, deep blue, a rich burgundy-purple. If the layer clothing works for you, she had that in lots of jewel tones. She carries the jeans that Oprah likes best; news to me, but as Oprah is another one of the curvaceous and beautiful, it seemed like a promising sign that the store carried them. No, they didn’t fit me. Didn’t have my size. But they did have lots of other sizes. I think I just happen to be a common size. Nice to be in a store where I was the common size.
Sorry if this sounds like a commercial, but it was just nice to be in a clothing store where, whether I liked every piece of clothing in the store, or not, I could get into most of them. They had shirts where not only did I not have to get out the minimizer bra, but I needed the more busty version, so the neckline fit. Ah, heaven.

I’ll try to keep this quick. Just because Jon and I don’t work in an office and wear suits to work, some people treat us as if our jobs aren’t real. They call in the middle of the day and feel slighted that I can’t talk for an hour. If I had a “real” job, would they still do that? Do they think because Jon’s boss happens to be his wife that they can call up with less than thirty minutes notice for him to move furniture? Yes, they do. They did. Today.
Yes, he could have just said no, but it was a relative, and the relative is doing a favor for another relative. but this particular relative always acts as if our schedule is completely free. When we first got married he would show up unannounced and act as if we could drop everything to visit with him. I was sorry that he’d driven for an hour one way, but he should have called first. The first time we visited, and explained the difficulty. The second time, we just explained the problem, and went back to work. He finally started calling the day of, and if we couldn’t meet him, we’d tell him. He’d say it was the only day he had that week, and we’d explain that we were sorry but it was a bad day for us. He seemed to take it personally, like we didn’t want to see him. That wasn’t it. But if Jon worked in an office in a big glass building, I don’t think his relative would keep wanting to meet in the middle of the business day. Writing is a job. Damnit. Not a hobby. And Jon’s job is getting ever more complex as we add new computer enterprises to our little empire.
If he had asked first, that would be one thing, but just assuming that Jon was free, that was inconsiderate. I used to think that people didn’t treat my job as “real” because I was unpublished. Then I got published and it still happened. I thought well it’s that I don’t earn that much, they still think it’s a hobby, or if I had more books out, they’d take it more seriously. Nope.
I don’t know how I could be a more seriously working writer, and still some people treat it as if the writing happens by magic. Like I have some wand in a drawer somewhere and just a flick of the wrist and the words pour out. God, I wish it was that easy. Writing a book takes a lot of time, dedication, and just plain hard work. Jon acts as both computer wizard, sounding board, brain storm partner, research assistant, and hand holder. That is a very important job with a deadline less than four months away, and a book tour coming up. Jon and I always get a little tense just before tour. Alright, I get a little tense. Alright, I get a lot tense. Things that would normally not be that big a deal, really get under my skin. Darla’s job is sometimes just to make sure my mood doesn’t rain all over some innocent bystander. Jon and I both get moody about similar things, so we’re not always a lot of help to eachother in this circumstance.
I think if just once I wasn’t in the middle of one book for one series, while I was preparing for the tour for the next book, I’d be less tense. I’m doing more and more Anita interviews for INCUBUS DREAMS, while trying to stay in Merry’s point of view. I’m still working on being able to talk and think about one series while staying steady in the pocket for the other. I’m getting better at it. I guess its like any skill, you just need to practice. Again, this may have needed to go in the soapbox section. Sorry about that.

I feel punished. It’s Sunday, and the rest of the world seems to be having fun. I’m working. I love my work, but I’d rather goof off. Part of the problem is that I left the book yesterday in the middle of a sex scene. I should know better by now. Once you’ve got the heat worked up and the mood right, you don’t stop. But we had an appointment to keep. We had to go shopping for tour. I’d done ten pages, I was tired, I was sort of ready to stop. But stopping for an hour for lunch is different than stopping for the day.
