Author: Jonathon

Darla just told me she had an e-mail from someone wanting to know if Bluebell the Hermit Crab had survived. No. Bluebell didn’t make it. Trinity took it very well. Part of that wellness, I think, is having seven hermit crabs left. We now have an isolation tank set up for molting crabs with it’s own heat source, damp sand, water and high calcium food. Bluebell was our first crab to molt and I think it caught us all by surprise. Actually, we thought Gabrielle, our biggest crab, had eaten her. But apparently all Gabrielle ate was Bluebell’s shed exoskeleton.
On a happier note, thanks to the nice lady who gave me a copy of STAND TALL, MOLLY LOU MELON by Patty Lovell, illustrated by David Gatrow. It’s a very fun children’s book about making the best of what you’ve got. The lady who gave it to me (sorry I’ve totally blanked on your name) said that she thought I’d appreciate it because of my dedicating a book to my grandmother, who was only 4′ 11″. That did make me appreciate the book all the more. Thanks again.
Gotta get back to work. Need to make pages, pages, pages.

I’m wearing dark charcoal grey lipstick. A black t-shirt that says, “You’re just jealous because the voices talk to me.” I’ved added a touch of mascara and called it done. I’m not feeling the least bit Disney today. It’s all Goth except I’m not willing to do boots or heels. It’s too damned early for uncomfortable shoes, so the jogging shoes break the Goth rule of always trying to look cool, or at least dark. The shoes are white. If the Goth fashion police catch me today I’ll get a ticket.
I’m in one of those bad moods that is actually enjoyable. A shared grumpiness that Jon and I both enjoy. We can only do it on weekends when Trinity is with her father, so I think we enjoy it all the more because we don’t get to do it that often. Jon is using tools in his workshop. Project for the day; a gaming table. Which will mean that the dining room table will be free of gaming stuff again. Yea!
It’s hard to explain what I mean by Goth mentality. It’s not depressed. In fact Jon is perfectly happy making stuff in his workroom. I am working because my muse woke up busy, and I can feel the book moving liquid in my head. Fast, slow, I don’t know, but it’s there and ready to go. Which is very cool. We got to sit at a restaurant and have breakfast out while we looked all dark and grumpy, though I noticed we touched each other more than any of the mundanes did. A bump of shoulder, a caress of hand, a smile, a head laid upon a shoulder, a hug, a kiss. I don’t understand why people don’t touch each other more in public. But my point is this. Jon and I were all too early in the morning, too dark to be out in the daylight, but we seemed happier and more together than most of the happy, normal people.
Gotta go. I’ve got all four dogs in the office with me, and for once they’re all being fairly quiet. The musical Jekyll and Hyde is playing on the CD player. Time to light my candle and get to work.

Hi! It is Darla. I just wanted to toss in my thanks on the events! Give a little reminder, correct a bit of misinformation and give a heads up on a unhappy albeit necessary change.
First, thanks so much to everybody who trekked out. Your patience is amazing and appreciated. Especially the signifigant others and children who were so well behaved their parents should get them a treat! We know it was a long night and wait for most everyone. It was nice to chat with so many folks and hear how you came to the series. Though the prize for distance this time goes to the lady who came from New York to attend. We won’t tell your sister you really weren’t here just to visit her.
Special waves to Carol, Kathy and Jodi over at the Barnes and Noble in Springfield Illinois, you guys were amazing. And Mike the driver who got us there and back safely.
Waves also to Holley and the crew over at Borders in Brentwood. Who now have copies of the promotional newspaper, (I dropped them off this morning), had I known theirs hadn’t arrived I would have brought them with me. Hope we didn’t keep you out to late!
Teanette, take care of yourself and we hope your feeling better. You know we expect to see you the 28th! Your thoughtfulness in not risking exposing to your cold Laurell was really appreciated.
This is your reminder: Don’t forget to send in your reciepts for the drawing before 09/15/04. The packing slip from the online retailers is certainly acceptable. And for those folks who tossed their reciept or forgot to get one, you can take your book, copy the cover (xerox it) and write your name and address in the margin. That will be acceptable also. For those who don’t remember the address: LKH PO Box 190306 St. Louis, MO 63119. We have already amassed quite a few! If you win, and it is returned or I don’t have an address to send it to, I will be choosing an alternate winner.
We will be destroying all the entries after the drawing. We will not be keeping that info. We have a nice hefty papershredder and all of it will be going through there. So no worries about your info floating around. We try to treat others how we would want to be treated and I know I don’t want mine floating around. And please do not include anything extra in your entry. I will be opening only the winners envelopes so notes will get missed!
The correction: Despite what some of the online retailers have marked, Incubus Dreams is 658 pages not 320. Unless they are only sending out half the book. I have notified them of the error but I don’t know how long it will take to correct those.
Now for the nasty bit. Due to the extremely large crowds we are going to have to down the number of books Laurell signs to 2. Sorry! With 13 events planned in 14 days and crowds expected to number 300-600 per signing even at two books it will run 600-1200 signatures a night for Laurell. She will continue to personalize one and sign one. But if she cannot type she cannot write. We hate to limit it like this and this is as low as Laurell is willing to go. So grab a friend and make them stand in line with you.
Darla

