Author: Jonathon

Goodness, I don’t think any blog has generated as much mail as the one on being part of a herd. First we heard from those who are not a part of a herd, or a part of the wrong herd would be more accurate. Now we are hearing from those who are herd members and resent the implications. So let me be a bit more clear.
Nothing wrong with being part of the herd as long as that is where you belong and you want to be a part of it. It is when we try to pretend to belong and struggle to fit, or the herd tells you you should and it is not you or your place, that it is wrong. I suspect the herd is actually far smaller than it appears. Too many folks spend their lives unhappy trying to be a part of a herd because they think they should. If what your doing is causing no harm, then be yourself. If that means running with the herd, wonderful! But if it is causing you pain then split off and find the group you should be with. Life is too short to spend it unhappy or pretending to be whom you are not.
The majority of a herd, is content. They are happy to be there, happy to have those around who are just like them. Safety in numbers and all that. And that is a good thing, to feel safe and happy. But for every herd, there is a small number who probably don’t really belong to that herd. They are unhappy (I suspect they are in the herd because they think they should be, not because they want to be) and use that unhappiness to try and hurt others. That is wrong. If someone is not hurting anyone else, then they should be left to follow their own path. Not made to feel guilty, or wrong in some fashion for not sharing the herds ideas and values.
That was the point. If your trapped in a herd then life is truly miserable. If your spouting the herd line and using it to batter others, that is really wrong. People need to realize that it is okay to be different. Different doesn’t mean wrong or bad necessarily.
The truly scary ones are the herd leaders who play on the fears of those in their herd and encourage them to harm others because they are different. In the movie The American President, the last few minutes the president is giving a speech, and he talks about how you win elections. By telling people that others are responsible for their unhappiness. You point a finger at those who do not share the herds ideals and tell them you would be happy if it weren’t for those people, over there. Them, it is there fault. Life would be better if those people would disappear or join the herd.
The fact is it is not true. Nor would life be nearly so interesting if they did. Diversity is a part of who we are. Sameness is an illusion. We feel safer if we think we know what the rest of the world is doing. If we think they are just like us. Well, not everyone shares the same ideals, not everyone wears the same clothes, spouts the same lines or follows the same religion. Different doesn’t mean wrong. It really doesn’t. Too long that has been used by those who are want to be a power, petty people with delusions, frightened people who fear others. So they convince the herd that the those outside it are somehow to blame. It leads to fear and hatred and violence. And it is so unneccessary.
Is there anyone who wasn’t looked down on by another group in school? Who wasn’t made to feel less in some ways because they didn’t fit some other groups ideals of what they should be? Wasn’t bullied or picked on, made fun of for being different? It is the whole problem magnified. You think as adults it would disappear, but it doesn’t.
Herds are fine. Just find the one you belong too. Find the one that makes you feel good about who you are and doesn’t feel the need to make others feel like less because they are different, one that doesn’t believe in harming others for not being members. Find your herd. Find yourself. Be proud of who you are. And when you run across a member of another herd, try smiling at them. You might be surprised to find you have more in common than you think.

On the road again… just happen to be on the road again… not making music, not seeing friends, I just happen to be on the road again.
sorry, had a moment, It’s past.
We’re here in LA in preparation for the second event for Seduced by Moonlight, a signing at the Huntington Beach Barnes & Noble. We’re looking forward to the event, and seeing everyone from the LA area out there.
Going to run and rest.

