Author: Jonathon

Quadruple Woo Hoo!!

Quadruple Woo Hoo!!

We’re number Eight again! We’re number Eight again!
The New York Times Best Seller List Came out yesteray and Seduced by Moonlight was still #8!
Four Weeks and still in the top 10!
Hyper Cool!

Ooooh, gun porn.

Ooooh, gun porn. I’ve been looking at the Heckler and Koch web sight. Oooh. Pretty. I actually started because I couldn’t find my notes on Anita’s shotgun. My files on guns and such is still missing since the move. I think it must be in that box with the dog mugs and missing video tapes, because none of them have shown up in the three years we’ve lived here. I must assume they are lost for good. So I am starting to look around at guns again. I was going to go gun shopping for Anita after I finish this book, anyway. Since there are many fine compact handguns that will fit her and my hand, out there. Many more than ten years ago, when I first went shopping. I also have spent a good deal of the afternoon trying to figure out how the heck she could carry this much fire power, and be able to move easily. Does the term Malice clip mean anything to you guys? If not, I won’t try to explain, just let’s say it’s nifty, and helps you customize your carry-gear. We are about to have Anita go into the big bad vampire’s lair at night, because they have at least one hostage, and they’ve let us know that. Yes, it’s a trap, but like all the best traps, even knowing that, you can’t not do it. So we’re loading up for bear, or vampire as the case may be, but I’m trying to figure out how to carry the H and K MP5, Ithaca 37 sawed-off, and a Mossberg 590A1 Bantam, without getting tangled and bumping into eachother. Will we need that much firepower? Maybe. And any time the answer is maybe, I want the firepower. But I also want to be able to move without clattering, so we’re still working on if it’s actually feasible to carry it all, or if I need to whittle it down to only two big guns. Gotta go, I want the equipment question settled today so we go brave the bad guy’s lair tomorrow in my working day. Anita is trapped in one of those nights that seems to have no end, which happens in the middle of murder chases, especially when they turn into hostage situations. Bye for now.

Hey everybody.  It’s me.

Hey everybody. It’s me. Incubus Dreams is over nine hundred pages now, and not done. But I’m not worried about it because I did 20 pages or more for the last four days. 29 pages yesterday. Whoohoo! I always know that the book is barreling to a close when I hit a string of days like that. This is my favorite part of the book, when the only thing that prevents me from writing more than twenty plus pages is just physically I can’t do it anymore that day. When my body just whimpers no more, it’s time to stop for the day. Gotta go. More pages to write.

Ok, I’m recovered enough

Ok, I’m recovered enough to talk about the B&N signing on Saturday.
It was good to see everyone who couldn’t make it to the library event in early Feburary. We really thought the signing went well, we were done by 7pm and Laurell’s arm was not hurting too much. We were able to get a good supper at a reasonable hour. All becasue we started the event at 2pm.
It was all in all a really fun event. I got to see one of my cousins that I hadn’t seen in a while and caught up with her and her husband. It turns out that she has started wrestling in the local circut, which is really cool.
I’ve got to go and work on several other projects that are looming.

Hey everybody, it’s me.

Hey everybody, it’s me. Incubus Dreams is finally in the end game, which means I am writing as hard as I can. Making notes, trying to make sure all the clues work, that the red herrings are as scarlet as possible. The end game is both one of the most fun parts of any book and the scariest for me, because here is where I find out whether the plot, the mystery, the personal interactions, work, or don’t work. This is the moment when you find out if that scene on page 111 (Just made up number don’t have time to check what page numbers I’m really concerned about) worked or whether it was a trip down the rabbit hole. Rabbit holes were first described to me by two fine writers Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, check out their stuff. I maybe using rabbit hole in a slightly different way than they did, but to me, it’s a thread of plot or character that distracts you and takes you where you don’t want to be, or don’t need to be. It takes you to a part of Wonderland that you don’t need to visit, maybe ever, but certainly not in this book. I’m off now to see if I’m chasing rabbits, or if the hounds are truly in full cry. bye for now.