Hey, everybody. We had the second signing for Cerulean Sins last night. It went well. It was great seeing everyone who came out. Two nights in a row when I got to bed after midnight, and I’m beat. We estimated I signed somewhere around a thousand books last night. No wonder my arm wasn’t happy by the end of the evening. Somedays I think I should learn to write with both hands, so I can switch off, but then I wonder, what if both arms start to hurt? Oh, well. Thanks again to everyone who shared their time with us last night. Jonathon, Darla, and I, were happy to see you all. Our friend Richard helped out last night to (no he has nothing to do in either appearance or character with Richard the character in my books. I met him years after the creation of Richard Zeeman), if our friend, Richard, keeps helping out at local events we may have to introduce him, too. We introduced Darla last night, though for all you who are not local, Darla is not traveling with us for out of town dates. She’s very happy about that.
As for Jonathon and I, we’re wondering, when will that damned teleportation technology come on line? It would make tour so much easier.

The first signing is today. The first signing for the paperback release of Cerulean Sins, that is. I add that so no one gets the idea that Incubus Dreams is coming out earlier than it is. That’s still end of the month. Thank God.
I have so much work to do before I vanish into tour for weeks at a time. Some writers can work on tour. I have not been one of them up until now, but I’m going to give it the ol’ college try. We’ll see. I know that I’ll be a lot happier with my deadlines if I didn’t loose all that time on the book.
We’re doing an event in Springfield, Illinois tonight, and an event at the Borders in Brentwood tomorrow night. It’s sort of a micro-mini tour for Cerulean’s paperback release. My publisher hopes that it will boost sales. That and the collectible postcard in the paperbacks. Yeah, limited edition postcards, four of them, and to get all four you’d have to buy four different copies of Cerulean in paperback. Sorry about that. I think we did auction some postcards for charity but that’s over with, I believe.
Anyway, I am going to try and write. Then must exercise, cardio today, so treadmill. Did you know that the treadmill was originally a torture device (French I believe). It was discontinued on the grounds of cruel and unusual or some such. And here we are buying one, and using it voluntarily. Something so wrong with that. Then shower and clean up. Make up. The dress, the shoes, the jewelry, the outfit. I’m trying to wear things for these two events that I couldn’t wear on the larger tour, because of color or cut . . . I e, they wouldn’t look good on me on television. Or somethings just don’t pack well. Too bulky, or wrinkle like hell. Yes, most better hotels do have laundry and dry cleaning services, but you can’t always count on when you’ll get your clothes back. Some clothing wrinkles badly on a two hour plane flight. Not good for tour.
On top of all the other stuff, one of Trinity’s hermit crabs had decided to have trouble with it’s molt, and Jon is off trying to find sand soft enough for it to bury down in. Frankly, I fear Bluebell the crab is not long for this mortal world. Trin took it pretty well, but that’s because the crab is still kicking. By the time she comes home from school, it may not be, and Jon and I won’t be here. Grandma Mary will be meeting her off the bus. Trin has usually taken it very hard when she looses so much as a fish, and the crabs are more interactive than a fish. I hate to saddle Mary with the trauma, and I hate to leave Trinity without us, when dealing with it. But we’ll be on our way to Springfield, for the signing, when she gets off the bus. Maybe she’ll take it well, or maybe the crab will pull through.
I’ll see everybody at the signing tonight and tomorrow, and even more of you on the larger tour in a few weeks. See you then.

