Author: Jonathon

Hey, guys. We got some e-mails from people who thought my last blog entry was a little depressed. I didn’t think so, but hey, reading back over it, it does seem a little down. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to tell me to buck up. I finally realized that I’m trying to treat the books the same way I treated them when six hundred pages was a really, really long book. Now most books average around seven hundred plus pages. INCUBUS DREAMS is going to be over a thousand pages. I’d make it shorter if I could, but the book has to be as long as you need to finish the themes, plot, whatever of the book. But back in the day when books were four hundred pages, five at the outside was when I finalized how I write. My schedule, my habits, etc . . .
I’d been wondering why the last few books I couldn’t find one single album to get me through the entire book. The answer is simple. I like to listen to the same music over and over, so that when I hear that album it puts me in the mood to write that book. There are still some songs that evoke certain books or characters for me. I can’t listen to the music without thinking of the writing. I can listen to the same album for five hundred pages, then somewhere between five and six hundred, I get tired of the album. I just simply want different music. When I next sit down to write a book, I will know that if the book is going to be six hundred pages or more, that I simply need to plan for two different albums. Either switch them back and forth early on, or be prepared with a back-up album when I get to the last third of the book. See, perfectly logically, once you think about it.
I also used to immerse myself into my books. I would write and write, and barely eat, or sleep. I threw myself into my make-believe-universe like jumping off a cliff, trusting my words to catch me. That works great when it’s a four hundred page book. It’s even doable at five, but you get much over that and you just can’t disappear from the rest of your life for so long. Especially with children, and a spouse, and dogs, and friends, and hell, just everyday life. Your life doesn’t run itself. So this total immersion technique that worked great for the first four books or, so. (There was some problems with it when my daughter was born and I went back to work when she was three months old. Babies take up an amazing about of time and energy.) But I stubbornly tried to keep writing as if I was still childless. I gave that up. Impossible. Babies change everything about your life. You’re still you, but your time is not really your own. Not for a very long time.
But when I do write, when the kiddo is in school, or my lovely husband is doing child duty, I still try for the immersion technique. But now the books are seven hundred pages, eight hundred pages, nine, a thousand. I simply can’t immerse myself into a book for that long, and neglect everything else. It just isn’t doable. Even I don’t write that fast. But because I was still opearting as if the books were half this long, I was mentally beating myself up. Thoughts like, I used to be able to work like this. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this the way I’ve always done it? The answer, is so obvious, but only if you notice it.
I’ve in effect been trying to do the equivelent of three to four of my old books in a year’s time. No wonder I can’t do it. Who could? As the books have doubled, or more, in length, I’ve cut myself no slack in my schedule. I’ve treated the idea that I want to write two books a year, as gospel. When I set this goal the books were around four hundred pages, close to five, a piece. Eight hundred pages a year is doable for me. Even a thousand pages is doable with effort. But what I’ve been trying to ask of myself is between sixteen hundred and two thousand pages a year. That is not doable. That is like insane.
It also explains why I get tired of a book before a book is finished. I always am tired by the time I finish, no matter what book it is. I always like getting to the end. But the last several books I’ve gotten tired sooner. I’ve had this niggling feeling that the book should be done, and it’s not. It’s like only three quarters done, but my body, my mind, my habits, tell me we should be done. Because I developed all these habits, trained myself to write a book about half to three-quarters the length of what I’m writing now.
I’d been thinking I was doing something wrong, but it’s simply that I hadn’t made room in my schedule for the growth. It would be like trying to treat your child like they’re still in elementery school when they’re about to graduate high school. All the strategies that worked when they were little, just don’t work now that they’re eighteen.
I’ve been putting off vacations; trips to the zoo; you name it, it’s all on hold. Because I have to finish to the book first. No, I’ve decided, no I don’t. I will continue to work on a regular schedule, and I still turn out more pages per day than most writers do. I am blessed in that way. But I have to find a way to write that reflects the length and complexity of the books now. I have to figure out what of my engrained work habits I can change, and what I can’t. Extra music, and probably go back to a page count that is smaller than my usually, so I pace myself better. I keep hitting days of twenty page plus, and that would be great if the book was actually that close to the end, but it isn’t. I have almost two hundred pages still to go. I broke it down yesterday to a chapter by chapter outline, and that’s about where we’re at. Now would be the time to go into the tweny page a day run, but I did it too early. Like running a marathon and doing the last kick too far away from the finish line. You make it across, but you make it across slower.
Now that I’ve had my revalation about why things aren’t working as smoothly with the writing as they once did, I can fix it. I can try to rework how I work, but until I realized the false logic, or maybe outdated logic, I was working on, I didn’t know what was wrong. It’s an old saying, but a true one; don’t work harder, work smarter. Which is what I will be trying to do from now on. Bye for now.

