Author: Jonathon

We just spent four hours in the emergency room with Carri, my assistant and good friend, and her wife, Pili. Carri left work here and headed for home about twenty minutes later she called Jon on his cellphone. I knew immediately by his tone of voice and body language that something was wrong. Carri’s jeep had just been in an accident. She’d called 911, then tried to get her wife, Pili, but Pili didn’t hear her phone, so Carri called Jon. He got hold of her wife who went for the hospital. We got to the emergency room while they were still at the front desk. Carri had said she was all right, but we needed to see for ourselves. It’s not real until you touch someone.

Jon and I actually passed the accident scene on the way to the hospital. Her Jeep looked awful. When we got to the hospital and saw her even with the bandaged arm it was a relief. I hugged her and her shirt was crunchy with bits of windshield glass. She and Pili told me not to hug her that one person with glass on them was enough, but that was one hug that had to happen right that minute, damn it.

We went into the rooms they’d let us trail with her, and waited in the waiting room when we weren’t allowed. Thanks to all the staff at St. Mary’s that took such good care of her, and thanks for moving her up the line before the pain hit as hard as it could. I really wanted her to have good pain meds when the shock wore completely off. Vicodin, its what’s for dinner. None of us had eaten yet. Jon and I had ordered take-out at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Little Saigon, just before Carri called from the accident. Somehow in all the waiting we’d mentioned it to Carri and she said that sounded great. So while Pili went back with her for them to clean out the wounds, at last, we called the restaurant to see when they closed. We explained why we hadn’t picked up our order, added food for Pili and Carri to it, and told them we’d be there as soon as we could, but please make our order the last of the night. Thanks to the staff at Little Saigon who were so understanding and especially the kind man who waited a little past closing when we called that we were leaving the hospital and heading his way. We picked up the food and headed to Carri and Pili’s house with it.

We ate at their house and are just now getting home. We’ve fed our dogs and are waiting for them to digest so they can have that one last trip outside, then bed. I’m so tired my eyes burn, but it’s not lack of sleep it’s more adrenalin seeping away into the cracks and crevices of my psyche. Carri will be fine the worst of it seems to be a sprained wrist, some cuts, and chemical burns from the airbags deploying. They deployed when a tire, the whole wheel, came off a car on the other side of the highway and flew across the median and into Carri’s jeep. It’s totaled and the safety glass of the windshield did what safety glass is designed to do it cracked but most of it held together except for the pieces that powdered onto her. After seeing what the airbag did to her arm I’m going to see if I can sit a little farther from the wheel when I drive. Airbags save lives, and saved her from worse injury most likely, but these are not chemicals you want on your skin or in your lungs.

Thanks to the truck driver that first stopped to check on her and then used his rig to block traffic so she didn’t get hit again. Thanks to the nurse who stopped right after that and wrapped up her wound before the ambulance arrived. Thanks to the ambulance crew and the police that helped take care of her and took the report. They say that there are no good Samaritans anymore, but they’re wrong. There are good people out there and Carri met several of them tonight. Thank you all.

Several of you have written in about my Entertainment Weekly interview. You’ve said that I disrespected Anne Rice by saying that I pioneered my genre, not hers. I don’t consider Anne Rice and I writing in the same genre. Yes, we both write books with vampires in them, but I’ve never believed that vampires alone define a series, or a genre. I actually see vampire novels as having divergent sub-genres.

First was Ms. Rice whose big new idea to the vampire novel was to make her vampires much more "human" than the writers that had gone before her, and she gave them a huge dose of angst and melancholy, and made them beautiful though impotent which I always found an interesting choice. INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE came out in 1976 and I, like many writers to come after, would be influenced by this book.

But I have to add that I was also influenced by 1975’s Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. His vampires were as scary and mundane as Ms. Rice’s were otherworldly and esoteric. It was like two sides of the vampire coin. For the sensuality, though no actual sexuality, I was influenced by Ms. Rice, but for bringing vampires into the ordinary world it was Mr. King that intrigued me. It would be more than a decade later before I wrote my own vampire novel, but I know that these two books contributed. I guess no one counts Stephen King in this vampire genre because he only did the one book. So if Ms. Rice is first then . . .

Second is what I consider my genre which is mixed genre, a horror thriller/romance, but that doesn’t really say what I write. The closest description of what I consider my genre is Paranormal Thriller. In both the Meredith Gentry books and the Anita Blake novels I take thriller or mystery, mix it with horror and fantasy elements, then add a strong dose of sensuality, romance, and sex. I’ve yet to hear a single word that described it. There were actually editors asking other writers to give them Hamiltonesque books a few years ago when I was the only bestseller in this genre. I thought I was a little young to be an ’esque, but a lot of writers have made a career out of doing just that. The two things I think I brought first to the vampire novel was that my vampires were out of the coffin as it were and everyone knew they existed. Anita’s world is ours if we woke up tomorrow and had to deal with the monsters of nightmare and fantasy. No one had done that before. The other thing I did first, or that’s what editors and publishers tell me, was raise the stakes on the sexual content.

Oddly, most of the writers who have come after have taken the sexual content but the only one I’m aware of that has outted her vampires in her world as much as I have in mine is Charlaine Harris with Sookie Stakehouse books and the TV series "True Blood".  The first Sookie book was in 2001.

