Author: Jonathon

Once upon a time there were only four channels on the television. There were no home computers. There was no internet. Blogging and Twitter were not a sparkle in their inventors’s eyes. There was no video tape, no DVD to watch. Whatever was on those few channels was what you had. There was ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS or some local channel that did local programming if you were lucky. I grew up without PBS, we couldn’t get it. I didn’t see "Sesame Street" until I had a child of my own. There were many fine programs on all the channels, but for news once there was only CBS at our house, because they had Walter Cronkite. He was THE news anchor. His calm, authoritative voice got this country through the Vietnam War, and his news casts were the most exciting and well informed on the Space Program. I was very small when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and don’t remember it much because my grandmother wasn’t that interested in it, but she watched Mr. Cronkite talk about it. She wanted to see what he had to say about all of it. It wasn’t landing on the moon that excited her, it was the man behind the desk. I always thought she had a secret crush on Walter Cronkite, and why not? He was intelligent, kind, passionate, knowledgeable, charismatic, and he honestly knew his job. He was not just a talking head. Walter Cronkite was a newsman’s newsman. I guess I should say newsperson, but regardless of gender Walter Cronkite has been the bar held up to generations of newspeople for decades, and though we’ve had some fine people anchoring for us, no one yet has been the "next Walter Crontkite".

I will leave it there, because there are many fine articles out there being written by people in the business, and people who actually knew Mr. Cronkite. I was just one of the many viewers who watched him, and trusted him. Yes, that’s right, we trusted Walter Cronkite to tell us the truth. We honestly believed that if he knew something bad he would tell us, and if it was good he would tell us that to, he covered the news all of the news. Admittedly, Mr. Cronkite worked before the networks had to sell commercial time with the news, before the news had to compete with regular television shows for ratings and sponsors. Maybe one of the reasons we haven’t had the "next Walter Cronkite" is that the news business has changed to the point where it’s entertainment first and information second. His rich, familiar voice, told us our news both good and bad, and we honestly believed that he wouldn’t hide anything from us. We believed he was a man of honor and integrity. I have never heard a story about him that made me doubt that.

Was he the last anchor we had in this country that we trusted to that degree? I think so, and if that is true then it is a sad legacy to a great man.

It’s the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. First, hard to believe it’s been that long. They’re twittering the mission as if Twitter existed then, when to my knowledge Twitter wasn’t even an idea in anyone’s science fiction. The computer revolution and it’s social context was just not something that was foreseen by anyone. To my knowledge, since I cannot possibly have read every essay, every SF story, every whatever of the last 40 years, I will add the caution of "To my knowledge".

But let me add that the computer you’re using, Twitter, Blogging, all of it is partly in existence because we went to the moon. the technology created to get our people safely there and back was the beginning of all this. So the next time someone asks, "Was it worth it going to the moon?" Ask them how they’d like to be without their internet.

I’ll leave you one of my favorite presidential quotes, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . .  ." All that will power of a country, all that money, all that time, all that brilliance, just so, eventually, you could sit up late at night and scan the web for porn.

Question from the Forum:

I guess it’s not really a question more a oops on my part. Iranians don’t speak Arabic. I actually know that. They speak Persian. I meant to either change Moon’s background to Saudi, or change the Arabic references to Persian. As sometimes happens the fix did not get made; my apologies. I have changed it for the British and American paperbacks. I would have preferred to keep Moon half Iranian and change the Arabic to Persian references, but the book is now already typeset so any changes must be small. Moon is now from Saudi Arabia where they do speak Arabic.

One of the reasons I went back and forth on what country I wanted Moon to be from was the strong feeling I had that as one of our bad guys was Mid-Eastern I wanted one of our good guys to be Mid-Eastern, too. We have a lot of good people in this country that are of Mid-Eastern descent and I wanted to make certain that my book showed that. You’ll find that most of my police and military units are more racially diverse than they might be in the "real" world.  You’ll also find more women. If I know for a fact that women would never be acceptable I’ll play by the real world rules, but as we have more men and women in areas where there is no true frontline we are having more women than ever before in our history seeing combat. A lot of them are on transports basically trucking our shit across some piece of desert, and the enemy neither knows, nor cares, that these soldiers aren’t supposed to see actual combat. We are sending home a record number of wounded that are women.

