LKH, Author at Laurell K. Hamilton

Writing Roundup

I wrote over 400,000 words in 2024. I published over 20,000 words in 2024. 10,639 words of that was a novelette that appeared in the 100th anniversary of “Weird Tales” magazine. Thanks to Jonathan Maberry who edited it and put my name on the cover right between H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, two of my early influences as a writer. Reading Howard’s short story collection, Pigeons from Hell, when I was fourteen was what made me finally decide that not only did I want to be a writer, but I wanted to write fantasy, horror, science fiction, and sword & sorcery. If you want to read my story, “Cupid is a Knavish Lad,” where Anita Blake tries to save a woman from a vampire that is breaking all the rules and the law, and other great stories you can order it online. 10,887 words went to a second novelette in the anthology, Down these Mean Streets edited by Larry Correia and Kacey Ezell. It’s full of wonderful stories including mine, “It’s Always Sunny in Key West.” Visit Key West, Florida in Anita’s world where we meet a new vampire, Sunny Winston. Though you’ll see him with more than one last name in the story because even though vampires are legal now, he and his friends are playing it cautious, just in case the law changes back. I enjoyed writing Sunny so much that I’m making plans to explore other cities and their vampires in other stories. But where did all the rest of those words go? 200,000 went into the new Merry Gentry novel. Yes, that’s right the 10th Merry Gentry novel is done and off to my editor in New York. Thanks to all you fans that have been so patient waiting for me to finish Merry’s adventures. It’s coming at last.

Now for all of you doing the math, that leaves me with 200,000 words unaccounted for, so where did that go? It’s the outtakes file for the Merry Gentry book. You read that right. I cut as many words as I wrote for this book. I didn’t realize it until minutes ago when I was putting this blog together. All I remembered was that writing this book was one of the hardest I’ve ever done. I thought this book would never be finished. I beat myself up a lot. Why couldn’t I finish this book? What was wrong with me? What was wrong was I wrote a huge, freaking, enormous book, then edited and edited it, and cut here and there until it was done. And done meant I wrote 400,000 words from May 2023 to December 2024. So a year and a half… so not in one year. (Yes, my mind went straight to discounting it as not as amazing because it was a year and a half and not just a year. I’m aware that’s a bit crazy. Welcome to the impossible standards inside my head.) It still sounds impossible to write all that in that short a time, doesn’t it? I mean it sounds impossible to me and I did it. No wonder I thought I was losing my mind writing this book. Merry always writes hard for me, but this was epic, or maybe epic battle. I had convinced myself that I was weak and had been a big baby and that I’d only written 100,000 words or 100,050 tops. The book alone is 200,000 words and that’s just what my editor has on her desk. That I discounted so much of my hard work and just let my perfectionism and puritanical punishing interior dialogue make me unable to see all my accomplishment is something I’ll be discussing with my therapist later, but for right now I’m just going to try and let myself appreciate how much I actually did in a year and a half.

Whiteout, a dog, and a prayer

I’m sitting in my office listening to the dry, sharp sound of sleet hitting my roof. It sounds like sand being poured out, except wetter. Somehow my brain knows its nothing as dry and warm as sand from just listening to it. I grew up in Northern Indiana where winter is much more serious than it is here in St. Louis, Missouri. I’ve been in blizzards in a car and out of it. I’ve stood in the middle of an open field as the white out barreled down on me like a solid wall. Until that moment, I thought darkness, blackness, was the only thing that could steal my sight. I learned that day that white can be just as blinding, and you can be just as lost.

I could have outrun that wall of snow. I saw it coming and I was only yards from the house, but the dog we’d inherited, King, was with me. He was sixty pounds or maybe a little more of white German Shepard/husky mix, but looked like just a white shepherd. We inherited him after he got shot and after my grandmother and I had paid the vet bill, which was a hardship on our finances, I tried to take King back to his home. I started talking about what the veterinarian had told me, the physical therapy that would be needed daily, the walks on leash, the tending of the wound. The man who I’d thought was nice until that moment, looked me dead in the eye and said, he’d take him out and shoot him that he wasn’t going to do any of that. It was too much trouble. I went back to my car where King lay on blankets on the seat and drove him to my home.

My grandmother was not happy when she saw me pull up with the dog still in the car, but when she heard why, she let me make King a bed in the brand-new attached garage where the first car I’d ever owned got to park. She never allowed pets in the house except for once a year on Christmas Day. There were no exceptions, but the garage was insulated, and the bed blankets were thick, and he was half-husky. King was warm and safe with us.

It was my freshman year of college, and I lived at home so my grandmother wouldn’t be alone. I had an 8:00 AM creative writing class that meant I had to get up before dawn every day to do King’s physical therapy, so he didn’t lose the use of his leg. He let me do it even though I know it hurt, just as he’d let me pick him up and put him in the car when I found him bleeding the day he was shot. He’d screamed, but he never offered to bite. The only time he ever bit a human was to protect one of his people. He was a great dog.

When he was well enough, I started walking him in the predawn darkness. I was half asleep sometimes, so I let him lead me through our small town of a hundred people, or out into the fields along the roads. I learned his routes and what dogs were his friends and the ones that weren’t. But mostly, it was just King and me. We got snow storms and blizzards that year. There were mornings that I shoveled out the driveway and it was blown shut before I could finish changing out of the wet clothes into dry ones to drive to college. On those days I called in and said, I can’t get there safely. There were drifts as tall as cars across the highway.