I’ve spent the last week planning a fight. THE FIGHT. The fight where Anita and Richard finally say everything there is to say, and she walks out. I’ve spent the last week doing pub for SEDUCED BY MOONLIGHT, and dealing with bouts of illness in the family. I’m never at my best when I can’t immerse myself in the current book, but leaving it where I had to leave it, was just crappy. I avoided it for a solid week, partly because I truly had no real time, but also because I was dreading the fight. I’ve reread the chapter presiding, to get back into the flow, and to my great surprise, I don’t think we’re going to have a fight. I said in an earlier blog that Richard is that part of me that didn’t want to be who and what I was. That part that wanted to be ‘normal’ ordinary, whatever that means. I thought I’d come to terms with that part of me, and that Richard was the last remnants of it. But I realized that I don’t hate Richard because of Richard, I hate Richard because he’s a piece of myself that I still hate. How weird is it to hate the part of you that makes you hate yourself? Hating the hatred. I hate how he treats Anita and himself. But most of all I hate being reminded of that part of me.
I haven’t truly embraced all of me. There are still parts that I hate, or am afraid of. Dealing with Richard reminds me that I still have work to do inside me. God, I hate this ongoing process of self-discovery. When does it end? When do you get done? When do you run out of shit to shovel? Never is what it feels like.
I’m fighting with myself. Don’t you hate that? I know I do.
How do you embrace yourself when most of your life you’ve been taught that what you are, and what you want, and what you’re good at, is wrong, even evil? How do you shake a lifetime of negativity? How do you let it go? A piece at a time. One small, bloody, painful piece at a time. Let it go, and feel how much lighter you feel. Let it go, and know that there’s a reason that you are the way you are. There’s has to be a reason, or all is madness.
I believe that the universe is an orderly place, and thus it can’t all be madness.

I’ve averaged an interview a day. Publicity (how do you spell that?) is great, but I’m still trying to finish up INCUBUS DREAMS, and now I’m into the pub for SEDUCED BY MOONLIGHT. It’s like finally getting to bring the baby home from the hospital when you’re already pregnant with the next one, and about eight months along. An odd sensation.
It’s not like INCUBUS DREAMS is going well. With all the interruptions it slowed, but what really blew me out of the water was me. My courage failed me before this last scene. I just can’t do it. Don’t panic, no one dies, no one is permently out of the picture, but I’m just tired of emotional angst, and watching Richard and Anita beat each other up verbally and emotionally. I’m ready to call it quites for good, but I’m not in love with him. I’ve never had sex with him. I’m like that friend you convide in that gets to know all the bad parts but doesn’t participate in any of the good parts that makes all the other bad crap worth shoveling.
My timer just went off, got to hop in the shower and get ready for a t.v. interview. It’s taped, and no I don’t know when it’s coming out. Darla will let you know.

I remember now, why I dread having Anita and Richard alone in a room. They have fought for thirty freaking pages. Thirty pages of bickering, squabbling. Crap. Admittedly, it’s not all the same fight. They’ve avoided eachother so well in the last few months that it’s like they saved up. Saved up their grievances in a long laundry list of pain. Not the most fun day I’ve had at the computer, but I did most of those thirty pages in one day. The muse is working hard when you do twenty-four pages in a day. It reads well, and it’s all stuff that they had to talk about if they were ever to be able to be in a room together again and not cut eachother up.
Truthfully, I’d given up on Richard and Anita being civil to eachother. I had thrown in the towel, but they hadn’t. And hey, it’s not my social life, it’s theirs. So we had THE FIGHT. Then Jean-Claude woke for the day and interrupted them. I was grateful.
Yesterday I spent even more pages with the three of them talking together. Sweet Jesus on a stick. But again it reads well, in fact it reads better than I’d ever dreampt for a scene with the three of them alone together. By that I mean, it was much more friendly, and a lot less angry. Therepy is a many splendored thing. Richard formaly, and Anita informally, are using it to help themselves be happier with who they are. Great, right? Right. But the results have surprised me. I don’t know why, at this point in the book well over seven hundred pages, you’d think I’d be used to the idea that I’ve been wrong about every interpersonal relationship in this book. But nope, I thought I had at least this one pegged down tight. Surprise, surprise.
I started NARCISSUS IN CHAINS with the idea that Jean-Claude, Anita, and Richard would be some form of a happy little menage a trois before the end of the book, then Anita got hurt in the first big fight and it all went to hell. Every time I tried to fix her personal life, the way I wanted it, it screwed up worse and worse. So NARCISSUS was the last time I tried to force things. I promised myself I was out of it. It was their lives, they could live them the way they saw fit. But I’m only human and I started INCUBUS DREAMS with some ideas of how Anita’s life would work better. But I was still trying to shove her life into a very narrow box. But do we really want to live in a narrow box, or a wide one? I think wide, and if the notes for the next chapter remain, we’re about to do things that I’d sworn would never happen again, or some of it, ever happen. I actually wrote a bunch of spoilers and erased them. It was me bitching that my characters have taken over again, when the truth is, that when you’re characters are alive enough to totally throw you just be grateful, and buckle up, because it is going to be a bumpy ride.