I actually had one gentleman write in and complain that I had women in the unit that helped Merry at the end of SWALLOWING DARKNESS. My idea was that these were Illinois National Guard training at the nearest airbase which would be Scott. When the call for help went out, they sent the soldiers they had, and the reality of modern combat is that women are in the line of fire. I felt one, that there would probably be women in the unit anyway, and two, if the fairer sex is getting shot up then they get to be the heroes on paper in my books.

The world isn’t fair, but I try to be.

Eight pages Merry.

Meditated. I try to do that every day even if I don’t always talk about it here, or on Twitter.

Interview questions answered.

"Superman" by Five for Fighting playing.

Talked to Mike our editor for the Anita comics. He’s in New York at Marvel.

Talked to my agent, Merrilee, also in New York.

Went to the Hallmark store and bought cards that made me laugh out loud.

Dinner: tried the new KFC grilled chicken. Jon and I weren’t that impressed. It was okay, but strangely greasy which is weird for grilled chicken. How did they manage to make it greasy? Better not to speculate.

Watched "RadioLand Murders" one of our favorites, and especially Trinity’s. Friends were over for dinner so shared the movie with them, and they agreed it was a great movie. It’s fun, cleaver writing, witty dialogue, great cast, good acting, great set design, costumes, you name it and it’s pretty much a hit out of the park. It’s got a writer as a main character, multiple murders, romance, and some wonderful physical comedy.

Friends are gone home. Trinity is in bed. Time that Jon and I did the same.

Last music of the day: Type O Negative "Black No. 1"

The 55 pages that I cut yesterday have put me back on the path. I know tomorrow’s chapter and the one after that, so the hard edit was the right move. But Merry has always written like this for me from the very beginning. I guess for me series characters are like any relationship the way you begin is the way you will end. What do I mean by that?

Anita came to be out of almost nowhere in the first short story. She was all muse-driven and speed. The first Merry book,  A KISS OF SHADOWS, was actually written twice. The first time through Ballantine, Merry’s publisher, had okayed it. They would have edited it and put it out there, but it sucked. It did. For another writer it would have been okay, maybe even great, but I knew I could do better. I knew I hadn’t nailed Merry’s voice, or her world. I’d turned the book in because the deadline was upon me, but I was deeply unhappy with it. 700 plus pages of unhappy, so when I got it back from the publisher I proceeded to rewrite it. Not to editorial order, but to my order. I just wasn’t willing to put my name on something that sucked that badly, by my standards. Are my standards high? Hell yes. I demand a lot from the people around me, but it’s nothing compared to what I demand of myself. So I decided on my own to do this massive rewrite. I fell back onto my original rules for writing a book that I’d used for the first four, or five books I ever wrote.

The 70/30 rule. It means that 70 % of any first draft is garbage and you need to throw it out, but to get that 30% of pure gold you have to write the whole 100% then winnow the gold from the dross. As I’d written more books my garbage quotient had gone down and my gold quotient up, but that was with an established series. I’d let arrogance trick me into thinking that everything would write that cleanly. It didn’t.

I threw out 70% of the first book and kept about 30% of it. Yeah, you read that right. I trashed that much of a 700 plus page book. The original book and the finished one are almost unrecognizable except for the first part of the mystery, and that Merry worked at Grey’s Detective Agency, and that Merry was a fairie princess hiding from her family. The supporting characters stayed the same but they were much changed in personality and interactions with Merry. My then editor at Ballantine agreed that it was a stronger book. Everyone was happier and the book speaks for itself. I’m still happy with it, and that’s a lot for me.