It was bitterly cold that year, and the metal they’d put in King’s leg to save it got cold and he’d start limping and then sit down in the snow and refuse to go on. I’d take my gloves off and put my hands over his leg to warm him up until he could move with less pain, and we’d finish our walk. I’d stopped in the middle of the field to do just that, the snow was over my knees standing, so I’d brushed some of it away so I could kneel down without it covering me as I knelt beside my dog. He was whimpering with the cold in his old wound as I tried to warm him enough for us to finish the walk.

I don’t know if I heard something or if it was like that sense you get about weather, but I looked up and saw a white wall of snow and wind coming our way. It covered the horizon, and it was low and moving fast. I had minutes to run to the house and shelter. We were in a large open space with houses all around, but I knew once the white out hit the chances of missing the houses and heading out into open fields and never finding shelter were high. I had seconds to do the math in my head of risking freezing to death in the storm or running for the house and safety. I could have made it but King couldn’t, he was still too injured to run. I was in judo and in great shape. I could carry him if I had to on flat ground, but I couldn’t do it in knee deep snow and I couldn’t carry him as far as the house. Seconds of me staring at the storm and then down at my dog with his brown eyes looking up at me. I made my choice; I couldn’t leave him. I hunkered down on the far side of him to protect us both from the wind that was coming with the back of my winter coat and prayed it would pass quickly. Some whiteouts are just instances that descend and blow past; if it was that we’d be okay.

The world became white and the wind hit us like a giant was slapping to try and knock us to the ground. I’d never experienced anything like it, and as I huddled by my dog I had no regrets, but I knew we were in trouble. This storm was here to stay, and we could not be out in it and survive. I was maybe a quarter of a mile or less away from several houses and safety. My home was so close, but I couldn’t see anything and King was still too injured to play Lassie for me in the storm. I had been breaking trail for him in the deep snow all morning, he could not lead the way. I had a mental picture of our house before the whiteout happened. I visualized it as hard and solid as I could and prayed. Prayed that I was right, prayed that I wouldn’t miss the house by a few feet and wander out into the storm. Some of the blizzards that year had lasted hours, all night, or most of a day. King and I din’t have that kind of time.

I know that walk didn’t last as long as it felt, but in the white blindness with the world narrowed down to the wind, the driving snow, the air so cold it hurt to breath, and the dog that I was leading behind me as I broke the deepening snow, it felt like forever. At one point King refused to move forward and I almost cried. I pleaded with him that it was just a little farther and prayed that I was right. We’d be okay if we didn’t miss the house. The growing fear was that I had already missed the house and I was urging King out into the storm away from all shelter. Then I ran into the side of the house, the wind and snow as so bad that even standing with my hand on the house I hadn’t seen it. The wind died down for a second, enough for me to orient and head down the side of the house towards the back and the door. I kept one hand on the house and the other on King’s leash. We were almost home, almost safe, but the wind was howling. I had one of those thoughts you get sometimes, that if I yelled for help my grandmother wouldn’t be able to hear me inside the house, but that was just the fear talking. I had a hand on the house, I wouldn’t get lost now.

Once we got round the corner to the back, some trick of the wind had blown the snow into a trough so that it wasn’t as deep. King and I could both move better those last few feet to the back door which led into the garage. I got the door open, and I stumbled inside. The moment the door closed behind me the silence of not being in the wind of the was so loud in my head. It was the first time I realized that silence is its own sound, or that the absence of noise is a sound all its own. I locked the door behind me and leaned on it. I said a prayer of gratitude that we were safe, then got King settled in his bed. I can’t remember if my grandmother came out and helped me pick the snow out of his fur and get him settled; I just remember standing in the warm house with the snow caked to my clothes trying to warm my hands by the heater. We didn’t have central heating, so I huddled by the warmth in the living room. I remember the pain as circulation returned to my fingers which were mottled in colors I’d never seen on my body before. My fingers still ache in the cold to this day as a reminder of how close we came that day.

Resolutions, Goals, and other problems of the New year

I don’t usually make resolutions for the New Year, but I have made a goal of doing a blog a day for 2025. Is it too much? Will it fall by the wayside like gym memberships, diet plans, vows to give up smoking, or whatever we all decide we will be better with or without? This will be the third blog in three days; so far, so good. I admit that I’m beginning to worry a little that I’ll feel inspired every day for the next 362 days because today I was feeling very uninspired. Of course, I’m feeling uninspired even to write the new novel, and it’s Anita Blake, who usually writes fast for me. Having just finished writing a new Merry Gentry novel I have fresh proof that she comes harder at the keyboard. Today I haven’t wanted to write anything which is unusual for me. I finally realized that yesterday’s blog was about us losing my father-in-law this year. It was emotional to write about it and left me in tears at my computer. Maybe I need to give myself some grace in this ambitious goal of a blog a day? If the writing is personal and leaves me in tears, then maybe skip the next day and allow myself to recover before sitting down to search for inspiration again.

Okay, new goal. I will write a blog a day for 2025, but if the blog is emotionally draining or traumatic, then I give myself the next day off. I give myself the grace to be human and take time to process the emotional fallout of finding inspiration in personal pain. Let’s go one step further, I give myself permission to take the day off all writing if what I wrote yesterday has drained me emotionally and I stare at the blank screen with that thousand-yard stare. This leads into one of my other goals, or resolutions for the year, to be kinder to myself. If you are the resolute type I wish you good fortune and a stout heart as you try to stick to it whatever it may be. I’m going to step away from desk for now. See you tomorrow.