Its mid morning here and I haven’t really written anything of note in the blog for a while, so I thought I’d write something.
As Darla said yesterday, SbM is #11 on the NY Times list, and that is soo cool. I can’t really articulate how cool, as I’m still in shock that it is back on the list.
I’ve been taking some time of late to re-acquaint myself with one of my most favorite hobbies. Miniature Gaming.
I love to put together and paint miniatures. It brings me a bit of peace in my hectic schedule and everyone here thinks I do a wonderful job of it. Maybe I’ll put up a picture or two of my stuff and let you decide. But don’t tell me, I like to keep my illusions intact.

For the sixth week, Seduced By Moonlight is on the NY Time Bestseller List! #11!
Happy dances abound!

It’s me. Sat up late and finished a scene that I’d had to leave blank. A scene that I had not the heart or patience for weeks ago. I just typed, scene here, and moved the fuck on. Last night I had to finally finish it. It was a great scene. Fun, exciting, sexy, but it was still hard, because anything with Richard and Anita, and Jean-Claude is hard. It’s their dynamics, I guess. I was pumped after the scene, and if it could have been the end of the book, I’d be exstacitic this morning, but it’s not. Last night I chose music for the scene. TYPE O NEGATIVE “Black Number 1”. on continuous play. If you’re familiar with the song then it gives you some idea of the scene.
This morning I’ve skipped back to where I left the rest of the book, over two hundred pages ahead. I’m at page 920, and not done. I was in such a good mood last night. The scene really worked. This morning I woke in a deep blue funk, so tired, emotionally drained. For me it’s been being sick with one of those icky viruses for two weeks. Only kicked it’s ass yesterday. For Anita, we’re finally seeing her pay the price on stage for no longer believing that vampires are monsters. If vampires are people, living beings, then what does it do to you as a person to be killing them on a regular basis? She’s murdering people. Yeah, they started it. They killed other people, but sometimes they aren’t fighting back. Sometimes, the bad guys beg for their lives, and she still has to pull the trigger. It’s been ugly. So through very different avenues Anita and I come to this place in the book, both emotional drained, so tired. Maybe I’m like one of those method actors, and I adopt some of what my character is doing, or expereincing, because my courage has faltered several times this book. I know what’s coming and I don’t want to put Anita through it. I don’t want to see it, or do it, and I don’t see a way to avoid it. We’re back to having Olaf and Edward on stage, however briefly. We’ll need the back-up and that says more than anything else what kind of end we have for this book.
How much violence can you see before you break? I’m beginning to daydream about a cozy mystery world where no one dies violently, and it’s always tea time. Anita needs a real vacation, and so do I. But I think that she, like me, is incapable of having an innocent vacation. I can’t go anywhere without getting a new book idea for her, and it would be her luck that she’d be out jogging, or something and find a body. I can hear her now in my head, yelling, “What is this karma? I’m on fucking vacation.” She’d be so wicked pissed to have a crime dumped on her lap if she actually left town and tried to do something normal. You know, go to the seashore, look for shells, jog along the shore. Sounds good, doesn’t it, but even if I went, I would be gazing off to sea thinking of monsters.
I’ve got an interview question waiting it’s turn in the cue of interviews. The question is why violence? Why write about such violent themes? Why write about scary stuff? The answer, simply, is that I can’t help myself. It’s how I think. Give me an idyllic scene with daffodils and bunnies, and there’d be a severed hand in among the flowers. Or maybe, better yet, a partially decomposing hand, that one of the dogs dug up. Naw, we’ve seen too many dogs digging up stuff in mysteries. It happens in real life, but fiction should try to be fresh, if you can do it. One of the hardest things about writing a series if your detective is a civillian is finding exscuses for bodies to keep turning up. It’s so much easier with a main character that gets to be a professional cop or detective. One of the reasons that Anita is a professional, rather than a civvie, is that I read mystery series, and decided I’d rather have a reason for my main person to keep being called into crime scenes.
Strangely, I’m feeling better. Yeah, I’m tired. Yes, the book is the longest yet, and that’s playing hell with my deadlines, but what I wrote is true. I write what I think about, what ocurrs to me, and that is some pretty dark shit. I’ll leave you here. Keep the light on, watch your back, and remember that noise . . . It’s nothing.

Doh!
I apparently mis-spoke last week when I said that the book had had a good run. It seems that the book isn’t done yet.
The New York Times Best Seller List Came out yesteray and Seduced by Moonlight was #12.
So this makes it six weeks in the top 20, four in the top 10, five in the top 15.
Lets keep it rolling!