The higher sexual content has been more popular with other writers. Now, notice I don’t claim that I was the first to invent the idea of adding mystery to vampires. That was first done by Lee Killough in 1987. P.N. Elrod would hit the shelves in 1990. Tanya Huff in 1991. I wrote the first Anita Blake short story in 1987. What the heck was happening in the world from late ’80s to early ’90s that we all came up independently with the idea to mix mysteries and vampires? It would be interesting to figure that out.

My first Anita short story got lovely rejection letters but no one wanted it because it mixed genres. Mix-genre didn’t sell back in the late 1980s. I know with this being one of the hottest trends in publishing today it’s hard to believe that, but trust me no one wanted it. GUILTY PLEASURES my first Anita Blake novel would take two years and around two hundred rejections before it would sell to Penguin/Putnam as an Ace paperback original. It would finally see publication in 1993. I didn’t go into hardback until OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY, book nine.

None of these early books have the sensuality that I chose to put in mine, and to my knowledge none of them would add the sexual content that I’ve become known for in both of my series. Notice I consider the Meredith Gentry series to be part of the same sub-genre as Anita, even though there are no vampires on stage in Merry’s world. For me it’s the fantasy/horror/thriller element mixed with the romance and a heavy dose of sex that defines what I do in my two series. If you take the vampire out of this sub-genre and just allow thriller/mystery and horror elements then Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde books qualify. They came out in 1989. Again, what the heck was happening out there to make this suddenly seem like such a good idea?

Why do I say I pioneered the genre if there were books before? I’ve never said I invented the sub-genre, only that I pioneered it or popularized it. When I was getting all those rejections for the first book they said vampires were dead as a genre, that mixed genre of any kind didn’t sell unless you were Charles de Lint, and he did fantasy mixed with modern day, no vampires to my knowledge. But he’d made a career out of mixing modern day with the fantastic and at that time no one else had. There’d been a few books but no one had carved a successful niche for themselves. None of the early books had reached a wide enough audience to help my book sell, or maybe mine was just too different, either way the genre was too new to even exisit. It was just this new idea that no one wanted.

What I’ve been hearing from writers and editors for years is that my books have helped them sell theirs, or made the editors want to buy things like mine; Hamiltonesque. I mean there were techno-thrillers before Tom Clancy, but his popularity made the genre into the monster it became. Someone has to sell well enough before there’s enough market for other people to jump on the bandwagon. No one blinks in publishing at the idea of mixing vampires and supernatural beings with anything now. It’s all game, though nothing is quite as hot as vampires right now. There’s Stephanie Meyers and her Twilight books and movies. Her first book hit in 2005. I would say that her vampires are more Anne Rice than mine. Would that make her vampires Riceian? Or perhaps Ms. Meyers had created yet another sub-genre for vampires I’ll bet you money that editors are asking for Meyeresque books, or Twilightesque books. Charlaine Harris’s books have led to a hit TV show in "True Blood" and vampires have never been more popular. I wonder if the editor that told me all those years ago that vampire novels were dead and no one wanted to read about them anymore is watching all this with wonder? Nah, she’s jumped on the bandwagon, too. I guarantee you she’s got her own writers doing Riceian, or Hamiltonesque, or Meyeresque, or maybe Harrisian-esque?

That long ago editor should have remembered that the vampire never truly dies. They’re not dead, they’re undead, and apparently you can’t keep a sexy vampire down.

Left Jon tucked into bed. We made the mistake of turning off a DVD but not the television and got caught up in the movie, "Apooloosa" based on a Robert B. Parker book. Yes, the same Parker that does the Spenser and Jesse Stone series. I am a serious Spenser fan. Those early books are part of where I learned how to write good dialogue and to be in love with hard-case detectives. When people ask who Anita’s literary grandparents are, I could truthfully say Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books and the old Hammer Vampire films. (Does that count as literary?) I read "Interview with the Vampire" by Anne Rice and "Salem’s Lot" by Stephen King and they both made big impressions on me, but nothing resonated with me to the degree that Parker’s work did.

"Apooloosa" was amazing with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as the main characters.  Harris also co-wrote screenplay and directed. It was Viggo’s bone structure that first made me go, "wait I know that face". He’s one of those actors that can vanish into a role like a good character actor but is still a leading man; gotta love it. Jon and I planned to watch just a little to see if we wanted to try and catch it later, then suddenly it was 1:00 AM and the show wasn’t over yet. This late I should be up for one of the following reasons: writing on a deadline or with the muse striking hard; up with friends having a great visit; up with family having a great visit; in an emergency, or having great sex. Television does not qualify as something worth setting my schedule off by this much, even good television doesn’t qualify, unless it is something watched with friends or family. We’ve stayed up and watched stuff with our daughter and counted it family time, and the same is occasionally true of friends, though usually if we’re up that late it’s conversation that’s kept us up not TV. But in a spirit of positive thinking I told Jon last night, "We can sleep in tomorrow and still get eight hours of sleep."