A Good Man Lost

I’ve been trying to write a roundup of events for 2024, but can’t seem to manage it, because the biggest loss of the year looms too large to put it on a list with anything else. We lost my father-in-law, Art this year to Parkinson’s. It’s a terrible disease, because before it takes your life it takes pieces of you away. First the physical; Art was one of those big, strapping men who rarely got sick. He retired from the Air Force National Guard as a major. He was who taught me that the weekend soldiers are some of the first called up and the last called home, depending on their specialty. After 9/11 his MOS in hazardous chemical and biological weapons got him shipped out to parts unknown. The only thing Mary, my mother-in-law, knew was it was hot and sandy. That was all he was allowed to say even to the love of his life, because his location was top secret. The uncertainty of that was so hard on her.

He got home safe and sound and eventually the trip was declassified so he could tell us where he was, but I’ll never forget those weeks of not knowing where he was, or how much danger he was in. He came back with a renewed enthusiasm for spending time with family, especially his grand daughter, our kiddo. We’d planned a trip to Disney World and Art hadn’t come with us. He wasn’t a big Disney fan, so he had some bachelor time while Mary came along. Our kiddo was still small enough to be in one of the rented strollers and it was great. Not long after that trip, he was shipped out for one of his longest deployments. He never talked to us about how much danger he had been in there, like most military personnel he told mostly funny stories about his time in the sand box, but he came back with a renewed enthusiasm for any family trip or outing. He said he regretted missing that Disney trip, which let us know without him saying it aloud that he had feared he might never get a second chance to say yes.

The first time I met my future father-in-law he was dressed like a tree and overseeing sandbag efforts at Kimmswick, Missouri. It’s a small town full of shops with an old-time feel. If you want good food and great deserts make reservations at the Blue Owl Café. But during the flood of 1993 we were all trying to keep the town safe from the river. A tall man in uniform walked into the room where the volunteers were taking a break, and he had this calm, commanding presence that went beyond rank. He was a leader in the best sense of the word. Stepping into the room he seemed to quiet the chaos and bring order just by being there. That is what a good officer does, and he was that and more.

I had no idea that I would someday marry his son and be a part of Art’s family and help make him a grandpa. I didn’t know that we’d all go to England together and walk up Glastonbury Tor together, or travel from pub to pub trying the local lager and ploughman’s lunch. Art and Mary would take us to the Florida Keys for the first time where I would fall in love with the Caribbean blue-colored water and find the first place that truly felt like home. If I could go back in time, we would travel more as a family while he was healthy and himself.

Parkinson’s took Art away in pieces. It reduced a proud, strong man to weakness. He hated it so much. He was intelligent and well read, well studied with a master’s degree in theology. He could talk philosophy, religion, and so much more at length. He never lost his temper, never got upset if you made a good point. He just discussed. He began to lose that, too. It was like a race to see what part would go next. I’ve lost people suddenly with no warning at young ages and that is awful, crushing, but watching Art disappear into the disease that was ravaging him was cruel for him and those around him. It was especially hard to watch Mary deal with it, because they were a love match until the very end. He is still the love of her life, and she is still his; nothing will change that, not even death. They are both devout Catholics, devout Christians in the best sense of the faith. Art is somewhere no longer in pain and if he has a physical body up there with the angels it is strong and healthy again. He’s up there visiting with his friends, he had so many, and waiting for Mary. Selfishly, we don’t want her to go too soon, but I know when the time comes, Art will be one of the first people she sees on the other side. Of that I have no doubt.

First Bird of the New Year 2025

I woke on New Year’s Day 2025 and was almost nervous about what bird I would see first. It’s unusual for me to feel anxious before I look to the skies for that first omen of the new year, but as I looked out the windows there was nothing. No birds, no squirrels (that was my animal of the year twice) in fact the winter bare yard was utterly quiet. I paced through the house the only human awake with the three kittens trailing me, I’d learn later that Magnus, our oldest rescue at 6, was tucked up in bed with my husband pinning him in place for a late winter sleep in. I went to my office to fill the bird feeders there and again nothing stirring, not even a titmouse. Then I heard a thunk-thunk-thunk on the only feeder that still had something it, the suet feeder.

I knew from the sound that it was either a woodpecker or a starling. I didn’t want starlings, I spend too much time fighting with them in our nest boxes and them emptying our feeders in huge bullying flocks. I hoped for a Yellow-shafted flicker, our largest regularly visiting woodpecker, but they’re larger than the feeder and since I still couldn’t see our thunking visitor I knew it wasn’t that, or a red-bellied woodpecker, but as I crept closer the bird was still hidden from sight, so the list thinned even more. I was able to creep within inches of the window because the feeder hid me from the small bird’s sight line. I was almost a hundred percent sure when I finally caught a glimpse of the black and white body hanging on the suet feeder. My first bird of the year is Downy Woodpecker. The moment I saw it I felt calm, all the nervousness evaporated. I felt grounded and full of a deep contentment. It was an unusually strong and comforting reaction to the year’s first bird, but I’ll take it.

