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.
“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.
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.
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.
Happy Spring Equinox and Blessed Ostara! Smolder, the latest Anita Blake novel comes out tomorrow! I can’t wait to share it with you all, but it’s extra special this year of 2023, because this is the 30th anniversary of the Anita Blake series. We’re starting the celebration with two events. March 21st St. Louis HiPointe theater live and in person with a virtual streaming of that both version require a ticket. It’s hosted by Left Bank books. Everyone’s been lovely and agreed to mask for me, I got long covid and to keep me safe and writing more books for all of you, I’ve asked everyone to mask. Thanks again. March 22nd for all of you that couldn’t make it to St. Louis there is a Barnes & Noble ticketed virtual event where William MCCaskey, my co-editor from Fantastic Hope will be asking your questions live online! You also get a signed copy of Smolder, but to get your questions answered and your signed copy you need to get your ticket to the event ASAP.
Once when I still believed I’d get my doctorate in English literature, and write on school breaks, one of my favorite teachers had an epiphany in our upper level lit class.
One fine spring day, a literature prof named, Dr. Lalka declared that he would not read children’s literature to his soon to be born baby. He would read them only Literature, serious Literature like Shakespeare and Chaucer, Keats and Shelley. Children’s books he doubly declared, damaged a child’s brain and ruined their chance to love real Literature.
The eight students sitting around his table all looked at each other. He called them his little Cherubs, and they called him, Doc. They were the pride and joy of his students. The best, the brightest of them all. Those eight shining stars stared at each other and then with shared smiles began to recite, GREEN EGGS AND HAM by Dr. Seuss. His little cherubs spoke very word from beginning to end, leaving out nothing, remembering it all though it had been many years since they had read it.
That college professor named, Doc began to blush, pink at the beginning then red and redder and reddest of all until he had to bend down his head and recover himself. When once more he could speak, he said, that perhaps there was more to these children’s books than he had first thought and maybe among all the Shakespeare and Chaucer he might sneak a few stories with less thee’s and thou’s and more Sneetches and Loraxes.
His little cherubs rejoiced in that college classroom, knowing they’d saved Doc’s baby from the doom of being forced to grow up far, far too soon.
Happy Birthday to Dr. Seuss! Happy World Reading Day to everyone! Hope you’ve had a lovely one.
Have you Pre-ordered Smolder, the next Anita Blake novel coming March 2023? If you have, please go to this form and fill it out to receive your own bookmark and holiday card from Anita and the Gang!
What was your first bird of the year? The first bird you saw outside on New Year’s Day. Mine was cardinal for the second year in a row, but 2022 it was a single scarlet male the only color in a winter landscape full of snow. This year the day was gray looking more like late November here than December. Three female cardinals fluttered around the bird feeders their soft brownish tan bodies with the tips of faint red at crest, wing and tail blending into the dead leaves and bare trees so that only their movement betrayed them. The first bird traditionally tells us what the coming year will be like, or what will be important to us. I have had January firsts where the birds all hid and I saw mammals, squirrels one year, and a cat one year. But it’s usually a bird, then you have to figure out what the message is for the year. Squirrels for me are to balance work and play better. Cat, was a sign to ask my allergist if I could have my first cat. That was a really wonderful moment after twenty years of allergy shots. Doves usually mean it’s going to be a year of matters of the heart, or issues associated with Goddess. Cardinals usually mean I need to be willing to be seen more, to stand out and say, look at me! It’s a lesson I struggle with like most writers, because on one hand we want our books to be wildly popular and sell tons, and make us tons of money to go with all those sales, but we are also usually introverts and shy, or at least more comfortable at our desks than doing interviews or public appearances. Even if we’re good at the public side it drains us. I was not happy with last year’s message of bright red cardinal, but female cardinal is a little less flashy. She does most of the egg sitting in the spring because her coloring lets her blend in and not attract predators while the male is the stalking horse saying, look at me and don’t look for our nest. Do I get to hunker down at home and nest this year? Cardinals don’t stop with laying eggs and raising chicks just once in the spring, unlike most song birds they will rinse and repeat two to three times a year. Here in Missouri where the weather stays mild longer I’ve seen them still feeding fledglings in early October. Though that’s a chancy month in the Midwest, because we can get a freak October snowfall. The year I noticed them feeding in October the weather stayed mild, luckily. They build a fresh nest for each set of eggs, probably because even the slowest predator might figure out where their nest is if they keep going to the same location to feed babies from March to October. Once they successful raise all their young then it’s time to form winter flocks with the juvenile birds who look just like mom. The males won’t get Dad’s bright red plumage until next spring, so the threesome I saw by the feeders on January 1st probably weren’t all females, but mom and chicks all camouflaged together to up the chances of this year’s babies surviving the winter without getting eaten by a hawk, or other predator. Maybe that’s my lesson for the coming year that I don’t have to be the brightest thing in view, but just concentrate on laying as many eggs (ideas) and raising as many chicks (books) as possibly this year. Be wildly productive and concentrate on writing new stories, and don’t put all my eggs in one nest, basket like the cardinal I’ll up my chances of success by having multiple nests for different broods (ideas/novels/stories) and concentrate on raising them until their ready to fly on their own and share with all of you.
I’m so excited to share the beautiful cover and spoiler free cover copy of Smolder, the next Anita Blake novel with you!
Hints and one reveal that starts on page one, so I’m not giving anything away.
Vampire hunter Anita Blake is no stranger to killing monsters. It’s part of her job as a Preternatural US Marshal, after all. But even her experience isn’t enough to stop something that is bent on destroying everything—and everyone—she loves.
Anita Blake is engaged to Jean-Claude, the new vampire king of America. Humans think she’s gone over to the side of the monsters. The vampires fear that their new king has fallen under the spell of the most powerful necromancer in a thousand years.
In the midst of wedding preparations—including getting Edward, aka U.S Marshal Ted Forrester, fitted as best man—Anita gets a call that the local police need her expertise at a brutal murder scene linked to a nationwide slaughter of vampires and humans, dubbed the Sunshine Murders.
But there is more than just a murderer to catch: an ancient evil has arrived in St. Louis to challenge Jean-Claude for his crown, his life, Anita, and all they hold dear. Even with Jean-Claude’s new powers as king and Anita’s necromancy, it isn’t enough, however; they must embrace their triumvirate, or allow primeval darkness to spread across the country, possessing first the vampires and then the humans. Evil will triumph unless Jean-Claude and Anita can prove that love conquers all.
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