We did, we have, and I’m still not happy. Why? Because I haven’t eaten breakfast and it’s 10:37 here. I’ve munched on some fresh cherry tomatoes from our garden. I’m drinking tea, but when you’re on a nutrition plan that puts your calorie intact this low missing breakfast is bad. It makes you want to say, screw it and just eat what you want. Let’s face it most of us want sugary crap for breakfast, or at least I do. I checked on CalorieKing.com and found that what I want to go out and get for breakfast is almost half my calorie intake for the day. I don’t think so. Not having eaten in so long makes the discipline of it all that much harder.

The second reason I am not happy with the delayed start to my day is that I have writing to do. I will have writing to do most days until DIVINE MISDEMEANORS is turned into New York. There are a lot of reasons for that, but cutting the 50 pages earlier didn’t help. It’s a much better book for cutting all that and totally reworking that section of the book, but I didn’t get a stretch on my deadline because of it. I’m willing to work hard to make this Merry book the best it can be, but there comes a point when you look at your page count, your life, your deadlines and have to decide is this going to happen; can I deliver? We haven’t reached that dread moment yet, but if I keep sleeping in until almost lunch, then have to take care of the dogs, feed myself, and only then get going on the writing I’m just making it harder to keep the deadline. It’s a weekend without the kiddo and I’m trying to make as much hay as I can. I feel like I’ve misused my time.

Positive thoughts, positive thoughts: Jon finally got me to watch "The Frighteners" which is one of his favorite movies. I told him, "If it’s one of your favorites why haven’t we watched it in nine years?" He made noises at me, by end of film I understood. Some of the movie is too close to what I do for a living and it makes me pick at things. It makes me find the logic flaws, or anything that makes me cringe and go, "No way." I kept most of my thoughts to myself, and I enjoyed the movie, but I had a very hard time not picking at some of it. It had a really good twist end that I only saw a short time before it happened, that was cool. In fact, it’s a very fun film with good special effects even by today’s standards, but then it is a Peter Jackson film, co-written and directed by him, and it’s also produced by Robert Zemeckis with Michael J. Fox staring in it. It was a good film, but it was a little too close to a busman’s holiday for me. This is also why I watch almost no vampire TV shows or films, they drive me crazy, because it’s rare that their internal logic, or lack thereof, doesn’t bug me a lot. Think taking a police buddy to a cop film and listening to him tell you just how many times the police work on the screen is wrong. Lot’s. Jon knew that about me, and it is one of his favorites. He didn’t want me to not enjoy it, or to pick it apart. We compromised I tried to keep my mouth shut and only grumble in my head, and we enjoyed the movie together.

It was "The Frighteners" that we turned off and were suddenly on a TV channel and got us sucked into "Apooloosa". We’ll want to get the movie and watch it all at some point, and I even want to get the book which somehow I missed, but not today. Today it’s food and getting me to my desk. Unless my muse strikes hard the out-of-house-time Jon and I had planned on doing may have vanished under the getting-to-sleep-in-time.

A lot of you ask me what it takes to be a selling writer, well one of the biggest things it takes is displine. Short stories can be written when the muse strikes, if you only write a book when the muse strikes generally you never finish that book. Novels are about steady day-in-day-out work. They’re about sitting down on a beautiful summer’s day when you gaze out the window and want to run around the yard like a mad thing chasing your dogs, or just sitting in your garden, but instead you go to work. Does that take all the fun out of it for you? If so, be a plumber, or an accountant, or a thousand other jobs, because in the end writing novels is work. I love my work. I love creating characters and worlds and finding out what happens next, but it’s still work. Every job has it’s crap quotient, every job, the trick is is the job worth the crap to you? To me, it so is, because I’ve had other jobs, even in cooperate America. I never worked hours this long for a company, but for myself and my characters I’ll do the work.

I am really glad Jon and I didn’t make plans to go out with friends today, because I’d need to cancel and some of my friends I haven’t seen in weeks, some in months. When the schedule gets this tight I see friends that are more available for spur of the moment stuff, because I never know when I can break free and play. Here’s hoping the muse and I have a bumper day of quick, good pages so that there is some day left for Jon and I to find some playtime of our own.

So many of you ask me how to be a published writer, and I’m sort of stumped, because every writer I know well does it differently. We are very individualistic creatures, we writers. There is no magic formula, or at least not just one. It’s more like there’s a different one for different writers.

Some writers outline. Some writers make outlines almost as long as the finished book. I can’t do that, because if I outline too much then that pressure to write the story goes away. I’ve learned that I can outline the major points of a book, but if I flesh out too much it actually hinders me from finishing the book. I never, ever use the outline they teach you in writing classes. It’s artificial and stifling to me and my muse. I’ve only known one writer that ever found it useful. I write, in part, so I can read it. So I can find out either what happens next, or how we get from point A to point G. Some of my strongest scenes, the ones that you’ve loved the most, are total surprises to me until just pages, or even sentences before the scene happens. I’m right there with the reader going, "Holy shit!"