So, from the beginning it’s taken me more pages of false starts, wrong turns, to get to the meat of a Merry story than it has to do the same for Anita. I used to think it was because I wrote Anita in short story form first, the one published, "Those Who Seek Forgiveness," and many unpublished and unpublishable shorts. Yeah, probably I could get them published now, but trust me, they aren’t worth it. They are almost writing exercises where I explore the world and the characters. My literary fingernail clippings should stay where all fingernail clippings go in the trash.

But with this book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS, I had seven Merry books under my belt. I knew the world and the characters, but it didn’t seem to matter. I still had to write fifty-five pages of nonstarter before I could figure out where we needed to be and how to get there. I hadn’t had to do this in several books, but since book eight really almost begins another story arc for Merry, I guess in a way I was starting over with her. Sigh. But I’m finally excited about the book and eager to know more, and for me as a writer that is absolutely essential. Alone in my office it’s just an audience of one; me. If that first audience isn’t having fun or being intrigued or horrified or just plan scared then how can I make any of you feel those emotions later?

 

The Merry book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS, has been kicking my ass all week, but it was especially bad yesterday. I came to a grinding halt, no pages, no progress, and I didn’t know why. Usually when a book comes to this kind of halt something has gone seriously wrong with the plot, or character development. Now sometimes it’s something in your real life that’s making your muse refuse to work. I mean, your parent dies, you get divorced, near car accident, real life can make your muse hike her skirts up and run for the hills, or just shut your own creative juices down to such a small trickle that the muse has nothing to work with, but if you have no trauma in your life then don’t go all writer’s block on me, which is a failure of self-confidence and yet a different problem.

What I’m talking about is the point when a book just sits there and sulks. Now, that happens for another reason to me and that would be tour, or a long trip of any kind coming in the middle of a book. I come back to the computer and find that the book is stone, cold to me. Whatever magic or interest made me want to write the book is gone. This is a fixable problem, by the by. You can reread what you have, make small (small) edits, nothing big, because there’s nothing wrong with the book except you’ve been too long away from it. I find that often that is enough to bring the book alive again and set me writing.

But when a book that I’ve been working steadily on sits there and sulks, something else is wrong. It usually means I’ve gone down a wrong path, and somewhere behind me is the right turn. Now, if I’m lucky I notice this within a handful of pages, but if I’m not lucky, or if I’ve been particularly stubborn about admitting it then it can be a lot of pages.

I just cut 55 pages from the book. Yeah, you read that right. It’s not cut and paste it in later in the book, either. This is one of those moments when the cut pages are simply gone, trashed, useless to the book, the story, and any other books down the road. Boy, was this a wrong, freaking, turn. I can usually salvage something or put it in an outtakes file for a later book, but there is no saving it. I’ve fought with my muse for a week, and I finally have to give in and say, she’s right. It doesn’t suck. I’ve reached that scary point where not much of my writing sucks, but just because it lacks suckage doesn’t mean it’s good, or right for this book. Writing has to be good and right for the book and the characters and the world, simply not sucking is not enough. Sigh.

Someone has already tweeted that, "How could I cut 55 pages. They have trouble cutting 1." Believe me I tried not to cut it, but in the end remember it’s not holy writ, lightning did not carve these words into the mountainside. It’s just words on paper. You can write more, and you can write better.

I will blog later about the last time I had to cut even more from a book, but for now, I’ll leave it here, because blogger seems to eat my longer blogs, and that would just put the cherry on my ice cream sundae; I hate maricino cherries.

Jon and I are thinking about getting a tatoo. It would be a first. Friends with tats here have someone they want to take us to, and we were set to do it, but we made the mistake of catching some of "L.A. Ink" and seeing the tats that Kat Von D and her crew are doing. I have to say that their work makes most artists’s portfolios that we’ve seen on the internet sort of suck. Tattoos are forever and we’ve waited this long, it would be a shame to be unhappy with the finished product. We actually thought about using date night, which this is, for getting a tattoo, but two things stopped us. First, our friends that we trust to make sure the process goes well are out of town. Second, we just weren’t a hundred percent certain because we hadn’t seen anyone’s work near us that really showed they could do what we wanted.