Good Morning everybody. I’m at my desk, and Jimmy is in his bed beside me. I thought Pippin was coming up, too, but he’s only made two dashes into the office then, at top speeds, back out and down the hall, and down the stairs, and then right back up. He is playing some game that is a combination of tag and keep a way with Jon.
It started innocently enough with Jimmy wondering back to Jon’s office then following him back towards the stairs, and me just wanting to know which dogs were coming upstairs with me. My goal was simply to sit down and get to work. So Jon helped herd Jimmy up here, then Pip was trying to play licky-face through the banister with Jon. We don’t let the dogs lick us on the face, not if we can help it, we know where their tongues have been. But something about almost getting there excited the big puppy, and the next thing I know Pip is tearing around like some fifty-pound black blur. Jon is agging him on, making bark noises, and snuffling noises, and crawling around on his hands and knees, and the puppy is just loving it. I play with the dogs, but apprently I don’t imitate play behavior as well as Jon does, because Pip never goes quite as nutso with me, as he does with Jon. It’s a gift.
The game ended when Jon tired before the puppy, but who doesn’t tire before a puppy? Then Pip gulloped (gallop isn’t quite the right sound) down the stairs with Jon, and they raced off both of them tired but smiling. Dogs do smile, you know, or at least most dogs do. I am willing to believe that there is a breed or mix out there that does not smile, but I have yet to be introduced to it.
Phouka and Sasquatch are downstairs with Darla in her office. Pip is with Jon, and I’ve got Jimmy. There are days when I think I have too many dogs. Today is not one of them. After all if we had fewer dogs not everyone would have one to keep them company at work. And that would be a shame.

I finally realized that I’m almost afraid to write in the blog about how well the new Merry book is going. It seems like everytime I write that I may have hit my stride in it here on the blog, I don’t keep my stride. I don’t think it actually has anything to do with the blog process, but more with me relaxing about having passed the hurdles.
There is a point in most books where I just simply know that it’s working. That I’m over the hump, but every time I build up speed for A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT, then I stumble, and loose my momentum. Jon and Darla have both reminded me that I do this on most books. Merry writes slower than Anita, that is simply a truism, so the stumbling seems more obvious to me. I guess if you’re moving fast enough, the bumps don’t seem like mountains. They’re just bumps. At slow speed, the bumps are mountains, or at least hills that must be climbed, and it slows things down even more.
I know that each book is different, like a different year out of your life. Never quite the same. But I didn’t realize that a series character, or maybe the difference in the worlds, something, could make that much difference in how an entire series of books writes for me.
Gotta go the landscaper is here. I did twenty pages yesterday, and twenty pages the day before. I’ve said a little prayer that I’ve actually hit my stride for this book, settled in not for a sprint like Anita, but that long marathon jog. You still get to the finish line, just not as fast.