Good example of that is OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY, where Anita is introduced to Ted Forrester’s fiance, Donna. Ted is a legal bounty hunter, and now a fellow U. S. Marshal, but he’s also Edward an assassin so dangerous he gave up killing normal humans because it was too easy. He specializes in killing monsters: vampires, wereanimals, or other human killers. He’s a predator’s predator, so when he introduces Anita to a fiance to what she considers a fictional person, Ted, she’s totally surprised, and shocked. This was one of those moments when I was with Anita as I wrote it, going, "No way!"  I knew about Donna about two sentences before Anita did.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, Edward is one of my characters that keeps his secrets close to his chest. He rarely talks directly to me. I know he’s off doing other things when he’s not on stage in a book. He comes back to the pages trailing the scent of other adventures, more secrets, like some heady perfume. Strangely, one of the other characters that doesn’t wait for me to write him is Jason. Yeah, I know Jason the boy next door all teasing and sex appeal, who just happens to be a werewolf and a stripper. The two men are very different characters but both very independant. Though both are strangely easy to write once on paper. No idea why.

Jean-Claude, my contribution to the sexy vampire problem, does talk to me directly sometimes, but he also keeps his secrets. He’s both very open and very not. Perfectly him.

Anita is my open book, and the only reason anything surprises me about her is if it surprises her, too. Which happens more often than I’d planned over the years. She’s now a U. S. Marshal with the preternatural branch of that service. She’s still killing vampires and rogue shapeshifters, but she’s also dating the same monsters she’s charged with executing. She’s very much the girl next door who ended up in a very interesting job.

Merry’s men don’t talk to me directly. They don’t do things when I’m not looking. They wait for me to come to them and get it on paper. Merry, faerie princess and private eye, is both open book to me and deeply secret. I guess that goes along with the whole faeries being the hidden people, but it’s still a big difference between the two series and their characters.

On paper Merry writes better and faster with each book, sort of, she’s never as fast a write as Anita, unfortunately. This new Merry book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS, is writing differently than any other Merry book. I’ll do a page or two, then have to think about it, because I have to make a choice of actions and it changes the rest of the book. I know the overall plot of the book, but the getting there on this one is like picking my way through a minefield. A wrong step and I have to back track to the right path, keep forcing my way down the wrong path and I end up having to cut 55 pages like I did only weeks ago for this book. Ouch, on my deadline, by the way.

All this to say, that every book writes a little differently for me. Every main character writes differently for me. Some of the major/minor characters write differently for me. Major characters are like friends no two the same. How do I tell other people how to write a book when after over twenty of them I’m still learning?

I didn’t watch any of the Apollo 11 footage on TV or on the computer. I didn’t listen to any of the audio. At the time I just thought, well, I’m really busy. That is true with the next Merry book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS due to hit the shelves in December I am rather frantically writing. Jon and I are also still working on the current comic issue of THE LAUGHING CORPSE. There is also some dealings with various things to do with the Anita Blake television show/movie. Can’t go into details, but let’s just say it’s added to my to-do list. In a happy, puzzling, Alice Through the Looking Glass sort of way.

I was excited about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the moon landing, and it was made doubly poignant for me by the fact that Walter Cronkite died just as it was all happening. He’d been the anchor that my grandmother loved, and had covered the moon landing in a well-informed, enthusiastic, and emotional manner that would be nice to see more on our news now. So, why, on the day did I watch, or listen to, nothing?

It took me a few days to figure it out, but I finally did the math. 40 years ago was a very different anniversary event for me. The moon landing was July 20th, on August 3rd we would get the call from the state police that my mother had been killed in a car accident. I always wondered why I didn’t have really strong memories of it all, I mean I was little, but it was man’s first steps on the moon. Why didn’t it stand out in my memory more? I’d never put it together that it was so close to my mother’s death. While the world was still basking in the glow of "one small step for man, one giant step for mankind," I’d had my own world changing event.

I kept meaning to watch the coverage, but I kept finding excuses not to watch. I worked hard and harder through all of it. Was some small corner of the child I once was convinced that there was some connection between the moon landing and my mother’s death? I don’t know. It’s a question best left for therapy, if it needs answered at all. All I know is that days before I was excited about Apollo 11 and the 40th anniversary, but when the moment came I wanted to be anywhere but watching it.

Was my mother excited about the landing? I don’t remember. I was so young, only six. I couldn’t tell you what my own mother liked on TV, or movies, for the love of God, I don’t even know what her favorite color was, but I know she was buried in my favorite color, because my family had me pick the dress. I was six and a girl and was still going to ballet class, my favorite color was most little girl’s favorite color: pink. My mother was buried in a pink dress. She didn’t own a pink dress. She, like me, didn’t look good in pink. Did some aunt or cousin have to shop and buy a pink dress?  Years later I would be going through the closets at my grandmother’s and find one of the dresses I remember my mother wearing. It was black and dark chocolate brown and she had looked beautiful in it. I thought, this was what she should have been buried in, and suddenly I thought, I was six, why was I picking anything out? My grandmother is dead, too now, so I can’t ask her why, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She would have answered that question as she answered so many others, "Why do you want to talk about that? It just upsets me."

That makes two of us. The difference was always that if something upset me I wanted to know why, what happened, I wanted to poke at it, tear it apart, dissect it. My grandmother always found that relentless search for truth one of my least endearing qualities. Now I use that same nearly ruthless pursuit of facts and answers to write. It helps give reality to my fantasy, and makes my books better, stronger, more real flesh and blood.  But it doesn’t do anything about that damn pink dress.