Jon turned to me and said, "We could just go to L. A."

I looked at him, and nodded. "True."

I smell a road trip.

Jon found the blog I thought I lost last night. Here it is:

British Publisher Questions done and e-mailed home.

Intro to complete hardback of the Guilty Pleasures graphic novel done in draft, will be done final rewrite tomorrow morning. E-interview almost done will finish it tomorrow afternoon.

Worked on Merry. Need an earlier scene to explain scene just had. It’s too late into the book for this much new stuff not being mentioned. It’s one of the dangers to a first person narration. Surprises are hard unless you cheat. I hate writers who cheat. If the character knows it, so should the reader.

Actually had a note so strong had to open new file and write it, so it got out of the pipeline. It’s a partial scene, most of a chapter in a future Anita book. For those complaining about Haven having a new Regina, you’ll get more detail, but SKIN TRADE was about the mystery and me trying not to get bogged down in too much of the relationship stuff. Anita was attracted to Haven, and he wanted her to be his Regina, but just because someone wants you to marry them doesn’t mean you have to do it. No amount of good sex, or handsome, or even mutual attraction, makes up for someone who doesn’t work in your life. Haven doesn’t share. He may share less well than Richard. You’ll get to see it on stage one way or another, but for now just remember love doesn’t conqueror all, and lust sure as hell doesn’t. I’ll quote a close friend, "No matter how pretty she is, someone somewhere is tired of her shit." Change the pronoun and you’ve got an idea where I am with our blue-haired lion friend. Sorry you haven’t seen much of it on stage, but you will. He won’t be a major part of the next book though, so don’t think he will. He won’t. I know the next book plot, and that is not it. Though his actions will be changing things. It’ll all be very Greek, as in the harder he tries to make things work his way the more he messes it all up. Enough, I’m probably over sharing. I’m tired. So I’ll stop.

In fact, it’s bed time. It’s past time for bed. It’s been a good day, just one of those days when I’ve worked my ass off and still didn’t see the end of my to-do list. Some important stuff didn’t get touched today, so tomorrow is hitting the priorities, no, wait, I did that today. Maybe it’s too many priorities? Hmm. But spending time with my daughter cannot be a bad use of time. I made it a point today to have some mother daughter time. Did I have time for it? No. Did I have time not to make time for it? No. All you working mother’s understand what I mean. But now, my friends, I am to bed. I am going to find my husband and have him hold me and tell me that I have been strong enough, brave enough, organized enough, just enough, for one day.

This meditation brought to you by Red-Tailed Hawk. I was doing my morning meditation and just as I knelt down to light up the incense I saw a red-tailed hawk sitting outside my window on top of the purple martin box. It’s actually a sparrow box. I’ve never seen a purple martin near our house. But there, just outside my office windows was a huge red-tailed hawk just sitting there. I stayed low so not to spook him, and about that time Carri knocked on the door because I’d asked her to bring something over to the office. I told her to stay low and move slow, she did, and we both watched the hawk. We got to watch him gather himself up and stoop for something on the ground. We thought he’d caught something, but when we moved so we could see he was simply standing in the dew soaked grass. He stood there for a minute and I swear he seemed puzzled. We thought he’d missed whatever he’d aimed at, when he raised a yellow talon and stabbed the grass twice. We thought he just hadn’t quite killed it, then instead of moving in on his fresh kill, he just stood there staring at the wet grass. We finally realized that whatever he’d stooped to kill he’d missed it. He stood there a little while longer then winged it to the nearest tree. Carri went back to work and I made tea.