Downy Woodpecker will be my theme for this year. What does that mean? I can start with metaphysics or with science. For the metaphysical I start with ANIMAL-SPEAK and ANIMAL-WISE by Ted Andrews. All woodpeckers are about rhythm: finding a rhythm for your life that works for you. They beat their own drum against trees, drainpipes, and other manmade surfaces. It’s a way of communicating to their mates and declaring territory. That’s not in Andrews’ books but you can find that and more at allaboutbirds.org from Cornell University, or abcbirds.org from American Bird Conservancy, and other places like the Audubon Society. Look for books that feature your bird, its habitat, its favorite food, or anything that catches your imagiantion and makes you think of the bird.

Downies are North America’s smallest woodpecker between the sizes of a sparrow and an American Robin. Being so small means, they can get insects in places that all the larger woodpeckers can’t like the stalks of plants that we’ve left for the winter in our garden, or the thinnest of tree branches. Imagine a woodpecker small enough to feed on the same plants that American goldfinches use though they go after the seed heads and the Downies are after the insects. What insights can I take away from the above for my year? Find your niche and stick to it because that’s where your food/treasure lies?

Downies also join mixed flocks of chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice in the winter which allows them to forage for food with more eyes looking out for danger, so maybe the message is also about cooperation? Working in a group? But deeper dive into the biology side and I find out that Downies also watch where white-breasted nuthatches hide their seed caches and raid them cleaning out the winter horde of their flock mate, so maybe it’s not about group dynamics? Sometimes a cool science fact is just that, it’s cool or fun, but not metaphysically significant.

I’ll be meditating and journaling on exactly what Downy Woodpecker’s message is for me this year, but for now knowing this is my theme for 2025 is enough. What was your first bird, or animal of the year? Domestic animals that you live with do not count. Happy New Year everyone.

New Virtual Event!

I’m so excited to answer all your burning questions for SLAY and Anita Blake!

I will be a guest of The Big Thrill on December 2nd and 4;00pm PT / 6:00pm CT !

This will be a Zoom webinar and only the first 500 attendees will be able to get in.

The link is https://bit.ly/4684jhV and the passcode is :058572

This link will become active on the 2nd of December.

If you’d like to submit questions ahead of the event, reach out to john@thrillerwriters.org with the subject line “SLAY VIRTUAL EVENT”

The War Does Not End at Home

To all the Veterans and those who love them,

My cousin’s war was Vietnam. I don’t know what happened to him, but from things I heard he came back earlier than expected. I don’t truly know why, just bits of my uncles talking when they didn’t think I was old enough to remember or understand. He seemed sad, that I remember. Whatever happened while he was gone it changed him, but like my uncles before him about their own wars no one talked about it at least not with little girls or women in general. It would take me years and dating men who had served to realize that men don’t talk to anyone about it, not even each other. Oh, they’ll tell stories especially if they can spin it for humor, or bragging rights, but they don’t talk about it in the way that I had assumed they did. Maybe after a few drinks, or a lot of drinks. Sometimes you drink to remember, and then you drink some more to forget. That would change over the years, but back then men were men and that meant you didn’t talk about it. My cousin lived a long life after he came home from Vietnam. He got married, had a son, and would finally die suddenly during the covid lockdown. None of us talked about his paranoid delusions or that when he was at his worst my grandmother and I were afraid of him. It didn’t happen often, but it also didn’t happen until after he went away to war. To my knowledge he never went to the VA or tried to get help from them. No veteran I knew growing up ever went there for help.

I dated a man who served in Iraq. I’m a light sleeper, so I’d wake when he started to struggle in his nightmares. I’d pet him back to sleep before it got too bad and woke him. He said he slept better with me than anyone else, but there were nights when I missed my cue, slept more soundly and woke to find his side of the bed empty. I’d get up and walk through the dark until I found him in the living room on the couch not planning to sleep, but to maybe turn on the TV and lay there, or maybe just sit in the dark until dawn. I’d coax him back to bed, and we’d try again. I lay awake until his snoring let me know he was deeply asleep, and only then would I relax and sleep myself, but I tried to keep a hand on him, so I’d feel the first hint of the nightmares coming for him.

My boyfriend went to Afghanistan before we met. There were anger issues, but I had my own that I’d spent decades in therapy learning to control, so I said, work your issues and we’ll be okay. He went to therapy, he worked his issues, it got better. I am not a veteran, my anger had nothing to do with war foreign or domestic, but rage recognizes rage. There’s a kinship to having that much destruction inside you whether you aim it outward or inward, or a little bit of both. There was one infamous Thanksgiving that he put his fist through a wall. I waited until the next day when he was all smiles, and you’d think that the tempest had never happened except for the hole in the plaster board. I told him that if anything like that ever happened again, we were done, and he was moving out. He seemed shocked, but he believed me when I said it was a hard limit and nothing like that ever happened again. He did go to the VA for help and there were questions about sleep disturbances which he knew he had, but he didn’t know all of it, because he slept through it. Only those of us that had shared a bed with him could tell him that he cried out in his sleep, but never in English, usually in Arabic. Dream or memory, it never woke him. He’d stop yelling, and grow quiet, his breathing deep and even until the next time.