My mood went really dark yesterday. By the end of the day I was left puzzling over what went wrong inside my head, or emotions, or whatever to cause all that blah. So I went over my day, trying to figure out where I lost the thread of it all. Okay, so the morning didn’t start out great. Jon woke at 5:00 AM not feeling well. He got better during the day, we’ve just both learned there are things we can’t eat, or rather we can, but we’ll regret it later. So cross another food off his list.

By the time I got Jon settled back asleep it was time to get up and I had to have a bath. I just couldn’t jump into the day without it. It was another contortionist bath because of the tattoo, and Jon actually being asleep so he couldn’t help me tape Saran wrap on over the tat. Yes, I know it should have been fine for a shower, but I’m nothing if not cautious. I was soooo not risking messing up the tattoo. I do not want to have to repeat it because I screw it up. By that time it was late enough that I was past my usual down to the kitchen start the day time. That is one of my hot buttons. I do not react well to my schedule being messed with, I’ve had to learn to be okay with it and I’m getting better. In fact, I was calm, cool and actually got to my desk by 9-something. Only a little behind schedule. Okay I wasn’t calm because I had to meditate to find my calm. I did, and felt better, in time to take a call from one of my best friends. He’d had a crisis, and it was a real one, no jokes, no pretend. I don’t normally take phone calls during work hours, but something in his voice let me know it was important. I’m glad I took the call and don’t begrudge one minute of the hour and change of the call. But by then it was 11:00.

We’d been trying to have lunch with Charles all week. But first we, then he, had had things come up and other people change plans on us, so we’d finally gotten it down to 11:30 on Friday. Well, it was Friday and I couldn’t say to him, "I’ve had such a disrupted morning, I need to work instead." I mean I guess I could, but during summer when his kids and ours are out of school we see a lot less of Charles. It had been ages since we’d gotten together with him, so I was not cancelling. He was running late which seemed to be just the rule of the day, but finally . . . He came, we all went to lunch and it was good. It’s always fun to talk to him, and we fall into that pattern of banter and sharing that we built touring together, so it’s always good. though, Carri and I kept falling into talking about business, just hazards of a week day lunch among co-workers. I tried to behave myself, but I did have her make some notes for things to do when we got back to the offices. Me, I had to go back to writing, but I am learning to delagate. It’s a good thing.

Charles had to leave straight from lunch to go for Indianapolis for a drifting event. He had his car loaded on a trailer and ready to go in the parking lot. It was one of the things that had made him a little late for lunch, but again, we’d wanted to see each other so he’d made time to have lunch with us then do his long event. It’s all about compromise. We hugged him good-bye and went back to work.

But, Jon and I had an appointment at Jenny Craig. We’d fallen off the wagon, and gone back on strict eating schedule and it wasn’t working. We’d actually gained weight. The only change from the first time we went on Jenny was that we were doing semi-serious weight lifting. I would say serious but I have to change the weights back at the gym from some of the male weight lifters and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that’s some serious weight lifting. I’m both impressed and intimidated by someone who can press more than my body weight. Eek. The Jenny Craig rep told us that we needed more protein and more calories on the day’s we were weight lifting. That of course with that level of physical activity we needed more food to keep from being constantly hungry. We’d already cheated at lunch and Jon and I had had almost nothing but protien. We felt much better, not hungry, and this morning we woke up without that gnawing feeling in our gut. We also lost weight just by adding extra protien. More calories equals weight loss if it’s the right calories. So, happier with the meal plan and off we go back home, but by that time it was almost 4:00.

I’m sorry if it’s much after 3:00 in the afternoon I’m tired. I’m ready for afternoon tea or something. The book that I’d written 11 pages on the day before was completely cold on the page. I was frustrated, my deadline was getting ever closer and I was working on not getting angry. Angry at nothing and everthing. I called Carri and asked, "Gym now?" She said sure, her partner Pili was already here planting. Did I mention she landscapes among other talents? She’s an artist in everything she does, even gardening, which is both interesting and visual very cool. Our back yard has never looked so good.

We went to the gym and we lifted. About the time that I was sweating enough to need to wipe sweat off the machine for the next person to use, I was starting to feel better. I lifted as much weight as I could and still do three reps per exercise. I live so far inside my head that I find sometimes the only thing that’s going to help is to do something intensely physical. It just seems to break something loose, and the black mood evaporates on a sheen of sweat, and sheer muscled effort. I felt better and the three of us got that second upper body workout that we missed on Wednesday due to lack of planning and enthusiasm.

I didn’t regret taking care of my sick husband (who woke up feeling much better and is fine now; more vegetables damn it), nor did I regret talking to my good friend and doing the guy version of the girl talk (guys do talk about their emotions and shit, it just takes a lot to get them there, and you have to be guy enough and girl enough to get it), lunch with Charles no regrets there (good luck in Indy, Charles), Jenny Craig we so needed that pep talk and the extra calories, so can’t regret that, that brings us to the gym and I so needed that. So, I didn’t regret anything I’d done that day, but I didn’t have any pages either. I did regret that.