Let me just say how much I hate to shop for clothes. Shopping for Jon is so much easier than shopping for me. At a nice clothing store, the men’s clothing actually is measured and fits within those measurements. But even at a really nice clothing store, women’s clothing does not. No woman can actually say she’s a size ten, or a size twelve, and have that be true across the board no matter who is making the clothes. A size ten in dress pants that are almost identical in every way except color, are two different sizes if they are not from the same designer. It’s just the truth. How can any woman judge themself on a dress size, or pants size, when it depends on the whim of some faceless designer?
And don’t even get me started on styles this year. I’m very happy for all of you with a belly button piercing, that you now have pants low enough to show them off, or at least not rub them and make them get infected. But for the rest of us who would like a pair of pants that actually hit at the natural waistline, or maybe gasp, a little above the natural waistline, we are just crap out of luck. The low rise jeans are not a flattering line on eighty percent of the people I see wearing them. But wear them they do, because they’re in style and it’s hard to get jeans that aren’t cut that way most places. The jeans I was okay with, but now the dress pants have gone that route, too, and that is simply too much. I thought the jeans looked odd low cut, but the dress pants cut that way or weirder. They just don’t hit the body right if you have curves. I have an ass. I very nice ass, thank you very much. I like my ass. My husband likes my ass. But none of the pants I tried on in the women’s suits fit both my ass, and my thighs.
Yes, I have thighs, and calves, curving the way most of us really look unless we’re willing to starve ourselves. And why the hell should we starve ourselves? For what? To be a smaller dress size? To fit into clothing that we wouldn’t want to wear if it wasn’t in style? I say, no. Don’t change your body because some emaciated model on some distant runway looked good in this, or some singer or movie star that exercises four or more hours aday, or eats only protein shakes and lettuce, says you should look a certain way. Strike a blow for female liberation, and male liberation for that matter. Women don’t diet for men. We diet for other women to say, “Oh, how nice you look. Did you loose weight?” Most men like curves!
My theory on the extreme low rise that was so low it showed your thong underwear was that the women who it actually looked good in were so thin they had no breast cleavage anymore, so they went for butt cleavage.
To cap it off we did an errand at the mall briefly, something we’d promised Trinity we’d do with her. We popped into Hot Topic. First, Jon and I remembered quickly why we usually visit the store without Trinity in tow. She was giggled over the purple glittery lingerie. The dress on the wall that looked like a catholic school girl uniform had had an illegitimate child with a punk rocker, made her say, “Mommy, that’s just wrong.” Jon and I agreed.
But the kicker for me came when I held up an extra large baby doll shirt. Extra large, mind you. It would have fit Trinity, but not me. I remember when I liked most of what I saw in Hot Topic. Now, I still like some of the stuff, but they must be targeting an ever younger audience, or are the girl’s in this country really that tiny? Maybe the baby doll shirts are actually meant for dolls and I just misunderstood. (Yes, I know that Torrid, their larger size sister store exists, but you can’t just take clothes made for one body type and just up the size and have it be flattering. Sometimes, but just making it bigger is not a fix on some of these styles. How about clothes that only look good with curves underneath them, instead of the other way around.)
The average size woman age 15 and up, is still a size fourteen. A fourteen, not a three, not a zero. What the hell is a size zero anyway? Jon says it’s a placemaker for a real person. I have to agree. If anyone reading this is naturally that tiny, great, if you’re happy with it, great. But if you are trying to starve yourself down to some impossibly small size. Stop.
Remember, when you look into the mirror, don’t ask what size jeans am I wearing. Ask am I good person. If the answer is yes, then the size pants you’re wearing will take care of itself.
Be healthy, folks, not thin. Remember that thin and diet are both four letter words. I don’t think that’s an accident.
Maybe this blog should have gone in the soap box side, but Jon’s off at the store running an errand, so no one here to support my technical lack. I’ll leave the blog here, my apologies to anyone who didn’t want to read it. I’m going to go make pages.

Dreamed that the world blew up last night. Now, no one panic, because it was just one of those weird dreams that make no sense. It began with me as a character in the movie De-Lovely, which I’ve not gotten a chance to see yet, then moved into something more science fictiony. The world blew up, and there was this talking golden retriever. But it must not have been too bad a blow up because gravity still worked and there weren’t many people gone, or dead. For a post-apocalyptic dream it was darn mild. Jon brought me some fast food which I don’t even like as if it were a treat, when what I wanted was chocolate croissants. But as out there as this dream when the alarm went off this morning my first thought was, wow, I didn’t expect the alarm to work after the world blew up. Not fear, not anything but mild puzzlement that the alarm worked when the world had gone away as we know it.