Hi all! It is Darla. Wow. We have heard from so many folks that they too are not members of the herd and Laurell’s post made them realize there is nothing wrong with them after all. The age range has been astonishing from early teens to late 50’s.
In fact Laurell and I were discussing it at lunch today. That unless there is someone in your life or you find a friend like you that you may not realize it is okay to be you, even if that you is different from those around you.
Laurell calls them the herd. I call them the chickens. I do that because my aunt had a group of chickens. (What do you call a group of chickens anyway?). One chicken had it’s eye injured and lost it. My aunt had to segregate the chicken she called Popeye. Why? The other chickens attacked it everytime they could get to it. As if that small difference was some how a death sentence for poor Popeye. He looked just like all the rest, except for the eye. He even acted like them, but that small difference was enough to make the rest want to destroy him.
I always called those who were different, like myself, the wolf pack. Wolf packs tend the wounded and injured. The whole pack will raise the new cubs. They all take joy in the new ones. They don’t pick at those who are slightly different, not as fast, not as good. Rather they all tend to help it along. I have no doubts about which group I would rather belong to.
Some of the emails have asked how do you survive? Or at least they have in so many words. So how do you? By being yourself. By realizing that if you’re not harming anyone else, that you’re okay. Find someone else who is not pack to be a friend with. Especially while in school. Because as hard as it may seem in school, it will not last forever. You will get out of school and be able to continue on with your life. In the meantime, you keep your head down and find things you enjoy doing. Don’t worry about the herd. Easy to say, hard to do. But I been there and done it. So have lots of other folks. You just have to push through it without letting them destroy you.
Find refuge in something you love.
Don’t try to change the herd members. They are terrified of those who are different. Heck, you might be right and them wrong! They cannot stand the thought and will torment you for it. My experience has been many of them are miserable and scared, and misery really does love company. It is sad so many convince themselves that tearing down others is the road to their own happiness. It is not. But you will never convince them of that.
Once you become an adult it is easier to find others who share your joys and passions. It is easier to stay away from herd members. But you will never escape them