But this morning I woke up and realized that the paragraph I’d done yesterday was wrong. I’m erasing the paragraph and just jumping into the interrogation scene. I don’t need to explain, the last chapter sets everything up for the reader. Yes, a police interrogation scene in a Merry book. DIVINE MISDEMEANORS is kicking my butt more than most of my books by simply forcing me to think before I choose a direction, if I bull my way ahead I end up having to throw out the pages later. No, I don’t have time in my schedule to waste a day, but my muse apparently needs more time to think on some scenes and that’s just the rhythm of the book. It’s a little irritating, but I’ve made notes this morning and I’ve finally been quiet long enough and away from desk long enough for my muse to whisper down my fingers and let me know that I was taking another wrong turn. Today I have my directions in hand clearly written down, so off to work I go. Oh, and where was Trinity during all of yesterday off having a special father/daughter day with her father. She had a great time and missed all my moody mishagas.

Questions from Forum, Twitter, Face Book, and My Space:

1. How does Mowgli Syndrome work? This was first mentioned in DANSE MACABRE, but for those who are not that far in the books or just to refresh the memory, Mowgli Syndrome is a genetic birth defect in Anita’s world. It happens when a human woman that does not shapeshift (because technically shapeshifters are still human) has sex with a shapeshifter while he’s in half man, half beast form. There is a chance that any baby conceived during that kind of sex could have a mixture of human and animal DNA. This does not make them into a born shifter. This makes them a hybrid and some pretty terrible things can ocurr. First, the baby can develop at the speed of the animal in question which with leopards is a matter of weeks, not months. So a human woman can go from barely knowing she’s pregnant to being so pregnant you can’t get a legal abortion. There are no recorded cases of a baby born with Mowgli’s syndrome living for very long. There are cases where the mother dies during the pregnancy or birth. Her body just can’t take the rapid changes of a pregnancy shortened by half, or more. Also the woman’s body can begin to see the baby’s DNA as an intruder just like a rejected transplant organ, or a mother who has a reaction to the RH factor in her baby’s blood. (Oh, yeah, if you are say A, or any other blood type, its the RH factor that matters in this, say you’re negative, but your baby is A positive, you have a chance of your body reacting really badly to it. It’s usually a second pregnancy after a first baby that had the opposite RH factor so the mother’s body is primed to go, nope that’s not our blood type we need to get rid of it.) I’m told they have more treatments for this problem than they did when I was pregnant, because I was sick enough my doctor was trying to find out what was wrong so I got to find out some rather exotic potential problems.

I figured that if a real pregnancy could begin attacking the fetus just because of RH incompatibility, or a variety of other things, then what would happen if you put DNA that was truly different from the mother’s in her body. If you could manage to get a baby and mother alive and whole through a pregnancy with this genetic problem then you’d end up not with a baby shapeshifter, but with something that was neither human nor animal, but a mixture, and not that more elegant mixture of the leopardman, or wolfman, form. My biology degree always helps me make my world more real, and make it more terrorfying. As a woman, the thought that something can go wrong with the baby you’re carrying is one of the top fears. I saw enough in college classes that scared me when I got pregnant. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But during this book with Anita I did more research into potential problems and let me say not research to be done while you are pregnant. Way too scary.

Oh, and before someone asks, having sex with a wereanimal in full human form does not run the risk of Mowgli Syndrome. Apparently in human form they are, well, human for DNA purposes. We talk about their inability to pass a blood test, but no one ever talks about genetic testing for lycanthropy. And, yes, I know that lycanthropy technically is wolf based, but it’s actually a word in medical circles, so I made the choice that it would be used to cover the larger group. Yes, there are other words for it, and I’m sure in Anita’s world there are words for individual animal strains for it, but they wouldn’t be commonly used.

2. What then about the weretigers? We learned in SKIN TRADE they are the exception to a lot of shapeshifter rules. The weretigers are shapeshifters from birth, which is also unique, but most only shift for the first time at puberty. There are weretigers that are survivors of attacks just like most shapeshifters, but the weretiger clans look down on them as lesser beings. They consider any of their people that would attack a human and contaminate them to have committed one of their greatest crimes. They are the only known group in Anita’s world where the female shapeshifters can actually carry to term rather than lose the baby during the sometimes violent changes of shape changing. Also, the baby inside a regular shapeshifter is human when the mother shifts to animal form the baby doesn’t shift with her and you lose the baby that way. Would the baby born of a shapeshifter mother and a human father have Mowgli syndrome? Don’t know, it’s never been successful done in Anita’s world. See earlier probelms.

The weretigeress’s husband, or mate, calms her during the pregnancy and actually keeps her from changing form until after the baby is born. This is only possible if your mate is powerful enough to do the metaphysics, but most males are trained from an early age to do this trick, so most can. I believe it’s something that other wereanimals could learn how to do, but we haven’t seen anyone practice long enough to try. I’m planning on the weretigers that came home from Vegas with Anita to try and teach other animal groups how to do that.

3. No, I have never written a book by hand then typed it into a computer. The first book I ever wrote was done on a computer and all the others have followed suit. My first short stories were by hand, but I was twelve. Once I learned to type my short stories were done on a typewriter. God, carbon paper and white out. I love writing on computers it is so much easier to make copies, to change mistakes, you name it, it is easier on a computer.