Do you ever wonder where the really weird ass shit in your brain comes from? I do. I wondering about a lot of things that the majority of people don’t give any thought to, but surely most people would wake up from a dream like that and wonder where it all came from.
Maybe part of the dream came from the fact that I’m reading the essays of E. B. White. The author of CHARLOTTE’S WEB, one of my favorite books, but he wrote a great deal more than just that one book. Sixteen books altogether I think. The essays begin in 1938 or so, and go to 1975, or so. At first I jumped around in the two collections, THE ESSAYS OF E. B. WHITE, and ONE MAN’S MEAT. Then I started simply reading them in chronological order. Not only can you see White’s growth as a writer and a person over the years, but the world changes. The essays in the thirties are somehow less anxious. Even the essays during World War II, seem less anxious than his essays in the seventies, when he literally lists a paragraph of things to be anxious about. The world as we know it, is no more. Change happens and the world moves on. We can like it, or not like it, but our dislike doesn’t stop it from happening.
But would we really want time to stop, and nothing to change? If you say yes to that, go to any old cemetery where the graves date before the early 1900s. Look at how many of the graves from the 1800s are children’s graves. The reason people had a lot of children was partially because your chances of raising any child to adulthood was damn slim. Many families in England (I’m not sure of other countries.) would name more than one daughter after the mother, in hopes that one daughter would survive to grow up. This tradition is one of the things that contributed to names like Margaret having so many nicknames: Marge, Margie, Margo, Peggy, Peg, Meg, Maggie, Meggie, Rita, Greta, Maisie. I know I’ve left out a few. The nicknames were what you called the different little Maragarets, so that they wouldn’t all actually have the same name when you were talking to everyone. As medical science got better and more kids began to survive, you ended up with the nicknames becoming names in themselves, because it was just too confusing to have three Margaraets at the dinner table.
But it’s not just medical science that I’m happy about. I’m a woman, and there has never been a time, at least in most of the civilized world where women have had more rights, more privelages. I am the major income for my family. I am the bread winner, and my husband is just fine with that. I still run into men that can’t deal with that, but the secret is to date below thirty, or at least below thirty-five. I’m sure there are some men that are evolved enough to deal with a strong, independent woman, that makes more money than they do, but I didn’t find many of them when I was dating. And yes, ladies, there are idiots below thirty, too. And for the men’s side of things, unfortunately, there are still woman out there that see a man as a way to quite work and be taken care of. I find that they give the rest of us a bad name.
Another thing to check out in the cemeteries is how many wives a man buried in his life. Childbirth took a lot of young women. I and my daughter Trinity would have died in labor without some pretty high tech stuff. So change is good, not bad. But it can be scary. Just hold on, and know that the world changes, but it does not end. It’ll be okay, just remember to buy the chocolate croissants instead of the fast food hamburgers. I mean if you’re going to eat food that would make a personal trainer weep, go for the chocolate.
A NOTE TO ALL THAT ARE READING ALL THE BLOG STUFF I PUT UP TODAY. THIS IS THE BLOG THAT I TALK ABOUT IN THE “I HATE TECHNOLOGY BLOG”. It magically reappeared, even Jon doesn’t know why it went away, or why it came back. I pressed some other buttons trying to re-edit something else, and viola, it’s returned from the grave. Anyway, you guys get two blog entries sort of for the price of one. Enjoy.

I had written this lovely blog about dreams and the essays of E. B. White, and how change is a good thing even if we can’t stop it from happening, or control it, but . . . But I pressed the wrong buttons. I press control ‘s’ to save my writing all the time. I’m sort of paranoid about loosing pages once it gets too big, or too pretty. So I tried to save but control ‘s’ is not save on the blog. It publishes. Now, if I’d realized when everything starting to whirl and do stuff what was happening, I would have simply called for Jon to help me and it would have been fine. You’d have maybe glimpsed a draft of the blog, then Jon would have helped me retrieve it, and you’d still have gotten the original blog when I was done with it. But no, I panicked, and hit escape, which told the blog program that I didn’t want to publish, and it took it upon it’s little technological self to erase, or eat, or whatever, the blog I had written.