Hey everyone. I’m just going to drop a quick note about last night’s Wolf Howl.
One word : Amazing.
The reading was amazing, the talking around the campfire was amazing, and the wolves…. Oh, the wolves were freaking amazing!
I said it last night, before Laurell started signing books. “Hearing the wolves howl is the reason we chose the Wild Canid Research and Survival Center as one of our charities. I want my daughter and her children and their children to have the opportunity to experience what we did tonight.”
If you were there, you know what I mean. If you missed it… We may be doing another one again in the fall.
Got to run and get breakfast,

No, not another damn sex scene. NOOOOO! I like sex. I like writing about sex, but damnit we’re almost done. I’m beginning to see every scene that isn’t directly related to the main mystery as a barrier to the end of the book. I don’t want to explore interpersonal relationships. I don’t want to do another therepy session. I am done for this book. I just want out. Out means over. Bad guy dead. Murders avenged. Fini. But the rules for the arduer though changed by this point in the book, are still the rules. I can’t break my own logic rules, or the entire integrity of the world goes crashing down, but damnit, I am tired. I begining to run out of different ways to do sex this book. We’ve done rough, more than once. We’ve down most of the positions that make sense when you’re starting out a sex life, and at least one that doesn’t. We’ve used the extra strength. We’ve used the idea of furry in new and interesting ways. We’ve done the vampire bit. We’ve done it this book. Now I am left with a sex scene that isn’t in the outline, and that I didn’t see coming, and I just simply don’t know what to do with it. It’s with someone we haven’t been with this book, so that’s good. But what’s left? I’ve been threatening to have a shirt made up, PLOT CALLED ON ACCOUNT OF SEX SCENE, INCUBUS DREAMS by Laurell K. Hamilton. It was funnier a hundred pages ago.
I cut sixty-two pages out of the book not long ago, which dropped me back down to under nine hundred pages. I will hit nine hundred pages again either tomorrow or by Thursday. At this rate INCUBUS will be longer than any book I’ve ever written. Shit. Longer than OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY.
While I’m making confession, may I just say I was wrong about Olaf and Edward being in this book. Mea freaking culpa. They would be wasted here, and Edward is not a character you waste. Next Anita book he and Olaf will be on stage early and often, but this book it’s just not necessary. Yeah, it looses me some cool scenes, but that’s just the way it is. I told Darla when I was sure that Edward and Olaf are not going to be in this book after I told everyboyd he would be, that I’d put it up on the blog, and let everybody know. Well here it is. Sorry, not my choice, not my decision, just that the book changed on me, as they often do. That’ll teach me to tell people too much before I’m more than a few hundred pages in. It’s one of the reasons I normally don’t do hinting, because I’ve lost track of the number of books that I think such and such character is going to be in, and then in the end, they aren’t. So there it is. I’ve got less than ten chapters between me and the end of the book and there is no reason, or time for Edward to show up. I’m disappointed to, by the way.
But next book is a plot tailor made for Edward. Without him, no book. So that one I’m sure of. Without Edward to help at the end of INCUBUS DREAMS though, it’s going to be rough. Anita will make it, but damn, we need more help in the vampire killing department than we have. Larry is still on his honeymoon, so no help there. Maybe we could enlist Manny, no, what if we get him killed? Anita and I are both beginning to wonder if her being the lone ranger of the undead world is such a good idea afterall. Maybe we need another vamp executioner in town, so we can divide up the duties more. Maybe. All I know is she’s had a rough hundred or so pages, and we were looking forward to her getting home to Micah and Nathaniel for this nice little scene. Something homey and comforting. But instead we’ve got to feed the arduer. No sweet domesticity, just fucking. I can’t even say it’s love making, because she’s put the arduer off for longer than she’s ever been able to. Someone killing vamps and answering officer down calls just made her not think about sex at all, fancy that. Now she’s home, and it’s catching up with her. It’s like someone with low blood sugar finally getting a meal, you don’t get to enjoy the food, because you just need it so badly.
Okay, we’ll find a way to enjoy the sex. I mean it is sex, and one of my rules is, it’s got to be fun. But if I could figure a way around this scene, then we could be so periously close to the end. I’m still trying to figure a way out of it. Or around it, or over it. At this point I’d rather see her talk to Micah and Nathaniel than anything else. Which lets you know just how much sex we’ve been having this time round.