Things that people don’t tell you about tattoos:

1. They hurt after you get them not just during.

2. They will eventually start to itch like crazy, and you must not scratch for fear of messing up the tattoo.

3. You cannot soak them in water for fear of ruining tattoo. So shower, not bath, or very careful to not get tattoo wet in bath, and no swimming. I’m told by this weekend this part should be over and I will be able to soak in the tub.

4. The scabs that fall off are the same color and shape as the tattoo because the scab has ink from your tattoo in it. It looks interesting and a little weird.

5. That you will need to keep the tattoo moist, but not too moist. Whatever you use for this must be unscented because your tattoo is pretty much a wound and scented stings. Some people were very adamant that you use a clear moisturizer, but we’ve managed to use a white hypo-allergenic lotion, scentless, dyeless, and it’s worked. Two friends with multiple tattoos have used it on all their tats so we’re trusting that if it worked for them, it will work for us. One friend even has as many allergies as I do. She and I often use each other as guinea pigs, as in if she can use it and not have a reaction so can I. So far, that’s proved true.

6. One thing I didn’t see on any tattoo websites for advice is to think about what position you like to sleep in when deciding where to place your tat. For at least the first night it hurts to put pressure on the tattoo, so if you’re a back sleeper and get a back tattoo . . . Just fill in the body part and the sleeping position. Jon and I were originally going to get our tattoos on opposite shoulders, but then we realized we are side sleepers who spoon back and forth all night. If we got opposite sides for the tats how would we sleep? So, we got the tats on the same side so we could at least spoon in one direction. By the next night we could sleep on both, though it felt a little odd, not painful just odd.

7. We were warned that tattoos are addictive. The level of pain was surprisingly high for both of us during the actual tattoo. Jon’s decided one tattoo will do him. I would like not to have to do it again, but I admit to talking to friends about the tattoos I wanted most, and trying to figure out how I can divide up the tats so that I’m not enduring the tattooing too long at a time. Outline one tat, then go away and heal, come back and do the color, go away and heal. It would probably take about three trips per tattoo to get them done, and honestly I’d rather not. Because once I get the outline I will feel compelled to finish the tattoo because it would bug me forever to just have the outline. A reminder every day that I couldn’t take the pain, and that I flinched. I’m not big on flinching. And, unfortunately the tats I want are paired, so if you get only one it’s only half done. Sigh.

So if I start I have to be able to finish, and I honestly don’t know if I can do it. There was a moment during the twenty minute tattoo where I got light-headed. I remember clearly thinking, "Oh, good I’m going to pass out then it will stop hurting." My next thought was, "Crap, if I pass out they’ll stop and I will have a partially finished tattoo. Crap. I can’t pass out."

Thanks for all the helpful advice on how to get through the pain of the tattooing process, but I tried them all and it didn’t work. I tried to do the find your point and stare at it, zone out. It helped, but it didn’t stop me from feeling the pain just from reacting to it as strongly as I wanted to react. Lamaze or yoga breathing, nope that really didn’t work for me. Nor did I find the pain cathartic. Cathartic is usually something I do on paper when I write. I tried cursing, no help there either. I went through everything I could think to do in twenty minutes or under. The thought of what I’d do for an hour long tattoo session is sort of problematic.

We love our tattoos, and are happy we did it. But I honestly saw this first small tattoo as a test to see if I was going to get the two larger tattoos I also wanted. I feel somehow like I’ve failed the test. I still want the tattoos, but I’m no longer certain that I could manage the pain long enough to get them. I guess it will come down to how badly I want them, and if I’m willing to pay the price not in money, but in pain. Somehow just asking it that way makes the answer seem like a simple, no way. And yet . . . and yet even as the scabs fall away and the itching grows worse, and this small tat still hurts (no it’s not infected it just seems to be how my body processes the healing process) I’m still worrying at the whole more tattoos problem and trying to find a more friendly way around it all.

Of course, first we’d have to find an artist that could do the tats justice. Because the only thing that would bug me more than starting but not finishing would be to endure all that pain and blood and have the tattoos not be good. So first there would be a search for an artist that could even do them, and having started looking at artist’s on-line portfolios I haven’t seen many that seem to be able to do what I want. Most of them have waiting lists and all are out of state. It just seems like too much trouble. And yet . . .

We were supposed to go to the gym tonight, but 7:30 came and we were not even close to ready to leave, so we called it. We got dinner and were going to try to see Harry Potter, but the next showing would have gotten us out at near midnight. Too late.

I should go back to work, but I don’t want to. It’s been a long productive day and though with my deadlines I need to go back to work, I think I’m done for the day. I’ve noticed if I push myself too late at night that the next morning is a hard slog at the desk. It’s all a balancing act, and I’m still working out the kinks in this particular act.

So no gym, no work, just good dinner, friends, family, a movie at home. I just know that getting out of the gym later than 10:30 just makes both Jon and I feel bad the next morning. So, I need to let it go, and remember one of my sticky notes I have near my desk. "Let go of the night you had planned, and enjoy the night you’ve been given."

I use that saying with different words in the position for "night". Let go of the day you had planned, the relationship you had planned, the book you had planned, the whatever you had planned and enjoy the whatever you’ve been given. I find it a very useful little saying and I periodically rewrite it with he appropriate new word in the saying and repost it by my desk.

