LKH, Author at Laurell K. Hamilton

Triggers

Triggers, trigger warnings, have been in the news a lot lately. Talk of trying to keep everyone safe in college lectures, panels at science fiction conventions, news items even, as if the world should be wrapped up in cotton wool and bubble wrap like your great-grandmother’s china so it doesn’t get scratched, cracked, or broken; but people aren’t dishes that only come out at the holidays. People move through the world every day to go to work, to school, to vacation, to . . . life. If you spend all your time trying to be protected from anything that could possibly upset you, how will you ever grow strong enough to overcome it? A trigger doesn’t go away but we can grow to the point where it no longer controls us. We can master our triggers and own ourselves to the point where we are no longer subject to the word, phrase, events that once made us so afraid, or angry, or upset. We can take back ourselves, our lives, all the words, all the memories, and we can own them again rather than them owning us. I swear to you that this is true because I’ve done it, but here’s the trick – you must not hide from your triggers.

If you hide from them and avoid them forever, perhaps you’ll never be “triggered” again, but you also give up parts of your life and yourself forever. Whatever made you feel like a victim, or took your sense of safety, will forever win, because you haven’t faced your demons, you’ve given ground to them. Old maps used to come to the edge of the known lands and then write two phrases, “Here be Dragons,” or “Here be Demons,” which meant that beyond that point the map makers couldn’t guarantee safe passage because the unknown was full of monsters. If we avoid triggering events and allow people to keep us “safe” from everything then the maps of our lives are not edged with monsters, the maps of our lives have sections right in the middle of them where a sign says, “Here be Demons,” right in the middle of our life. The middle of our life is full of places we pass through on a regular basis, so we pass that sign every week, maybe everyday, a sign that reminds us that here is a place that was once a part of our life and now it’s too scary to enter. To me, that was a constant reminder of what frightened me and made me feel like a victim, every time I stepped around that area of my life rather than walked through it I would feel a little more scared, a little more unsure that I was strong enough to do what needed doing, because the demons had won, they’d claimed a piece of my life forever.

How I faced my triggers was by walking into that place, those words, that moment with the big glaring warning sign over it, and I faced my demons. Was it scary? Yes! But every time I faced something that triggered me I got a little bit of myself back, I reclaimed pieces of my life, of me, from the demons; and every time I did that the “demons” got smaller and weaker, which meant I felt bigger and stronger, because that’s what triggers are, they are ways for things that hurt us to make us feel small and weak forever, but we aren’t trapped with our demons anymore, we survived, we moved forward, we built a life. I refuse to let the bad things control me by making me avoid parts of my life. I will reclaim all of it, every last bad word, hurtful phrase, frightening moment, all the pain, all of it is mine and helped make me who I am today. One of the things I discovered as I faced the pain was amazing to me – I didn’t die. Even having to live through the painful event by facing the trigger didn’t kill me, and Nietzsche had it right, that which doesn’t kill me really does make me stronger. My goal is to live the quote a little differently, “That which does not kill me had better run, because I’m coming for it.”

“Destroy your personal demons, use their corpses as fuel to light your way.” LKH

For those of you who may need help, please see the following links, courtesy of Dr. R. Kieran

http://www.apa.org/topics/trauma/index.aspx

http://www.nationalcenterdvtraumamh.org/

Father’s Day 2015

The photo with this blog is of my husband, Jonathon, and our daughter, Trinity. Sometimes I forget how very small she was when I divorced and was suddenly dating again. Jonathon was the only boyfriend I ever introduced her to, because he was the only one I was ever serious about. I think we married within a year of this picture. My second, his first, and he became a stepdad before he was ever a dad. He became Daddy-Jon because Trinity wanted a way to keep her two dads separate when she talked about them, so it was Daddy-Jon and Daddy-G. Trinity truly feels she has two fathers, and Jon felt that he had a great kid and there was no need for a second one, because biology doesn’t make you a dad. Being there daily makes you a dad. Jonathon watched the Barbie Nutcracker movie twelve times in a row when Trinity had the flu once. Only a parent does that for his sick kid. He taught her how to fence using boffer weapons so that she was so deadly in stage combat at drama camp that she had to bow out. “The other girl just kept dropping her guard, mom, I couldn’t help myself.” A dad is the person who comes limping in with the limping child after that infamous bicycle riding lesson. A dad is all that and so much more.