I knew my best friend before he joined the military. He thought he’d be going somewhere hot and sandy but ended up in a very different part of the world. He came back and like many military men do eventually became a police officer. I’ve been his phone call when the demons come, and the nightmares don’t wait for sleep. I’ve talked him down when I could hear his pistol on the other end being racked back, knowing there was one in the chamber. I knew what the sound was the very first time, it’s a singular sound nothing else quite like it. There’s also nothing quite like the fear that rushes through your body on the other end of the phone until your fingertips and toes tingle with the adrenaline as you realize that your voice is it, all that stands between the friend you’ve known since he was seventeen pulling the trigger. Words are what I do for a living, but I’ve never scrambled so hard to find something to say or prayed so hard for the right words in my life than I did those phone calls. The relief when we were finally able to get off the phone and he unloaded his gun and gave me his word he’d put it away for that night. I’m not sure I have the words to describe that kind of relief, the weakness that comes you’re your body as your own adrenaline seeps away. The grateful tears that your friend is still with you, and sometimes the hysterical tears, because I’m not trained to do this, I’m out a therapist. What if the next time I get it wrong and he pulls the slide back, puts that live one in the chamber and hangs up on me? What if he pulls the trigger while I’m listening and the sound of that shot, the sound I’ve been dreading lets me know I’ve failed, the final failure and lost my best friend? What if, what if, what if … but it didn’t happen, we’re safe. He’s remarried to a wonderful woman. He’s happier and calmer than I’ve ever known him to be. They have a little girl. Life is good. There haven’t been any nighttime phone calls in a very long time.

Times have changed since my cousin went to Vietnam. Men are talking about their pain and their experiences in the military and out of it. The VA is slowly becoming more responsive to the damage done to our men and women when they serve. It’s not perfect and it varies greatly depending on which part of the country your VA is in, but it is getting better. If you need help, please go get it. I know it sucks that getting help from the VA can be a fresh battle which is exhausting all on its own. Hang in there and remember you are worth it, you deserve it, the government sent you to war, they’re supposed to help you afterwards, damn it. For all those who aren’t veterans or related to anyone in the military, remember the soldier is not the war, or the government. Don’t yell at veterans when you want to yell at politicians, because usually the veterans would like to yell at the politicians right along with you. Be kind to each other out there, because you never know what nightmares the other person is carrying around with them, or how hard they are fighting just to keep going. You don’t have to have been in a real war to be struggling, but think about how hard the last few years have been on all of us, then add the memories and damage of having gone to war. That’s why we thank veterans for their service. It’s acknowledgment that the government has screwed them over even more than the rest of us.

30 novels in 30 years – Happy 30^th anniversary to the Anita Blake series!

“My first Anita Blake novel, Guilty Pleasures, was rejected over two hundred times.”

October of 1993 Guilty Pleasures hit the shelves. It was the very first Anita Blake adventure. After over two hundred rejections from almost every publisher possible and moments when I wasn’t sure I’d ever publish another book, I finally had the first book in my series published, and better yet I knew there’d be at least two more, because I had my first multi book contract. When I signed on the dotted line the contract was for three Anita Blake novels. I still remember the thrill of knowing there would be at least three books in the series! I’d already had one series end with the first book, Nightseer, because like most first novels it hadn’t sold well enough for the editor to buy more. It was supposed to be four books and now it would never be, but Anita would get at least three novels. I was giddy with the just that.

Anita Blake lives in a modern-day America where everything that goes bump in the night is real and everyone knows about it. The first book starts two years after Addison v Clarke had changed the definition of life and death by declaring vampires were legal citizens with all the rights that entails except for the right to vote. If you see a zombie on your street the police will come and keep you safe until an extermination team arrives with flame throwers in hand. I actually got rejected by a couple of publishers because my monsters were out of the closet. The editors said that without the mystery vampires aren’t scary. I’ve been proving them wrong on that for thirty books now. Another publisher offered to buy my book if I would make all my monsters a secret like every other horror novel I’d ever read. Anita Blake works full time at Animators Inc, where she raises the dead for her money hungry boss, Bert Vaughn. She consults with the police on supernatural crime part time and is one of the new legal vampire executioners because once a vampire starts to murder people for blood, they don’t stop. There was no way to go back and change Anita and her world, so I just kept collecting my rejection slips until then Penguin Putnam said, yes without wanting to change a thing. They bought me because it was something new that they’d never seen.

I had no idea that Guilty Pleasures would launch my career, or that I would ever get a chance to write the thirtieth Anita Blake novel, Slay that’s coming out November 7, 2023. My goal was to be able to support my family. I had no ambitions beyond that, because what was the point? All I knew then was that I was contracted for three books and if it all fell apart, I’d have at least a trilogy under my belt. If I’d told myself how successful I’d be as a writer way back in 1993 I wouldn’t have believed myself. I wouldn’t have believed a lot of things. The first three books have pagers and telephone booths as the high tech. Somewhere in The Laughing Corpse, or Circus of the Damned Anita gets a cellphone, but it’s nothing like the smart phone that we all live on and through now. It wasn’t just my career I couldn’t have foreseen, but the changes in technology that would reshape the world. Not a single science fiction writer, or even scientist saw that coming, so I don’t feel too bad. I would arbitrarily update all the tech in the series somewhere in the middle novels. It’s a tradition in long running mystery series that the main characters don’t age as fast as the rest of the world, and that you update history to keep the main character current with the present like changing their military service from Korea to the Middle East. I say mystery instead of horror, or fantasy, because at the time I was creating Anita, I had to turn to mystery series to read twenty books or more with the same character, no other genre had that at the time. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee – none of them ever age out of being able to outthink, out fight, or just be tougher than anyone they’re up against. If it’s good enough for the greats of the genre, it’s good enough for me. I do have the added benefit of Anita Blake’s supernatural powers helping her age slower than normal, or perhaps she’s stopped aging at all, we’re really not sure yet.