Me, again.  First let me thank everyone

Me, again. First let me thank everyone that e-mailed, or wrote in, to let me know not to let some of the publicity get me down. Thanks.
Second, let’s talk about the event in Huntington Beach, CA. It was wonderful, as always. Chara the manager always runs a very smooth ship. It’s one of the reasons that we’ve been back to her store so many times. We saw a lot of familiar faces in the crowd. It’s been about three, or four years of going about once a year, or more, to this same area, so we learned that some people’s children had graduated from high school. Some fans had graduated from highschool, or moved, or were in college, or graduate school. Entire families of fans coming now that they’re kids are old enough to read all the books. Some people are married, celebrating anneverseries. Sort of like old home week, in a way. I know that some of you in other areas of the country are frustrated that we never visit your part of the world, but honestly the publisher picks the areas we are to visit. Our input mostly consists of what store in that area from a list that we’ve been given to choose from. One, the store needs to have enough space to hold that many people. We average around two hundred people per event, but it’s been over five hundred, and close to six before. That’s more unusual, but it happens. That’s a lot of people for a store to hold.
Since I lived in Los Angeles for about three years once upon a time, I’m usually not that impressed with the weather. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to leave was I missed the seasonal changes. But it’s been an unusually cold and presistent winter here in St. Louis, and for the first time when Jonathon and I got off the plane, 70 degrees and that nice gentle air felt wonderful. For the first time in my life I understood why people take vacations to warm places in the middle of winter. Normally, I like winter, but I think almost everyone east of the Mississippi has had a little too much of it this year. Heck, I guess everyone east of the rockies.
But it wasn’t just the long winter that made L. A. seem more user friendly, it was that it was the beginning of tour, not the end. Usually we hit the west coast somewhere in the later part of a month long tour, and no city, no matter how lovely is lovely when you are two weeks or more into a plane a day, a city a day, and publicity all through it. My hat is off to all the actors and singers and comedians who do this kind of thing for months, or even years. All the performers who live more on the road than off, I do not know how you do it.
I begged off the big tour this time. Because it’s not just the month you loose, but weeks before in preperation, and weeks after in recovery. My husband and I always manage to be a little ill when we get back. Plane air, or the change in climate, or just a bug, who knows, but it happens darn near every time.
I’d love to visit every part of the country, and out of the country, that wanted me to come. If teleportation really worked, it might even be possible, but I am not one of those people who can work on tour. A little, a few notes, but not pages, and pages is what I need. Because pages will finish a book and notes won’ts. I’m still not finished with INCUBUS DREAMS. Until I finish it I cannot begin the next Merry book.
I’ve reached the point I reach with every book, I just want it to be done. No matter how much I enjoy the characters and the world my deadline looms, and is now in the rearview mirror, and the book is still not done. I finally realized that I’d been interrupted so many times by one thing or the other, mostly business related, that I had to get the last hundred pages and reread it. I couldn’t remember what we’d said, exactly what we’d done, so I had to back up. I hate doing that, because to me only pages count. Darla and Jonathon are both trying to get me to count the days when I make notes, or need to reread, or have to research, but it just isn’t real to me. Pages are real, pages count. I have a page count. I do not have an idea count, or a research count, or a I-can’t-remember-where-we-are count. But the gist of it all is this, about fifty pages need cut from the last hundred, because we repeat and wonder around too much.
You get Richard and Anita together and it gets wordy, or painful, or both. Add Jean-Claude and it takes time. But as I feared because I would go days without being able to write on the scene I had begun to repeat myself, or leave my outline further and further behind. So some major trimming and cut and paste to decide if this fact needs to stay, or this bit of dialogue, or if that is simply too cool to cut. Sometimes the really cool stuff gets cut anyway, but I mourn it more. Anything that makes me laugh outloud I try to keep in.
Some of the pages read incredibly well, and some of them, well, Jean-Claude got to say what I was thinking. “The two of you shall drive me to maddness.” (is that shall drive, or will drive, I’ll decide later.) His comment about Anita and Richard, and I whole-heartedly agree. But the three of them together on stage again was some of the funniest and most poignants moments yet, and that’s in a book that’s been pretty darn funny, and even more poignant. So it works, whether I agree with what we’re doing or not. (yes, I know that whether implies a choice so technically you don’t need to say, or not, but it always looks bare without it to me.)
As you can tell by my asides, I’m still thinking through grammar in this draft. If I really sweated grammar I could never do a blog entry again. I’ve got to get back to work, back to cutting and pasting, and whittling down this scene. I always have a scene in every book I’ve ever written that I call the-scene-that-would-not-die. It’s usually in the later half of the book, or at least a hundred and fifty pages, or more, in, and it’s a scene that just never seems to end. It usually averages between fifty and a hundred and fifty pages. At least half of it needs to be cut every damn time. Since I know that this happens every book, you’d think I’d get better at realizing that it is happening, thus preventing it, but there is something about that endless scene that is necessary for my process. Something shakes loose in all the stuff that needs trimming later, and the book usually goes along much faster and cleaner from that point on. I guess I can take courage from the fact that this is the scene, and once I’ve edited out some of the repitition and the stuff that needs to be saved for later books, the rest of the book should come faster, and go smoother. My, that is an encouraging thought, isn’t it?
I’ll stop blogging now and get to work before my brief spate of optomism fades. Late in a book, I’m always pesimistic. Don’t worry, just part of the process for me. I’ll cheer up about fifty to a hundred pages from the end, when everything is flying, and I get that writer’s high, sort of like runner’s high, but you don’t have to get all sweaty to experience it. Bye, for now.