It is through watching first my ex, and then Jonathon, with Trinity that I began to understand what a father does because I never had one of my own. I was a fatherless child, and by age six I was a motherless one, too. My grandmother raised me without any men around the house, so I had no clue what a father, or a husband for that matter, was supposed to do. I always felt very left out on this holiday as a child. I think it was one of the reasons I worked hard to make sure my ex stayed invested in Trinity’s life, so that she had two dads where I’d had none. The three of us even went to parent-teacher conferences for Trinity. There was no fighting amongst us at school events, because my ex-husband and I both agreed that our daughter didn’t divorce anyone, that was us, so we vowed never to bad mouth each other in front of her and to act like civilized grownups at school functions or anything that involved our child. I am happy to say that with almost no exceptions we accomplished that. Was it easy? No. Was it worth it for our kid? Yes.
Trinity is twenty now, but she still has two dads for Father’s Day. I’ve now watched dear friends dance with their fathers at their weddings, and thanks to Genevieve and her father, I’m learning that even when you’re very grownup, a dad is still important to a daughter. Thanks to Jonathon and Spike I’m learning about sons and fathers, too. A dad is someone you can turn to for advice, someone you just want to keep involved in your life, because you love them.
People keep asking me why I haven’t shown my fictional character Anita Blake on stage with her dad, and the honest answer is because I didn’t know what a dad was for, or how a grown child interacts with one. I would take my character Jason back to visit his father in Blood Noir, but that father was dying of cancer and their relationship was strained at best, so it didn’t really force me to show a healthy father/child relationship. Then in Affliction we went back home with Micah and it was his father who was dying in the hospital of a mysterious disease. Micah loved his father, but the dad spent most of the book unconscious, so I didn’t have to deal with it on stage much. It would take me a year after I wrote Affliction and had fans complaining that I had another father in hospital like Jason’s father, before I both realized that it was similar and understood why I’d done it. The short answer is that I don’t know what a father is for, and I certainly don’t know what a healthy father/daughter relationship is supposed to be. I realize now that is why Anita’s family has never been on stage. I don’t know what a family is for like that, not a dad-mom-sibling kind of family, because I never had one of those. Maybe as Trinity gets older, I’ll understand it more. Maybe watching Jonathon, Spike, and Genevieve interact with their families as adults will help me understand what it’s supposed to be like to be a grown woman that still has a relationship with their family of birth – the family that raised them.

Zombie Day!

It’s zombie day! No, it’s not a new book, it’s the first day after tour. It was great seeing all of you across the country for the Dead Ice Tour! You guys let me know just how excited you were to have the newest Anita Blake novel in your hands, and that was a lot of excitement! I loved answering your questions in Atlanta, New York, Houston, Dayton, and Lexington. You asked for me to tour some cities we hadn’t done in a few years, so I talked to my publisher and we did it! You guys came out in amazing numbers in every city, and we took selfies so you could see yourselves being awesome! (Okay, I forgot to take a selfie in a couple of cities; my bad.) But thank you for showing us so much positive energy! Thank you for loving Anita and all the rest of my imaginary friends so much!