People keep asking me if each book is the last Anita Blake novel, because a lot of my fans are from horror, fantasy, romance, and not as much mystery, so they’re used to series stopping at three, four, maybe six books if you’re lucky, but that wasn’t the template I used when I was planning my series. I went to mystery and studied some of the longest running series out there at the time. There are 21 Travis McGee novels, so I’m already ahead. Robert B. Parker wrote 40 Spenser novels before he passed and other writers were invited by his estate and publisher to continue the series. Ace Atkinson wrote 10 and has just passed the mantle to Mike Lupica who’s first Spenser book, Broken Trust comes out in November. Just hitting the 40 that Parker did is ambitious enough. Rex Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novellas and short stories. If you add it all together that’s 74 Nero Wolfe adventures. Now that’s a goal.

The Heart of the Matter

I saw my heart on a monitor today. It was beating away, keeping me alive. I got to watch the red, blue, and yellow flashes of my blood flow while Emily, the technician, took still photos to show my cardiologist. Green doesn’t mean go here, and red doesn’t mean stop. Red and blue are indications of speed and tell Emily if the blood is flowing towards her or away. It’s mostly all red and blue, but the flashes of yellow are where the blood is flowing fastest, speeding through the valves of my heart. The grayish image on the screen doesn’t look like hearts on television or the movies. The more I watch the more clear it becomes, but it reminds me of the last time I had a sonogram. I was pregnant with my daughter, though in the first sonogram I didn’t know what sex she was, only that there was a baby growing inside me and there she was with her first cardiac movement fluttering on the screen. Her heart so fast it sounded like a hummingbird’s heart. The first rhythm we hear is our mother’s heart, you think you don’t remember it, right? The first time I laid my head over my first husband’s heart that thick, even beat panicked me. It sounded wrong to me, not soothing, not right. I would talk to my grandmother later and find out that my mother had a heart murmur, and when I laid across my then husband’s chest I’d been listen for that thump-whoosh, not thump-thump-thump of my ex-husband’s heart. I had no way to know about my mother’s heart murmur, no one had ever spoken it aloud to me, but I knew the sound of my mother’s heartbeat, because it had been the music that had soothed me to sleep for nine months.

My heart today sounds slow, thick, in some spots deep bass, then Emily moves the wand to another spot and suddenly my heart sounds like like a frog, with a two tone sound higher pitched, as if my heart still holds a piece of the marshes and swamps that our ancestors crawled out of to come onto land all those millions of years ago. I ask, why it sounds so different, and it’s different valves in my heart. Nothing sounds like my husband’s sure, thick heartbeat against the my ear when I lay my head on his chest as we’re falling asleep at a night. By the time we married a second time I’d grown accustomed to the sound of a healthy heart against my ear.

I listen to the push and pull and flow of my heart, sound to sound, spring frog croak, deep bass rhythm, water pushed through a rock crevice like a spring coming to the surface of the earth and spilling out into a trickle of water. My grandfather would walk down from his wooden cabin every day to get water from a spring on his land. It was this tiny pulse of water, clear and cold spilling into a small pool and then seeping away into the grass and down another crevice going back under ground. He made his coffee with that water every morning, even though he had a well for the house. That water tasted metallic heavy with minerals, the water from the spring tasted clean, no iron taste to it at all even though the spring and the well weren’t that far apart from each other. I always wondered if the spring flowed into the same aquifer as the well water was drawn from, did that clear, cold, bright taste go back under and mix with some larger underground reservoir and get lost in all the rocks and roots that flavored the well? Or did the spring flow into yet another body of water hidden beneath our feet and stay clean and sweet?

I stared at the screen today and wondered if my blood stayed clear and sweet and healthy, or if my doctor would find that somewhere in me was a root of something not so sweet. The thought scared me, so I forced myself to ask technician Emily more questions about hearts, blood flow, valves, sounds, and how all that thick muscled certainty kept beating. I asked academic questions like I was back in Human Anatomy in college, though I’d never asked many questions about the heart, except enough to help me memorize the parts of it. I’d never seen it as anything more wonderful than the bones, or any other part of the body. it was just something to memorize for the test to come. I hadn’t seen the body I was sitting in as anything that special. Watching my heart on the screen today it seemed special, not just because it was mine, in my living chest, but because it was fascinating watching it work, and thinking that’s inside me, that’s my heart. I realized that all hearts were this amazing. If I had ever had today’s epiphany back in college maybe I’d have stayed with premed classes for my biology degree, but it had been dry work back then, not as interesting as birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, or my own stories. I’d seen one film in school of an open heart surgery, and the moment they used the big shears to cut through the sternum it made a sound, wet and sharp as the bone was cut. I don’t know what it was about that particular sound, but my eyes rolled back in my head and I started to sink down to my desk with another girl beside me. Then the teacher was there screaming in our faces, “If you faint no one will give you their notes. No one!” We rallied and didn’t faint, but that took care of any thoughts I might have had about majoring in medicine as my undergrad degree. If I couldn’t make it through a film of an operation, well, the real thing would surely put me on the floor, but today for the first time I wasn’t sure of that. If I had known the heart was this … alive, vibrant, literally the heart of the matter. I might have tried my luck at hearing that wet, sharp, terrible sound in person just to see this living muscle in our chests that keeps us alive. It was an epiphany moment, like another dream come to knock on my door, but it’s not loud enough to derail my life. I make a living from writing. Okay, more than that. I am a best selling novelist. I’ve hit #1 more than once. I’ve succeeded beyond my wildest dreams when I was in college. Biology had always seemed the road less traveled for me, but today I listened to the inner workings of my own heart and realized that there were other possibilities had I been inspired at the right time. Now, instead of changing my major I sit down at my desk and I write. I share what happened today with you here. I’ll finish this then get back to working on my forty-fifth novel.