I also went back to finish my meditation. I was kneeling down again, to actually meditate when I looked up and there the hawk was again. It was on a low limb of the nearest persimmon tree. It was a perfect view of the huge bird of prey from my meditation matt. I took the hint this time, stayed low got myself a big cup of tea and sat back down to watch the bird. My meditation this morning consisted of me watching this huge young hawk groom himself just outside my office windows. I’m Wiccan so it doesn’t get much cooler than that for my faith, then a huge winged messenger totem just outside the windows where you meditate. Hawk is always a good a sign, but as I watched him scratch his head until it was fluffy with those long talons I realized that maybe the major message was to simply watch the bird and enjoy it’s surprising closeness. As Freud himself said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Then the hawk flung itself ground-ward again. I got up quickly but carefully to see what he’d caught and watched him repeat his performance of earlier. He stood in the grass, puzzled, then stamped the ground with his feet as if trying to kill something, but he’d missed again.

He finally flew back up in the tree. A squirrel that had apparently been flattened to a piece of ground in terror for its life ran like a furry streak to the base of the tree and put the trunk between itself and the hawk. I’ll bet that squirrel thought it was a goner. I know the hawk was young because when it flew it had two tail feathers that were the rufous color that gives the bird it’s name, but the rest were the juvenal stripping. I say he, because though big, he wasn’t as big as I’ve seen which probably means he’s a boy. Girls are bigger. And he’s trying to attack shadows or grass movement. We get a lot of juvenal hawks each year. I’ve watched hawks, especially red-tails, try for leaves blowing across the yard, then look puzzled. Grass blowing will also lure them in to no purpose. I’ve watched them come close to squirrels, chipmunks, and bunnies. I’ve seen the escapee run faster than I ever saw them move as the hawk hits the ground and misses. Zoom, and one very disgruntled hawk sits on the grass and has a cat moment. You know, the, "I meant to do that" moment. This morning’s hawk was so inexperienced he didn’t even try for the cat moment, he was simply perplexed that he’d caught nothing twice. Little birds began to mob him, a robin being the boldest. I’ve never seen a robin mob a hawk before which makes me believe their nest must be near, or in, the persimmon tree. The usual mob consists of crows, grackles, blue jays, and mockingbirds. Sometimes you’ll get chickadees and sparrows, but they usually mob from a safer distance. I’ve seen jays, crows, grackles, and mockingbirds smack the hawks on their heads and backs.

So that was my morning blessing a big feathery totem sitting outside my window. Can’t think of many better ways to begin the day unless a bear walked through the yard, but that would be a mixed blessing with all the neighborhood dogs being on the small side.

4th of July Traditions:

See movie early in the day before fireworks start. Jon and I went with friends to see “The Proposal” with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. She’s always charming, but we’re really beginning to like Ryan Reynolds, too. The two together along with Betty White are funny, poignant, and everyone can act. So nice in a summer movie.

Added a trip to gym with workout partners. Jon worked out at home. I like the weight room better than he does.We don’t think this will become a tradition. Nor will the terribly unhealthy lunch. Not good before workout.

Stay home with our dogs, because Pippin is afraid of fireworks. Sixty pound lap dog for evening. He did really well this year.

Keep an eye on neighbors who some years seem determined to burn our house down with huge, illegal fireworks that two years running were aimed at our house.

Call police on said neighbors. There’s a reason that some fireworks are illegal within a residential area. Our firefighter friend says she goes to at least one house fire a year caused by some of this stuff and the house is usually a complete loss because of the rapid burn. The neighbors still shot off illegal fireworks this year, but nothing too big, or too dangerous, and they did not rain stuff down on our roof so it sounded like hail.The police did not have to be called. A better 4th for all of us.

Trinity is with her father this year, which means she’ll have a better chance at fireworks and swimming and all the usual stuff for the holiday. Pippin would lose his mind if we actually sat off the demon fire in his own yard.

I hope you enjoyed your own 4th of July Tradtions this year. Happy Independence Day!