But no matter how wonderful the tour was, there is always a zombie day after we get back. What is a zombie day? It’s a day after some major event like finals week, or finishing that huge project at work, or typing, ‘The End’ of a novel, or coming home from tour. Shorter tours are easier to recover from but no matter what there is always a day when I stare off into space at nothing in particular, can’t concentrate worth a damn, and am more tired than I thought possible outside of the first few weeks of a newborn baby coming home. All important decisions should wait until this phase of post-tour recovery is past, trust me on that one. Sometimes I try to ignore zombie day and muscle through, or at least try to ignore it, but I’ve learned that’s a mistake, so now I just let myself be as exhausted as I actually feel.
The best use of zombie day is to sleep in, maybe take a hot bath, and a hot tub is a bonus, drink lots of water and juice, take more Airborne and Emergen-C, and rest. Now, add that Jonathon and I both usually catch some bug on tour, so we’re actually sick on top of it all . . . and the only thing to do is nothing much. Dozing on the couch covered in sleeping dogs with a movie I’ve seen before playing as background noise is one of my favorite things to do when I’m this tired and sick. I usually do mysteries for the videos, but today a David Suchet Poroit, “Five Little Pigs,” actually had me crying, even though I’ve seen and loved the movie a dozen times. (Did I mention I can be a very emotional zombie on zombie day?) I needed a true feel good movie, so “Despicable Me” fit the bill. “Despicable Me 2” is currently playing, because it’s one of the few sequels that’s just as fun as the original.
I’m still occasionally trying to cough up a lung, but I’m feeling a little bit better than last night when I got off the plane. Happily, I didn’t catch whatever this is until after I hugged the last fan, shook the last hand, and answered the last question. So, whoever shared more than a hug with Jonathon and me, I hope you’re feeling better today, too. A lot of you asked why I’m not doing more cities, and the answer is simple: the longer the tour the more zombie days at the end of it. Shorter tours mean I can be back to writing pages on the next book, and that’s what all of you wanted the most on tour – the next-next book.

Dead Ice: Anita Blake

This is the last blog before Dead Ice hits the shelves here in America, you lucky fans in the U.K. already have your copy, but on this side of the pond we’re still waiting and in anticipation of that wait here is Anita. Because if there’s just one more blog left before the pub date, it’s got to be Anita.

Question: How did you come up with the character of Anita?

Answer: The summer after college I read my first hard-boiled detective fiction, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, Sue Grafton, Sara Paratesky, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. I’m sure there were other male writers in the genre I read that year, but that’s the list that sticks out in my mind. What stood out in my mind then was that the male detectives got to cuss, have sex, and shoot people pretty much without remorse. The female detectives rarely cursed, sex was either nonexistent or sanitized and off stage, and if they had to shoot someone they had to feel really, really bad about it. The difference between the two hard-boiled genders was so unbalanced that it pissed me off, and out of that anger I decided to create a female detective that could even the playing field. At the same time I read a short story with zombies in it, several articles on real life voodoo as a religion, one on Sanataria, and . . . the idea that Anita would be more than an ordinary detective began to take shape.
Secrets to Share: In retrospect I may have done a bit more than just evened the playing field, but then if something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing? *grins* The seed that would eventually become Anita Blake, and spawn a #1 New York Times Bestselling series, began with that sense of outrage at the gender inequality in hard-boiled detective fiction. If I’d stayed with that original idea then I would have tried to sell a seriously violent detective series with a hard talking and sexy female detective, and respected editors in the mystery genre have told me that they love Anita Blake, but the series would never have sold if it had been straight mystery. We may have come a long way, baby, but apparently mainstream mystery hasn’t come far enough to have a female detective that can play as hard as the men. In fact, Anita gets to play harder than most of the men in the plain mystery section. If I hadn’t read the pieces about voodoo and zombies at nearly the same time as the mysteries, then I don’t know if I would have thought to have Anita raise the dead for a living. Adding the horror genre to the mystery was what allowed me to be as violent as the crimes Anita was investigating needed to be; and horror also lets women fight back right alongside the men, more even than mystery.
The zombies came from reading the right things at the perfect time, but I’d already decided to put the supernatural in the series because I thought I’d get bored with just straight mystery. I read a lot of mystery series after those initial ones, not just hard-boiled, but cozy, and everything in between the two. What I found was that most writers seemed to get bored with their series between book five and eight. You could watch them fall out of love with their characters and their worlds. Some authors rallied and were able to find renewed energy and fall back in love with their series, and some were selling too well to stop so they struggled on for more books, but the lack of joy in their work showed through on the page. I decided I’d give myself enough toys so I would never grow bored. I’d read fantasy and horror most of my reading life and I loved old horror movies, especially the old Hammer vampires films. I’d watched them as a child on the late night creature feature show and been enthralled. I’d read all the real life ghost stories and folklore that I could get my hands on from the time I could read, so I decided I wanted a world where everything that went bump in the night was real. More than that though, I wanted it to be modern day as if we went to bed one night and got up the next day with all the monsters being real and everyone knew about them. I wanted to see modern day America have to deal with vampires, zombies, and shapeshifters as a reality, not as a rumor or a ghost story, but real. I wanted to mix the fantastic with the mundane in a serious way and see what happened. That was one of the main things that interested me at the beginning and is still one of my favorite things to write about today.
The fact that I then added relationship tropes to the series just helped me push the writing in any direction the story took me.