Cool!
The New York Times Best Seller List Came out yesteray and Seduced by Moonlight was #17.
It’s been a good run. Five weeks in the top 20, four of which were in the top 10.
Thanks to everyone who has helped support the book. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Hey, everybody. Jonathon and I are both sick with colds. You forget how really miserable they can be. I’m up trying to do a few pages just to keep the momentum rolling. I’ve found that for myself even a day with no pages can really hurt when the book is near the end. So I’ll struggle through a few. Even a page is better than nothing. Yesterday I managed eleven pages, after a week of two and five pages. I was very pleased.
You know how I say don’t rewrite as you go through your first draft, I still hold to that, but I found myself hoist on my own advice. Anita goes into the vampire lair with a police tactical team. As I’m trying to write the scene I hit three things in a row that I wasn’t sure of. I was almost sure, but not a hundred percent. But they were things that could have impact on the way I wrote the scene. For instance do we have flashlights or nightvision goggles. Right now we’ve got those flashlights that attache to the gun barrel, because the night goggles cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars a piece. Most police forces do not have the money to equip eight men with them. If when I’m finished with this book and I talk to my experts and they tell me that, well, actually, night visiton afterall, I’ll have to rewrite it, but if I’d tried to start interviewing people before the book was finished, the scene wouldn’t even be finished. So I literally wrote, NOTES; FLASHLIGHTS OR NIGHT GOGGLES. I have almost a dozen questions that I will be asking my expert, but until I wrote the entire scene I didn’t know what I needed to ask about. That’s one of the reasons I say do the first draft first, because for me, I don’t always know how things are going to happen until the scene is written. Notes don’t count, too often in the actual writing I find the scene turning in a totally different direction. Sometimes I go back later and rewrite the scene as I orignally intended, but most often, the new version is what stays. It’s fresher, more real, more true to something in the book.
Right now, I’m going to try and get a few pages of the aftermath scene. I was hoping we could skip this chapter, but it works better if Anita has her say to the police and everybody, rather than a few paragraphs of backflash later. I may try it both ways, but I think there’s just too much stuff to squeeze down into paragraphs. Pages, I think. I would love for this book to be shorter, but length is like heighth, you don’t get to choose. Gotta go.

Well the water from the cleft rock phase has passed, and I’m back to the doldrums. Why? Because I forgot my own advice. Remember when I say don’t research extensively before you’ve got a finished manuscript. Well, I forgot that. I mean this is my seventeenth book, or so. I have the disipline to do a little research than get back into the book. I won’t loose momentum this late in the book. I’m on a roll. Famous last words.
Admittedly I needed some of the gun research. It’s always good to see what’s new, and as Anita has started doing more hardcore gun work, ammo is a problem. It used to be, I believed we’d never need more than one extra clip but it’s been a hard year, or two for Anita. So I looked at ways to carry more ammo. All good stuff to know, but then I ended up spending way too much time looking at gun stuff. I realized I need to talk to some of my experts now that I know exactly what questions I need to ask. I even thought about making appointments for doing just that. But, the book is not finished. I could spend a week on the gun and tacticle research alone. But not until the book is done. Never until the book is done, because you’ll destroy your momentum. As I’ve done.
I’ll be okay, but that I could go from twenty pages a day to none, just because I stopped and got distracted by more research than I needed at that moment, shows how hazardous it can be. Yes, I will have to go out and see some of the new gun products before the final draft of this book is put to bed. Yes, I will need to talk to my experts before then, but now, now all it is, is loosing my way. Going, ooh, shiny.
Don’t let yourself get distracted, or it could mean the difference between finishing that first novel and never finishing it. A cautionary tale for all you out there trying to do this magic trick for the first time.
I know there are professional writers who do research as they write. I do some research before I sit down to write, but once the writing starts, only checking quick facts is allowed. If it’s not quick, it has to wait. Which means that in the chapter I got stuck in, I had to put the cap-lock on and just say, EQUIPMENT SCENE HERE. I’m going to have to handle as much of the guns and accesories as I can, before I can truly decide what Anita is using. We’ve really needed more shotguns in her arsenal for a while. I just haven’t had the time to do the hands-on. Well, when the first draft is complete, and before it comes back from New York for the first looksie, I’ll go do that hands-on, or as much as possible. Some weaponary I either don’t have, or don’t want access to. I mean the grenade launcher that is about the size of a compact shotgun is way cool, but I don’t think I really want to shoot one off. I’ll have to think about that one, but then I doubt we’ll be using it this book. It sounds more the kind of thing Edward gives Anita, or has himself, that she’s just amazed at. I was.
See, see, the extra research I did, isn’t useless. It may all turn out to be very useful, but it stopped me dead in the water on this book, and that’s got to be the highest priority right now. So, I’ve left my blank space, and when it’s all done, I’ll do my extra research and fill in the blanks. I don’t leave many blanks anymore, but there’s nothing wrong with them either. Maybe someday I’ll just accept that it’s the way I work, and not keep trying to believe I don’t have to do it that way this time. Yeah, actually, I do. It’s the way that works for me.
I was listening to Evanescence, and rolling along. Now, I’m back to THE MUSIC MAN, the new one with Matthew Broderick. Because, I’m picking my way again. I have faith that it’ll pick up, but until it does, I’ll listen to a musical and cheer myself along. At least I’m not back to Christmas music. Bye for now.