Jimmy and Pip are asleep on two different dog beds. Jimmy in ‘his’ bed which is right beside my main desk, and Pip on the bigger bed that is pretty much in the middle of the floor. They are both lying on their sides with their paws stretched out, deeply asleep. Jimmy at fourteen just came up and laid down, and once he was certain I was actually going to be writing for awhile, he went to sleep. Pip, at a little over a year, played with and crushed the empty water bottle I let him have, then laid down to sleep. This is one of the longest peaceful times the two of them have had together in my office. Usually I can only have one of them at a time since Pip hit puberty, and Jimmy decided he was old, but wasn’t backing down. Infact, the old man often starts the trouble. He has been writing checks his body cannot cash.
But we’ve been working with Pip on obedience and letting him know that Jimmy isn’t in charge, we are. It’s calmed him down a lot. We took him to a local outdoor cafe this weekend, and he sat at the table with us and didn’t try to jump up on a single person. A reord. He only tried to put his paw on the one lady who petted him. He didn’t bark once, and was very calm. The socilization is really helping his confidence. We also had a professional dog trainer out to the house to watch the dogs interact in their home environment. She was the one who pointed out that Pip isn’t aggressive, he’s afraid, and doesn’t know how to be boss, and doesn’t know who else is boss. He’s a dog, somebody has to be boss, but he’d really rather it were someone else. So it’s us.
I’m about a hundred and fifty pages in on A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT. If you’ve been reading the blog regularly you know that I’ve had some family illness, and it’s certainly effected my ability to concentrate on the writing. Preparing for tour also cuts into things. Getting our daughter ready for school to begin again, also takes time and attention. Though Jon’s mom helped with that this year.
I read how Eugene O’Neill, the playwright had his third wife, Carlotta, make sure that no one bothered him in the morning while he worked. No phone, no callers, nothing. Not even if the house were on fire. Everyone went around on tip-toes, speaking in hushed voices. At lunch she was afraid to even move to make her chair squeak for fear of disturbing the man’s concentration. She also sorted his mail, which frankly is a fine idea, but the rest . . . Yeah, it’s occasionally appealing to be that protected from the world. But how would it possibly work? What, I have a nanny to tend my daughter and never see her? You just give up your entire life to other people, and care only about the writing?
There are other writers that did similar things. Asimov worked an average of twenty hours a day, and supposedly never left his office during a work session. His wife brought him food. There are numerous other stories about writers that did that. Most, if not all of them, male, but I don’t see how it would work. I mean was O’Neill not told if his mother was ill, if he was in the middle of a play? Did he only learn of it afterwards? Was he that protected? Or did emergencies disturb the great man’s schedule? But what, I’m not going to greet my daughter home from the first day of third grade? I’m going to miss that? I don’t think so.
My husband and I were both there huddled under an umbrella in the unusually cold down pour, when she got off the bus for the first day of third grade.
I don’t know how to balance real life with the writing. I really don’t. But I just don’t think I could isolate myself to the degree that some have done and be happy with the decision. It would be as if the writing were more real than your life. How weird would that be? Also, truthfully, the thought of making everyone tip-toe around and whisper because I was working is a little too primadonna for me. I would feel silly asking my family and friends to do stuff like that. But hey, that’s just me. Eugene O’Neill was the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. He won four Pulitzer prizes for drama. Some scholars claim that he’s the third most widely translated and produced dramatist after William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Not bad, not bad at all.
So who am I to say that his schedule sounded prissy? I don’t have a Pulitzer, or a Nobel Prize. But I’ll say this, I can’t imagine thinking I could order my family and friends around to that degree and there not be a palace revolt. I take my writing very, very seriously, but so seriously that the squeak of a chair could disrupt my creative process — that serious I’m not.

We were home for less than twelve hours before we had to drag our butts back out. We got on a plane and flew to visit my family. It was a visit prompted by illness and just sheer age. There’s nothing wrong with my grandmother, except she’s 93. As Trinity said when she figured it out, “Wow, Mom, that’s like almost a hundred. We’ve got to go see her. She can’t last much longer.” Out of the mouths of children. But it is the truth. The woman has been telling everyone she was dying since she was fifty. She is going to be right someday, at least about that.
My Uncle Jessie on the other hand, is truly ill. A sudden discovery of cancer that he probably has had for years. He looked much better than my other aunt had led me to expect. But then, Aunt Bonita, has always been something of an alarmist. But in this case her exaggeration got me on a plane, and I don’t regret that. It was very good to see Jessie and Juanita, my aunt, and my cousin Millie. The visit was a good one.
I also got to see my Uncle Monk and my cousin Doug. He’s the closest thing I ever had to a younger brother.
I was reminded that my family loves me, and I love them, too, damnit. That we may not always understand each other, but there is still common ground, still room to reach out to one another. Which we all did nicely, thank you. Which was very cool.

We leave tomorrow for the ‘family vacation’. It will be the first one where we are driving somewhere instead of flying. You’d think with my fear of flying I’d be pleased, but no. You see, I’m afraid of cars, too. Not as afraid, thank God, but still nervous. My mother dying in one I think has something to do with this particular phobia.
Jonathon and I have both felt very anxious about the trip, and I finally figured out why. Because driving reminds us of all those awful family vacations where you’re trapped in the car with people who love you, but don’t always like you, and you’re going some place that you didn’t choose, and really don’t want to go. I think I had one vacation my entire childhood that was a pleasant experience. Maybe more, but the one that stands out was the one where my Uncle Toots (Elbert), and my Aunt Bev, took me with them and their children, my cousins Brett and Denise, to one of the Carolina’s. Even that trip had it’s ups and downs, but you had three teenagers in a car. Come to think of it Aunt Bev and Uncle Toots were pretty brave to take us. I don’t know about you but I was pretty damned moody at thirteen.
Oh, well. I’ve got to get back to work, and then finish packing.