Grizzy 2011-2023

Our house panther, Grizzy, lays in a languorous black pool in the heat. She loves being warm, so I’ve turned all the air conditioning off in my office, opened the windows, turned on some fans, and I’m letting her soak up the summer heat. It’s 84F outside, and I was raised without air conditioning so I can do it fairly comfortably today. But even if it had been over 90F today I would still have done it. Today the Kit-Kat, one of her many nicknames, can have anything she wants, and I mean anything. Our Dark Empress is a bit spoiled anyway, but today and early tomorrow it’s going to increase exponentially. Why? Because tomorrow we will take her to her veterinarian for one last consult and if he agrees, if we all agree, then she won’t be coming back with us ever again. We are having to make the incredibly difficult decision to end her suffering by ending her life. That sentence sounds so wrong. I started to type, cross the rainbow bridge, but no euphemisms. She has cancer. It came up very suddenly about three weeks ago, maybe a few days less. She’s only twelve, young for a cat for all you dog people out there. She should have had many more happy years to be our pampered house panther, but instead we’ve come to the difficult choice of letting her continue to suffer, or helping her die before the pain gets worse. There, I typed it. Die. We’re going to hold her in our arms tomorrow and allow the vet to kill her, or we keep her with us and see how terrible the rest of the process will be for her. Those are the choices.

I grew up with dogs, so I’ve heard a dog scream in pain, but never a cat until this last weekend. I didn’t know that cats made a sound like that, but just like with the dog the first time I heard it, I knew exactly what it was. She screamed out in pain twice, then she shook like she was having a fit, then she walked around in circles drooling and meowing in a piteous way. I was crying hysterically and thought this is it, she’s going to choose her own time to go. Then it all stopped, and she went back to being Grizzy. She didn’t look like she was in pain, she looked normal, seemed normal again. She asked for more food as if I hadn’t just witnessed her suffering out loud with no hiding. If that had continued we’d have bundled her up and headed to the veterinarian and helped end that suffering, but how do you decide when most of the time she looks normal? Well, almost normal.

There’s a growth on her forehead which has now grown so large that one of her large, emerald green eyes is completely obstructed by it. The growth was the first sign that something was wrong. It appeared on her forehead three weeks ago, a bump in her black fur above those vibrant green eyes. They almost earned her the name, Esmeralda, but she answered to the name, Grizzy, that her foster mom had given her. When a cat answers a name you don’t change it. Grizzy was short for Grizelda, which means, gray battle maiden. The color was wrong because she’s all black except for a perfectly round white spot on her stomach like a full moon over her womb. She was such a witchy cat; my grandmother would have hated her. She wasn’t a big cat fan anyway, but she was superstitious about black cats. Maybe that’s why I’ve wanted one since I was twelve years old, to defeat parental expectations? Grizelda is the name of a Valkyrie, the winged female warriors that help transport the dead from the battlefield to Valhalla and Folkvangr. Everyone seems to know Valhalla where Odin the Allfather hangs out, but it’s the Goddess Freyja who has first pick of the dead, not Odin. She chooses her half of the fallen, then Odin chooses from what she has left. The Valkyrie help transport the dead for both the Goddess and the God. So why would any rescue name a petite black cat after a winged warrior and chooser of the dead? A hawk caught her for dinner, thinking the small cat would be an easy catch, but Grizzy’s motto was always, fuck around and find out, and the hawk found out. Grizzy came out with a scar on one of her hind legs, and the hawk got to live to hunt another day.

She got the scar during her time at a feral cat colony where a volunteer witnessed the fight, so the tale of the battle followed her and helped her get the name. Her foster mom quickly realized that Grizzy was far too friendly to be feral, so once her medical issues were cleared up the rescue started looking for a forever home for her. They brought her up to PetSmart to be in the glassed-in cat adoption area to hopefully catch the eye of some potential adopters.

Grizzy was at least six years old by then, and a lot of people don’t want to adopt an older cat, they want kittens. I’ve never understood that, because those cute little kittens can grow up into cats that may be very different in personality, just as a human baby is different from the adult they grow up to be. If people are willing to adopt older they still want the youngest cat possible so under a year, or no more than two years, or three years tops, well you get the idea. Grizzy was between six and ten years old. A vet would later say six to eight, but when we saw her that day we knew she could have been as old as ten, a senior cat. On top of her age, she was a black cat, and some people still think they’re bad luck.

For me though, none of that mattered, in fact her age was a plus. The moment I saw her through the glass, I knew she was the one. She gave me a glare out of those brilliant green eyes and seemed to think very loudly, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting in this place for a whole week. You knew I was here!” I had. I’d felt this compulsion to go to PetSmart for a week and fought it off. We didn’t need another pet, but of course a cat is always right about such things. We did need another pet, we needed her.