Hey everybody, it’s me.

Hey everybody, it’s me. First the event at the Schlafly Library here in St. Louis went well, despite the forecast of an ice storm. We got a about a hundred and fifeteen brave souls to challenge the weather and come out for my talk. Those that did come got to hear me read from the first chapter of SEDUCED BY MOONLIGHT, the new Meredith Gentry book. And this group is the only group that will get to hear me read it. There were children in the audience, like ten and under. I remember now why I police the first chapter so that it has no words that aren’t at least pg rated, and no situations that don’t work for a group of all ages. Merry is harder to police in that way then Anita is, but I now remember why I try for the first chapter to be calmer. First, I came to a word that I wouldn’t say infront of my daughter, so I won’t say it infront of anyone else’s children. It was used once in the entire chapter, but early on. I thought I’d changed it, but it didn’t really matter because of something that was later in the chapter. There is no sex in the first chapter, but the situations are adult enough and suggestive enough that I was not comfortable reading it infront of the under ten crowd. So I just had to stop reading and explain to the audience why. They laughed and thought it was cute, or at least amusing. People are welcome to bring their children to events, but I think in writing the first chapter I’d been thinking more about how to begin the book and less that I’d be reading outloud in public. I forget such things at the price of my own discomfort.
The questions and answers went well. We were being filmed part of the time by LIVING ST. LOUIS, KETC Channel 9. I’ve finally gotten comfortable infront of a moving camera. Comfortable means you no longer get stiff when you know it’s there. That you no longer worry more about the camera than what you’re doing infront of it. That you be yourself. Okay, yourself plus about ten to twenty percent more. Don’t ask me to explain the more, because I can’t. But I know that infront of you guys as a group that I am a little shinier, a little more on, then in the privacy of my own home. I much prefer talking and interacting infront of an audience then those static camera interviews where there’s just me and the interviewer, and the crew. I’m getting better even at those, but I don’t know if I’ll ever truly enjoy them. Not fearing them isn’t the same as liking them. You’re so at the mercy of whatever questions are being asked, and you rarely know ahead of time. I have started practicing answers to the more awkward questions so I don’t get caught with no answer, or one that makes whatever they’ve asked worse.
I heard from Darla that we had a couple of people that took offense at my herd blog. Sorry about that. As Darla said in her own blog entry, the herd is great if that’s where you’re happy, but I’ve spent most of my life being told that I’m bad for not being comfortable in the herd. There was a long period in my life where I would have given almost anything to be a happy herd member, to fit in, anywhere. But you’ve got to be who and what you are whatever that means to you. Be the Zebra if that’s who you are, or be the lion, or be the monkey. Be who you are, that’s the big message. Be who you are, and don’t let anyone make you feel bad for being the person that makes you happy, not even me, not even by accident.
I think one of the reasons that I did the herd blog, and some of the others recently is the publicity. It doesn’t take long for me to grow tired of questions that imply or outright state that there is something weird or wrong with what I write, and how my mind works, and, mustn’t forget, my morals. I mean I’m a woman that writes about sex and violence; there must be something wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m okay. But the seemingly constant questions that imply or outright state that there is something intrinsically wrong with sex, especially sex written by a woman, begins to get under my skin. I don’t get mad, mad is for private, and interviews are business. But you’d be surprised at the number of interviews that imply that just thinking this darkly, this violently on paper means there must be something wrong with me. That it’s a kind of sickness or perversity. Sickness, no, perversity, well, it depends on your definition. I’ve interviewed people that thought anything but missonary position (man on top) was perverse. I’m not making that up. Interviewers keep wanting to blame how my mind works on the death of my mother, the absent father, but I’ve been attracted to things that go bump in the night from my earliest clear memories. Scary stuff, flowers, and animals. Books followed when I was old enough to appreciate them. Okay, I guess truthfully the flowers, the animals, then scary stuff, then books. Yeah, those are the clear memories. I’m one of those people that has true memory from before I was two. True memory because no one in my family told a story I remembered, I went to my Grandmother and told her about remmbering purple bearded irises againts a fence. I was standing, looking up at the irises, and they were huge to me. My grandmother looked startled, then said, “You can’t remember that. We lived in that house before you were two.” It’s my earlies memory, and I still remember the wonder of it.
I guess I’ll leave you all with this. We never get too far from where we start. The things that bring us joy when we are very little, are often, the things that give us joy when we are all grown up. Remember your joy, don’t let the world tell you that’s it’s wrong. Be the widebeast, be the elephant, be the gorilla, be the meerkat, be whatever you are. For those who found their herd early in life and loved it, my envy. There is still a part of me that wonders what it would be like to have been embraced by those around me and been loved for who I was, not merely tolerated and puzzled over.