Question: Will we ever meet Anita’s family on stage in a book?

Answer: I think so.
Secrets to Share:
I actually wrote the first chapter and planned the mystery plot for a book where Anita goes home for Thanksgiving. The original idea was she would take Richard to meet her family, but by the time I sat down to write the first chapter it was Micah and Nathaniel. Why not Jean-Claude? First, vampires don’t travel as well by car, and that was the original plan. Second, Grandma Blake is crazy religious and prays for Anita’s soul because she’s sleeping with a vampire. We don’t trust her not to do something like open a window so sunlight hits Jean-Claude. The original idea was that Anita would stay in the house she grew up in, like most of us do when we go home for the holidays. Nothing like being surrounded by family and staying in your old room to throw you back into old childhood mindsets. Not sure how much of the plot would change, but every time I try to make it the next book it just doesn’t work. My muse and I aren’t ready, or maybe Anita isn’t ready.

Question: Is Anita you?

Answer: No.
Secrets to Share:
I made Anita my size, because it was easier to choreograph a fight scene if my main character was my size. If I’d made her taller, or in any way that different from me physically, then I’d have had to find a friend the size of my character anytime I went gun shopping or looked at a shoulder holster. She’s my size because the hand I have is the hand I need to fit. It just made sense to me at the time. I gave her my hair because I like my hair, and I figured if I was going to screw her life up with terrifying mystery/horror plots that I should give her something that she might like, too. I’m told that Anita’s attitude is tough, strong, masculine, not very feminine, and in many ways, it is my attitude; but I didn’t think of it in those terms until readers and interviewers started telling me. Anita’s personality and mine were closer to the same at the beginning of the series, but it’s a first person narration so making her sound and think like me was easier as a new novelist. When I sat down to write Merry Gentry years later I would make sure she didn’t sound like Anita, which meant she didn’t sound much like me, and made writing her a whole lot harder. I think it’s one of the reasons that Merry writes slower than Anita, because I don’t think like Merry does, and yet she’s a first person narrator, too. Anita and I have diverged as people because our experiences have been very different. She’s gone on to have one of the highest kill counts in fiction outside of war novels, and I married, moved to suburbia, had a child, dogs, and did a much more traditional approach for the first decade I wrote Anita. She was anything but traditional by any standards. Anita is now decades younger than I am, because I read an essay by Agatha Christie years before where she complained that she’d made both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot too old, and if she could do it over again she’d have started them off much younger. I took that bit of advice to heart and Anita was twenty-four when she stepped onto the page, as was I when I wrote the first short story with her in it. Seven to eight years is all that’s passed in Anita’s world, while much more has passed in the real world.
Anita and I both lost our mothers in car accidents as children. She was eight when her mother died, I was six. Why did I do that? Because when I was twenty-four my mother’s death was still so traumatic that I couldn’t imagine understanding a character that hadn’t had a similar experience. That early tragic loss made me understand just how fragile life was, and took forever the ideal that the adults around me are omnipotent and could keep me safe, because they couldn’t keep themselves safe. That knowledge at such a young age has made me a different person than I might have been, and it’s so intimate to who I am that I gave the viewpoint to my main character, because again, first person narration. They say, write about what you know, so what did I know? I knew death and loss, monsters and lovers, small town American lost in the big city, I knew how to be a strong woman in a man’s world, I knew not to ask for mercy for there isn’t much to go around, save the mercy for someone who needs it more.

Sneak Peek from Dead Ice:
Lita looked at me, head slightly to one side. “You didn’t worry that it’d make men not want you?”

“No,” I said.

“You didn’t worry that it made you look like a victim?” Kelly asked.

I frowned at her. “No, every time I look at my scars I think that I lived, and I killed what hurt me. These are victory marks, not victim,” I said.