No battle plan survives the enemy. Well, no schedule survives reality. I’ve really got to own that last saying. Maybe that should be the next sticky note by my desk.

Tattoos; we has them. About a year ago Jon and I came up with an idea for a small tattoo. It was something unique and special to us as a couple. Our friend, Pili, who is an artist, and has several tattoos offered to draw them on us. She did, and we liked them. They wore off, and we had her draw them on us again. They wore off, and we missed them. She drew them on a third time and again we missed them when they wore off. Then we put the whole idea on the back burner so we could think about it.

These were all steps that our friends with tattoos recommended to us.

1. Start with a small tattoo. Main reason for this is to see if you can take the pain enough to get that larger design you’ve been dreaming of for years. Say you get a one inch crescent moon tattooed on your leg, and it hurts so much you never, ever, want to have another tat done. Great. In the middle of that epic back piece of the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo that covers your entire back is a bad time to discover you can’t take the pain to finish it. You’d have this half finished ink on your back forever. Start small see how your pain tolerance holds up.

2. In a place that is inconspicuous for the first tat.

2. a) If you work in a conservative job, or might someday then get a tattoo where short sleeves will cover it on the arm, and a skirt or shorts will cover it on the leg. Anything below the elbow or the knee is much harder to cover up for work. (Think oh, no, my job is cool with tattoos. Will you have that job ten years from now? Will the next employer be cool with tattoos)

3. Have an artist friend draw it on you so you can wear it for awhile. We had some other tattoos drawn on that just didn’t work. So glad it was only temporary and not permanent.

4. Have it drawn on you more than once to make absolutely certain you want the design and you want it’s placement exactly there.

5. Tattoos are forever unless you want costly and not always scar free laser tattoo removal. Tattoos are forever. Forever is a long time to have a tattoo you hate, or a badly done tattoo.

6. Which leads us to find a tattoo artist you trust to do the design you want. Do not, repeat do not, go into a tattoo shop and hand your carefully thought design over to a stranger whose work and talent you are not certain of. Sometimes this works out, but most often it does not. Let me repeat tattoos are forever. Shop carefully for your artist. (Our artist did the shoulder piece for our friend, Pili) So we knew he could handle a small, rather simple tattoo. But as much as we like her tattoo we would not have signed up for him to do the two larger pieces I want (ed) down the road. He drew beautiful flowering branches on her that flow down her arm and look lovely. The pieces I want (ed) are not flowers and pretty trees. Hey, it’s me did you really expect pink blossoms? Which brings us to the next point.

7. Just because a tattoo artist did a kick ass job on your friend’s tattoo doesn’t mean the same will happen for you. Check the artist’s portfolio before hand. If they don’t have a few years worth of work to show you walk away. You do not want to be someone’s learning experience. (Yes, I know I have one friend where that worked out and he has this great tat, but why play the odds when you can find an artist that actually has a track record that you can leaf through) Your friends great tattoo may be the best thing in the artist’s portfolio, if it is, walk away. One lucky tattoo in years’s worth of work is not good odds.

7. a) Just because this artist did a great job on your friend’s flower and vine shoulder cap, does not mean they’ll do a great job on the portrait of your beloved dog. Does this artist have any dog tats in his portofolio? Were any of them taken from people’s actual pets? If there are no dogs in his portfolio, then find an artist whose done some and done them well, if that’s what you’ve got your heart sat on. The same applies to getting that swallow tattoo if the artist doesn’t have a bird in his portfolio then find one that does birds.

8. Avoid the traditionally painful areas for your first tattoo. Any place directly over bone, on the back over the kidneys, inside of thigh or arm, especially high up on the inner thigh, base of spine for some people, top of spine for others (Yes, I know people who have had no trouble with any of those spots, but I know more than three that have had trouble with each spot. I’m taking majority vote on the pain locations.)

9. Does it hurt to get a tattoo? I actually have quit a few friends with tattoos, some of them quite close friends, and they all had varying answers. The majority said either the pain endorphins kick in and it doesn’t hurt for long, or it didn’t hurt, or it hurt, but not badly.

9. a) My friends are all lying bastards.

Jon and I both agree it not only hurt, but it hurt a lot. It hurt from the first needle prick to the last. Carri and Pili said that our tattoos weren’t big enough for the endorphins to kick in, that under twenty minutes it’s just all pain for a lot of people. Now they tell us. There is some validity to the endorphin reasoning. I know when I ran for miles that the two miles or under and it was just grinding work, but between three and four miles the endorphins did kick in and I would experience a runner’s high. I’m told that can happen with tattoos, as well.

9. b ) But some people never have endorphins kick in during a tattoo. It just hurts the entire time. There is a very real chance that Jon and I fall into this sad catergory. Being told there’s no way to know until you try something bigger and of longer duration is not the kind of logic that’s really going to win us over to a second tattoo.

Are we happy we did it? Yes. Are we happy with the tatoos? Yes. Are we planning our next tattoo? No. Is this our last tattoo ever? Probably. (I would just say no here, but friends warn us that tattoos are addictive and to never say never. Of course, these are the same lying bastards that said it didn’t hurt that badly so take it with a huge grain of salt.)

Here is the picture of our very first, and maybe only, tattoos.