Hey. Me, again. I am drinking mint tea out of a black mug that says, “Psycho Bitch from Hell,” on it. That should give you some idea of my mood. Yes, I am hoping to have Anita use the mug in some future book. But today, the mug is mine. It’s Sunday, but it makes almost no difference to me. Because I work out of my home, and my office is always there, always open, and the deadline for this book is so close that any spare minute must be used for the book. The deadline will arrive before the end of the book does. I’ve had to make peace with that, alright, I’ve had to try and make peace with that. I hate missing a deadline, for any reason.
The book is going well, sort of. I’m enjoying the book, always a good sign. I’ve plotted to the end of the book in more detail than I think I’ve done since OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY, or, NARCISSUS IN CHAINS. Here’s hoping that my favorite difficult girl does not throw out the last third of my plot the way she did in NARCISSUS. If Anita does, you’ll hear my screams where ever you are. I have neither time, patience, or enough deadline, for any of my characters to mess with me that badly. But truthfully, Anita hasn’t been a problem this book, well, not by her standards. She’s been suspiciously cooperative. It’s not like her. It makes me wonder when she’ll look up at me and go, aha, now I’ll make your life difficult. Actually, the two problem children for this book have been Richard and Nathaniel, okay, and Damian to a lesser degree.
Richard is still dreadfully unhappy with himself. He’s trying, he really is, but it takes time to heal that much pain. And for all of you that think his only problem is that Anita dumped him (by the way reread the scene, he dumped her), trust me, that’s not it. People act like your lover, you girlfriend, is your major relationship. It is, and it isn’t. Most of us end up in therapy because of things that happen with our blood relatives. Things we did, they did. Things we failed to do, that they failed to do. So messy. I’m just trying to give Richard room to maneuver. I know what’s eating him, Anita hasn’t found all of it out, yet. That heart to heart is still to come. Shit.
Nathaniel has just demanded his share of the book. I can’t blame him, I guess. He is doing almost all the house cleaning. That earns brownie points in my book. I love a man who is more domestic than I am. Of course, it’s not hard to be more domestic than I am.
Damian’s major pain in the butt moments, I think, are done for this book, but we learned a lot about his background that we didn’t know before. We’ve got the beginnings of a future book plot from it. Yeah, yeah, read all the Damian plots and see if you can spot the seed of the idea. Just kidding. Those of you who are going to read it minutely, go ahead, but those of you who just read for enjoyment, just read. Don’t worry about it. The idea is only a seed now. Like OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY was once. It usually takes years to go from that first scribble, or hint, to an actual book.
Right now, I had this fairly simple scene with only Nathaniel, Jason, and Anita in the room. Usually, they don’t argue amongst themselves too much. But no, Richard had to make a metaphysical guest appearance, and suddenly it’s turned into a major scene. Crap. I want to get back to the mystery. I’m tired of wading through other people’s personal shit. Shouldn’t wading through my own be enough? I should have known Richard would make an appearance, because the scene slowed down. Every scene he’s been in, has slowed to a crawl. I thought it was because I was dreading him and Anita fighting, but it happens even when only my subconscious knows it’s coming.
Everyone thinks I’m Anita. A lot of people thought that Richard represented my ex-husband. Hate to burst anyone’s bubble but this is fiction. Try to bear that in mind. I finally, this book, realized who Richard reminds me of. Me.
Richard is that part of me that hated myself. That part that wanted to be “normal”. That part that didn’t want to think differently from the vast majority of people on this planet. That part of me that really did cling to the life my up-bringing told me I was ‘supposed’ to have. I spent a lot of my adult life arguing with myself. Not wanting to like what I liked, enjoy what I enjoyed, or be fascinated by what fascinated me. Not wanting to embrace myself, accept myself. Wanting to reject everything that made me comfortable in my own skin, in my own head, in my own self. Richard is that part of me that is still fighting the good fight. Still trying to pound himself into a square hole, when he is so a round peg. That’s why part of me hates Richard, because I still hate that part of myself. It’s also why I love Richard, because I’ve been there, fought the fight, lost the war, and there’s no t-shirt, no medal. In the end is only the knowledge of who you are, what you are, and that the things that make you happy aren’t evil. You aren’t evil for wanting them. And the only person that can stand in judgment of you, is the people you allow to stand in judgment of you. Don’t give them that power over you. Don’t accept it. Be who you are. I went through therapy to find myself, and not to hate or be ashamed of what and who I am. Richard is at the beginning of his therapy, and that is a frightening, painful place to be. I do not envy him the journey, but I know the destination is worth it, because I’m there. I’m happy. Not only do I embrace who I am, but I get paid good money for some of my ‘strange’ ideas. The very things that made junior high hell, and high school not my best thing, and made me an outsider during college, and hell, an outsider at every parent meeting, or herd event. I finally realized that I’m not a herd animal. I’m the animal on the fringes watching the herd, and thinking, hmm, did that one limp? Predator sometimes. Sometimes I’m the animal in the tree trying to figure out how to shove a stick in a hole and get the termites out, while the herd passes under that tree. I have friends, and they are my pack, my group, but all my close friends share that odd way of looking at the world. We are the fringe animals, not the ones in the middle following the crowd. And that’s okay, it’s okay to be the predator, or the monkey in the tree trying to invent a new way of doing something.
In an effort to put more weekend in our weekend, and a little less work, we have plans with friends. Lunch, a movie, and then I have to get back to work. Funny how that works. But let me leave you with this, embrace whatever animal you are. If you are happy in the herd, rock on, but if the herd just keeps trampling you underfoot, get out of the herd. Find a nice safe rock to hide behind, or a tree to climb, and stop letting everyone make you feel bad because you don’t want to eat grass with everyone else.