Dead Ice: Nathaniel

We’ve only got two blogs to go until Dead Ice hits the shelves on June 9th here in the United States, but in UK today was your day to get Dead Ice; no spoilers! But since we’re running out of time for the blogs on our side of the pond, it’s got to be Nathaniel Graison, the other third of Anita’s live-in threesome.

Question: Is Nathaniel based on a real person?

Answer: No, but he’s one of the few inspired by a true life event.
Secrets to Share: I tackled researching BDSM, bondage and submission the same way I did guns, police work, or vaudun/voodoo: with respect and thoroughness. This was before I realized that BDSM was a part of my own lifestyle, so it was all brand new to me. I learned about dominants and submissives, it would be years before I learned about tops, bottoms, and I was still being told switches, people who can be both dom and sub, didn’t exist. I learned that healthy kink is all about safe, sane, and consensual. But I learned about a man who had vanished from the community after losing his dominant to a breakup. This individual was someone who didn’t play safe, or sane, but kept the consent; but what he would consent for was beyond what most dominants wanted to do with anyone because he wouldn’t safeword before he was hurt. A dom trusts his submissive to either call safeword before they are truly hurt in a scene, or to tell them upfront, “Sometimes I get caught up in the scene and I won’t safeword in time, so please help me keep an eye on me and call it for me if you think its needed.” Or words to that effect. The man who was missing wouldn’t do either, so most people didn’t want to play with him, let alone have a relationship with him. In a world where how much pain you can take could be a mark of pride and attractive to people, this man worried people. They’d actually encouraged him to get therapy because bondage isn’t a replacement for it. You should do bondage because it’s part of your sexuality, not because it’s part of your pathology.
The missing man was named Nathaniel, or that was his name in the kink community because most people use a nickname. Now, don’t get excited, I have no idea what this man actually looked like, I never met him, never talked to him, never had him described to me – honest. But the idea that someone was so lost that they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, protect themselves during scene play to the point where they would allow people to do irreparable damage or worse, really disturbed me. It disturbed the dominant who was my guide to the world, he was afraid that this Nathaniel had found someone who didn’t stop in time either from lack of knowledge, or desire for darker things than are acceptable in the community. BDSM is not a replacement for good therapy, if that’s what you need, go get healthy, and then once you’re better if BDSM is still something that interests you, come back with a better outlook and a healthier mindset. For some people bondage is a sign they need help, for others it’s just a part of their life. That this Nathaniel might have gone off with a stranger, which you’re not supposed to do, either you get people to recommend people or vouch for them, and let himself be . . . lost for good . . . It bothered a lot, just the concept that a person could be so . . . out of the confusion and dark fascination with the entire concept of someone doing that came my fictional Nathaniel. I kept the name and the dilemma, but my Nathaniel’s background history, physical appearance, personality, is all made up. I have no idea how it matched up with that long ago and long lost, person who planted the seed that would become my fictional Nathaniel. I didn’t need to know, because my imagination had taken that seed and run with it. In fiction I saved Nathaniel, and he got therapy and helped save himself. I was able to write a happier ending for my fictional character than seems to have happened to the story that inspired that first seed.
Question: Is Nathaniel based on your husband Jonathon?

Answer: See above, and no.
Secrets to Share: This is probably one of the most persistent rumors, that my husband is either Micah or Nathaniel or they are based on him, but neither is true. Sorry to disappoint everyone, but I do not base characters on the real people in my life.

Question: Is Nathaniel your sexual fantasy? Is Micah, Jean-Claude . . . etc . . . your sexual fantasy? Are the men in your books your sexual fantasies?