She came with the name Grizelda, Grizzy for short, and I wasn’t a fan of the name. I liked it better once the rescue explained how she earned her name. I mean how could I not love an earned battle name, but there are other Valkyrie names or even female warrior names that I would have preferred, but she answered to it. Not all cats answer to any name, so we kept it. Of course, one nickname wasn’t enough for our Dark Empress. She was Grizzywald, because of a certain movie that came out soon after we got her. Grizzly, Grizzly bear for her deep, raspy torch singer of a meow, and because of her big animal energy. My husband nicknamed her G-Money and it stuck. I added Kit-Kat. Our girlfriend started calling her, The Void, because she was utterly black like a circle of night poured out into pictures. Yes, Friedrich Nietzsche got quoted a lot after that nickname. You know the one, “If you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you.”

I thought Grizzy was going to be my cat, my witchy, moon-touched black cat, but she turned out to be my husband’s cat. He’d never had a cat before and didn’t think he was a pet person because he’d never been as enamored of our dogs as the rest of us were, but with Grizzy he suddenly discovered that not only was he a pet person after all, but he was a cat person. She demanded his attention, wooed him, barged into his affections ignoring all the subtle signals that my husband tried to give to let her know he wasn’t her person. But Grizzy knew he was her person and she was his cat. He spoke cat the way I thought I spoke dog. He was a natural at playing with them, reading their body language, in a way that he’d never been able to do with any of the dogs. He loved the pups, but as he blossomed with Grizzy I realized that it wasn’t that he didn’t like animals as much as I did, it was that he was a cat person. He’d never had a cat growing up and he hadn’t really interacted that much with our very first household cat, Éomer aka Meep, who was both his and my first ever cat. I did twenty years of allergy shots to be able to own any cat. I’ll get shots for the rest of my life, and it’s totally worth it. But Meep had been an only kitten, bottle-fed by human foster moms in rescue, so he had missed some of his, how-to-be-a-cat education. Grizzy had been someone’s pampered house pet, gotten lost and fended for herself in a feral colony, then rescued, and she knew everything there was about being a cat. She knew how to be pushy in a charming way, and she hunted my husband’s affections like she was still living outside and had a tasty squirrel in her sights. She was his cat; he just didn’t know it yet.

One night my husband and I were on the couch watching TV, and I heard him utter something romantic and cute. I turned with a smile and found him holding Grizzy. He’d been talking to the cat. I wasn’t even angry, it was adorable. I loved that he’d embraced the fact that he was a cat person and that he was Grizzy’s person. Her love for him freed something inside him so that he realized he understood Meep, and later, that he understood Magnus, our big ginger boy. My husband embraced that he was a natural with cats and it was all due to Grizzy’s persistence. Her second favorite person was our daughter, who now realizes she also is a cat person.

I don’t know what I am anymore. This blog has taken me days to write, and it seems right that I can finally finish it on the day that I’m finally crying. I cried when we held her in our arms while the vet helped her go painlessly, which was more than the cancer would have given her. I cried as I laid my cheek against the warm, black fur of her side that last day, but today I am weeping like something inside me has finally let go. I have been storing up tactile memories of her for the last week as we realized we weren’t going to have months with her, but only days. I have purposefully memorized the feel of her in my arms, the silk of her fur, even as the cancer began to carve her down so I could feel her hip bones and her tiny seven-pound body growing lighter in my arms every day. I memorized the warmth of her, told my fingers to remember how her fur felt, how her body felt alive, warm, pliable with her still moving and – I have had too many pets over the years where I touched them too much after death, but those were sudden losses with no warning. I didn’t know that I needed to collect the feel of them in my hands, my fingers, my skin. I didn’t know it would be the last time, so I didn’t pay attention, as we don’t most of the time. Even those of us that are touched by death at an early age and know the impermanence of happiness, safety, life, we don’t live every moment with that knowledge front and center. I try, but it’s too hard. It’s too great a reminder of the fragility of everything we hold dear, so we forget to hug each other goodbye before work sometimes. We don’t linger over the kiss of the people we love most in the world, because to linger on ordinary days is to admit that any day could be the last kiss, the last touch. And to dwell too long in that knowledge is unbearable. It would break us to live each day like that, but to live any other way dims our lives. Such hard choices: to sleepwalk through our lives or to embrace the ever-present loss as time marches on and over us, and we cannot get it back.

But … this time I knew, so I carved the feel of her fur into my fingertips. I pressed the feel of her liquid warmth in my arms like flowers that I wanted to keep forever. I gazed into those startling green eyes until I thought I memorized the pattern and texture of them. We have pictures that will help, but they won’t show me how it felt for my hand to stroke over the soft dome of her head and play with the delicate point of her ear. She didn’t like me doing that, but these last days I did it anyway and she tolerated it, maybe she knew that I was trying to make memories that would have to last forever. The feather light touch of her paws as she cuddled on top of my husband and I as we lay on our sides spooned together. She was never heavy, but those last two nights she was birdlike, dreamlike, light as a feather, like she was already fading into a ghost cat come back to comfort us. I lay there in the blackness with my husband curled around me and memorized the feel of this, too. Jon and I both knew that it might be the last night, so we lay still and let her settle, and tried to feel that tiny life tucked up in the curve of our bodies. She was so small, dainty, lovely, but she fought off a hawk and bore the scar of her victory. She was fierce and never backed down, never moved out of the way, but stood her ground and forced the world to move around her.

“Though she be but little, she is fierce,” –William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.