So, important safety tip learned. Control ‘s’ is publish, and the old lesson that you’d think I’d know by now, panic is not helpful. Panic will usually do the opposite of what you want to do. But I don’t have time to recreate the longer blog now. I gotta get to actual book pages. Nor, at this moment, do I have the heart, because I, like almost all writers, am always convinced that the pages lost are better, more lyrical, more profound, than any pages I will ever recreate to replace that which was lost.

I realize not everyone reads the board or belongs to our mail list. So I am going to try posting this here and see how everyone likes it. If not, I won’t do it again!
Darla
DUCKS ————————————————————-
Clicks the gaming store (across from the theatre) in Crestwood Plaza on Watson Road in St. Louis is now selling our Jean-Claude’s Tub Toy Duck for $10. If they go over well, they will offer them in their South County Store too! So if you get a chance drop in and get a duck. We are trying to talk them into carrying more of our stuff in their stores, so duck sales would help!
AUCTIONS ————————————————————
Our many thanks to Ann T and her $165 for the shelter. Ann gets the ID Tour shirt and our gratitude! We have a new auction! We got an extra copy of Incubus Dreams in hardback so we put it up on eBay for Granite City APA! Laurell has signed it and it can be personalized at the request of the high bidder.
Title: Incubus Dreams Laurell K. Hamilton Signed Item # : The item number for listing is 6925735008. URL: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6925735008 Ends Sep-15-04
TICKETS ON SALE ————————————————————
Don’t forget to order your tickets for the Wolf Howl with Laurell at the Wild Canid Research Center in St. Louis. You can contact Pam at the center for tickets. Phone: (636)-938-5900 Fax: (636) 938-6490 or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Tickets are $15 per person and there is a 100 person limit for this event. Includes hearing Laurell read from Stroke Of Midnight, howling at the wolves, hot chocolate, cookies and a special signing. Don’t forget to stop in the gift shop and help yourself to some special wolf goodies. Not to early to think Xmas gifts! Or if you cannot make the howl, October 3rd will be the open house at $10 per car load and you will get to see the wolves and lots of other nifty stuff. Not a bad time to check out their website: http://www.wolfsanctuary.org/Home/default.htm
CERULEAN SINS CONTEST ————————————————————
The Cerulean Sins contest is going! You have until September 15th to get your reciept in. If there is not space on the back of your reciept, just tuck a piece of paper in the envelope with it. Mail those to: LKH PO Box 190306 St. Louis, MO 63119
INCUBUS DREAMS GIVEAWAY ———————————————————— We are going to give away one signed copy of Incubus Dreams to a lucky emailer. Send your name and address to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). As with the snail mail, I will not be keeping these, they will not be shared. Should I be unable to contact the winner ie the mail gets returned, an alternate winner will be chosen. One entry per person please!

Riddle me this Batman. How is it that I did twenty pages on Sunday and felt great. I did twenty pages on Monday and felt great afterwards. But I did only ten pages yesterday and I felt like crap afterwards. I was so freaking tired. It’s not the amount of pages, but sometimes what’s in those pages. Some stuff is simply more energizing, or more exhausting than others. I know that intellectually, but in a stubborn part of my brain is still this idea that it shouldn’t matter. That pages are pages are pages.
Another riddle for you. Why is it that the first thing a woman does as she’s putting on make up is to make herself as all over pale as possible so that none of her natural color shows through, then the next thing she does is add unnatural color to her face? We get rid of our natural blush then add blush from a jar or compact. Why?
Riddle number three. Why is blue my favorite color? Why is green, or purple, or red, yours? Why does one hue attract our eye more than another?
One more riddle, so we won’t do the cliche of three. What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow? What African or European? Ahhhh!
Apologies to anyone who hasn’t seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Bye for now.