Answer: No, sorry, but though I find the men in my books interesting, and hot, because it’s hard to write a good sex scene if I, as a writer, aren’t attracted to the characters, but other than that, no. The closest to being my fantasy is Nathaniel, but not because of the great sex and his beauty. He is my fantasy husband/wife because he enjoys domestic duties like cooking, cleaning, and organizing a household. All of which I am terrible at, and Jonathon isn’t much better except for the cooking part. That he’s a domestic goddess is a wish fulfillment for me, because it’s something I’ve been wanting/needing in my life but couldn’t find romantically for a very long time. That Nathaniel is beautiful and in great shape is due in large part to his job as a stripper, he has to look good on stage. I now know the time and energy that you need to put in to look as good as he does, and it’s almost another full time job. If he wasn’t having to look that good for his job, then he probably would look a tiny bit less fierce, but he would still be beautiful. Of course, Anita works out too, both to stay healthy and to be able to run away or after the bad guys and fight if she has to, it’s a matter of life and death for her, which is a great incentive to hit the gym. She works out more than I do, because my job is to sit here and write. Sedentary jobs are so bad for the body. Both for health and my doctor’s urging I keep trying to add back in more exercise, but I actually hit a time a few years back where the amount of exercise was impacting how many hours I could write in a negative way. It was weird to realize how much time it takes to look a certain way. I’m not sure it’s possible for most people to dedicate that kind of time to it. One of the reasons Anita never does “normal” daily things is between her jobs, her relationships, and hitting the gym there really isn’t any time to do anything else. Staying in fierce shape is almost another job, and the way you have to watch your nutrition . . . it is a level of discipline and time management that boggles the mind, or it boggles mine.

Sneak Peek from Dead Ice:
“When Gabriel first introduced me to Jean-Claude I thought I was there to sleep with him, instead I was there to audition for going onstage at Guilty Pleasures. I thought I knew how to take my clothes off onstage, but Jean-Claude showed me the difference between shaking the moneymaker to the music and getting naked onstage, as opposed to a true striptease. I can still hear him: ‘One is an art, and the other is cheap and tawdry, and nothing cheap dances on my stage.’ God, Jean-Claude was so elegant in everything he did. I’d never seen anyone like him.”

“He is pretty unique,” I said.

Nathaniel laughed. “He was always a perfect gentleman with all the dancers. He said he couldn’t be a good manager if he played favorites, so first he taught me how to be elegantly sexy onstage and then he taught me which fork to use, and not to tuck my napkin into my shirt collar.”

Dead Ice: Micah

Micah blog:

Micah Callahan came on stage mid-way through the current books, almost literally half-way at book #10 Narcissus in Chains. The book was a game changer in a lot of ways for the Anita Blake series, but one of the biggest for her personal life was the addition of Micah.

Direct frontal shot of a Black Leopard snarling with isolated background,

Question: Why did the sexual content go up in the series once Micah was introduced?

Answer: It didn’t really go up that much.
Secrets to Share: The Meredith Gentry series was actually created, at least in part, to give me somewhere to put all that literary sexual frustration that wasn’t happening in the Anita Blake novels. I had written and finished the first Merry book, A Kiss of Shadows, and set a much higher sexual content from the very beginning. I think that’s why no one ever complains about it, because it was the dynamic from the start, but with Anita it wasn’t. She started out a very old-fashioned good girl, in that I’m-waiting-for-my-white-dress-and-picket-fence kind of way. So, after nine books where she had managed to have sex twice, three times if you want a more open definition than just intercourse, I’d decided to stop arguing with her. If Anita wanted to keep both Jean-Claude and Richard at bay and continue to cling to her commitment phobia, then so be it, I was done. Not done with the series, but done arguing with her, with Richard, with everyone. Merry didn’t argue about sex, or even commitment, because the whole idea was for her to find a prince/king to her princess/queen. Narcissus in Chains is a solid mystery with a villain that is still one of the most original ideas I’ve ever come up with for a bad guy; but to listen to the haters you’d think there is nothing but sex in the book. In fact, there is only one full-blown sex scene in the entire book. You could make a case for two, maybe three, if intercourse, or oral isn’t your sole criteria for definition of sex. One of those scenes amounts to metaphysical foreplay scene with Richard, Jean-Claude, and Anita, but the other two scenes are with Micah, who was a brand new character introduced in this book. There is actually no more sex in this book than in Blue Moon or The Killing Dance, but what is different is who the sex is with.
I had so many people complain about the sexual content in Narcissus in Chains that I almost accepted that there must be more sex in the book than I remembered writing, but no, no, there isn’t. It has only been recently that I realized the problem was that the first metaphysical foreplay scene was with Jean-Claude and Richard, the two men that Anita had dated for most of the preceding nine books, so fans had become wedded to the idea that this was it – her two guys. They were also convinced she would pick one guy to finally settle down with, and then suddenly Micah comes out of left field and wins the day, the lady, everything, because that’s what some fans seemed to think. They would have to wait for the next novel, Cerulean Sins, to discover that Anita hadn’t dumped both the other men. She’d date and still be lovers with both Richard and Jean-Claude, but she would also continue to date Micah. It would take me almost ten years to realize why some of the anger directed at Micah existed and by then it was too late to change things, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. My series, my books, my characters, and they tend to date/sleep with who they want to with very little input from me, actually. Micah was supposed to be a bit player, in fact he was supposed to be a bad guy henchman for the main villain. He wasn’t supposed to date Anita, let alone have sex with her. Which leads us into the next question.