Hey everybody. First off, we’ve got new photos on the blog. People had wanted to see what my office looks like, well, this is it. For everyone who wanted it to be a dungeon, or a dance club theme, sorry. I’ve found over the years that I work better surrounded by certain colors, and that if I have much of anything in the room that is too interesting, I tend to get distracted. So, other than research books, I try to keep the clutter to a minimum. Sticky notes do not count as clutter.
I think when we do the new offices, a project that is about two years away, maybe sooner, though frankly just the wee bit of construction we’ve done has taken so much more time and effort than it was supposed to, that it’s become discouraging. Anyway, when my new office gets done, whenever that will be, it will be blue, and green. I first discovered that green worked as well as blue when my first husband used to take me to a store in California that specialized in telescopes. You know the good kind that actually work for amateur astronomy. The store was painted an odd shade of pale green, like a minty color. Terrible color, I thought, but every time I walked into that place, I sat in a corner and wrote copious notes. It just flat did it for my imagination. Pale blue, and pale green, are the two surrounding colors that help me get ideas, and keep it moving. Most people seem to want me to surround myself with red, black, and chrome, but none of that is actually very restful.
I debated about letting anyone see my office. First, it’s my space. Second, I knew that a certain amount of my fan base is going to be grumpy about it. Because it won’t fit what they think my office should look like. But for those of you who are more interested in what it really looks like, than what you think it looks like, here it is.

If you’ll look to your right, you’ll notice that there are new items in the menu. I’ve added three photo galleries to the site, and I hope you enjoy them. Right now, only the first one, LKH @ Home, has any items in it. I hope to flesh out the other two over the next few days.

Hey again. Happy New Year to everyone. I’m hoping for us, personally, a healthier new year. Trinity caught a virus at school. Elemetery school is like a germ factory. First Jonathon caught it, then I caught it. In fact the adults are still not over it, though of course Trinity is. Is it just my imagination or do the kids that bring in the germs get better quicker than we do?
I actually wrote a scene, chapter, in the book while running a fever over a hundred, and didn’t realize how sick I was until later. When INCUBUS DREAMS finally hits the shelves in October of 2004 I’m thinking we’ll run a contest and see who can guess which scene it was. I don’t know, I have to talk to Darla and Jon first. Especially Darla, since she’s the one that bears the brunt of any contest. So don’t quote me on it, but it’s an idea.
Right now, I’d like to thank the person who gave me a copy of Evanescence’s debut album, “Fallen.” I get a lot of people sending me music, and most of the time it’s like so not anything I can listen to while I work, if at all. But I had a lot of people recommending it to me, and then one interprising fan, actually gave me the album. Thank you. I wanted you to know that the gift has been well recieved. About the paper you gave me with the album about which song you thought was which person, some of them not close for me, but you were right about Nathaniel and Damian, and some of the Jean-Claude and Asher. Thought you’d like to know.
Cool music. My favorite song is got to be “Tourniquet”. Followed by “Hello”, “Haunted”, and then everything else on the album. There isn’t a bad son on here. I do not say that about many albums. Jonathon and I looked up Evanescence web sight up. Okay, he did, and I watched. I found out they are originally from Little Rock, Arkansas. I liked them even better. Little Rock was a little too much big city for my family, we’re from Shirley Arkansas which is a tiny town in the hills. But I was born in Arkansas, and got to revisit every summer of my childhood. It’s got some lovely countryside, but I understood entirely when Evanescence’s sight said that they didn’t really fit in in that part of the mid-west. To most people Arkanasas is south, not mid-west, but oh, well. I still understood the whole not fitting in. Though to be fair to the mid-west, I’ve lived on the west cost in El Segundo, which everyone just lumps into Los Angeles. Trust me when I say, I didn’t fit in there either. I’ve traveled to New York on business, and now all across the country on tour, and again, it’s not a locale that makes you not fit in. I think it’s just harder to hide that you’re not like everyone else in a smaller pool.
Though the Bible belt can be a hard audience for the kind of thing I do, and the kind of music that Evanescence plays so beautifully. I could go over some of the comments I’ve had from people here, but why? Stupid comments from stupid people that don’t understand that different isn’t evil, it’s just different.