Question: Did Micah rape Anita the first time they were together?

Answer: No. Not to me, but to my great surprise this was one of the most frequent questions I’ve gotten over the years about that first scene.
Secrets to Share: This question totally caught me off guard at first, and the people who asked it in a hateful way, or were just haters in general, I pretty much ignored. If you want me to pay attention to you, be nice. Some very sincere women, who were very nice, were upset about the scene. It turned out that the scene had seemed like rape to them because Anita had not said a fully spoken, “yes.” I swear that I remembered her saying yes in the scene. I swear that I wrote her saying yes in the scene, but so many women were genuinely upset by the scene that I went back and reread it. One thing was true, Anita doesn’t say an out loud yes. *head desk* Sometimes when you write a book, things are so crystal clear in your head that you think they are on the paper; you actually begin to read them into the words, but that doesn’t mean they’re there. The problem is copyeditors and editors in New York can’t see what’s in my head, only what’s on the page, and if what I “see” in my head never got onto a version of the page, then they can’t help me remember it.
I went so far as to add a “yes” between the hardback and one of the paperback versions of Narcissus in Chains, but honestly I can’t remember which print run the change was in, and when the next print run came out the publisher had reverted to the master print file, and the “yes” was missing once more. *head wall* If I could do this scene again I would rewrite some of Anita’s interior dialogue to make it more acceptable to the women who saw/feel the scene as rape. All I can say is that I did not write the scene with that in mind, but having listened to enough polite fans explain their point of view over the years, I can see their point. My apologies to those that were genuinely upset by the scene as written, and I have endeavored not to fall into ambiguity in any other sex scene with anyone since then.

Question: Is Micah going to become king of the wereanimals in America, the way that Jean-Claude is king of the vampires?

Answer: I don’t know.
Secrets to Share: Micah is one of those characters that changed completely between character building notes and stepping on stage. The moment he interacted with Anita for “real” on paper he was someone new, someone I hadn’t planned. He was honorable, determined, as ruthlessly practical as Anita, and in many ways the near perfect helpmate that Anita had been needing. I had no idea he was a leopard king, a Nimir-raj, or that Anita would be his leopard queen, Nimir-ra. I had to come up with vocabulary for that, and so much more, after Micah announced who and what he was in the shapeshifter community. Since I didn’t know any of this when he first stepped into fictional reality I had no idea that he and Anita would create The Coalition for Better Understanding Between Lycanthrope and Human Communities, or that Micah would be called all over the country when there was a conflict between lycanthrope groups, or between humans and the shapeshifter community. Here’s a freebie insight, in Affliction I thought it was clear that Micah only interferes with out of state animal groups when those groups call the Coalition in to solve a dispute, or violence has already broken out, but not gotten to the attention of human authorities, but apparently not. Again, with Micah, people thought he was just traveling the country forcing groups to join our larger group – no. The Coalition goes only where, and if, called, but once you call in help if we pay in blood and pain from our people to solve your problem, then you and yours may end up joining the Coalition whether you like it or not.
Sneak Peek from Dead Ice:
Micah came through the door like he came through every door, as if the room were his room, or at the very least he was thinking of purchasing it. It was a surety and security in himself that he’d had since I’d met him.

Dead Ice: Nicky

We’re only two weeks away from Dead Ice’s publication. This blog will be the first one that doesn’t have a graphic novel image to go with it, because Nicky is one of several major characters that didn’t appear in the early books which were later turned into graphic novels. I’m trying to get images to go with Nicky and the rest, but for now his traditional lion form stands in for the other two forms.

Question: Did you know that Nicky was going to be a major character when you created him?

Answer: No.

Secrets to Share: I didn’t expect to ever see him again because I thought Anita was going to have to kill him. He was just another sociopathic bad guy when he walked on stage from my imagination. I had no idea we were keeping him around until the very last minute and even then I had no idea that he would be in almost every book from that point on. Even keeping him, I didn’t know Nicky would go from bit player to supporting character to main character.

Question: Why did you do the rough bondage scene with Nicky and Anita in Affliction?

Answer: Because they are lovers, and both of them enjoy rough sex and bondage with each other.

Secret to Share: Nicky was fast becoming a fan favorite until I wrote that particular scene in Affliction. After the scene, a lot of the women fans disliked or even seemed to hate him. I was totally surprised by the reaction. Anita and Nicky had had rough sex before on stage, but some fans thought this scene was too much. Why? We’d had Anita tied up during sex before, and I believe that Nathaniel was even part of that scene, too, just as he was with Anita and Nicky in Affliction. So why the negative reaction? And none of the fans are angry with Nathaniel, just with Nicky, again why? The only difference I can see is that it’s a more serious breath play scene, which Nicky enjoys giving, and it was his suggestion to add that to the scene. I was very careful and very clear to have Anita and Nicky discuss what she was comfortable with beforehand. Nathaniel was there as an extra safety monitor and not just as an extra lover. I talked about safety issues, because breath play of any kind is edge play, which means it can be more dangerous. I did my due diligence on paper and Nicky and Nathaniel both watched over Anita to make sure she was all right. I talked about it, rather than just glossing over the possible problems. All three of them care for each other, and they all enjoyed the scene and the sex, so why did some people freak about it and start hating on Nicky? I don’t know, I honestly don’t, but some people who were fans of his are now literally haters of his, so apparently the scene hit issues for people.

Question: When will see Nicky interact with more of the local werelions?

Answer: In Dead Ice.

Secrets to Share: My research into real lions helped me shape Nicky taking over the local pride and how he runs it in Dead Ice. Contrary to the old idea of male lions as the “King of the Beasts” presiding over their territory and their harem of lionesses all by themselves, it’s rarely just one king. One lone male lion would be hard put to defend against all commers, most prides are run by a coalition of male lions. More detailed DNA testing has disproved another well loved theory in that the coalitions were genetically related, brothers, or at least cousins, but DNA proved that some weren’t related at all. Male lions are kicked out of the home territories as they come into sexual maturity, so they won’t compete with their father, or mate with their mother, or siblings. Theories are that the young male lions kicked out of their home territory meet up in their wanderings and find that hunting in groups helps them stay fed. They also fight as a group and that is a big plus among lions. In fact, prevailing theory is that the reason lions are social and live in groups is primarily to protect themselves from other lions. Also, if your lionesses like the lions in charge they will join the fight against intruding males. There have even been cases of lionesses banding together and fighting off males, so that they are a power unto themselves. It’s not common because the males are bigger, heavier, and just have more muscle to throw around, but the lionesses do most of the hunting. Males only usually come into their own on hunts when really big game is the main food source for the pride, like water buffalo, giraffe, and even elephants, on occasion. Real animals, and real science, helped me understand that Nicky was the muscle, but as a sociopath he emotionally couldn’t run a pride, so another male lion that was physically less able, but very good socially, joined him as part of his leadership coalition. By end of book we’ll add another, so he’s Rex, but it’s a three-for-one, not related to each other, just like a lot of real lion coalitions.

Sneak Peek from Dead Ice:

Nicky asked, “Do you mean you have pictures in your head of what you want to do to us?”

”Yes.”

”Are they your thoughts, or is someone putting them in your head?”

”I do not know, but even speaking with you now, it’s as if my pork dinner were talking back. I’d think I was mad, but I still want to eat it.”

”Eat me, you mean?” Nicky said.

”Yes, very much.” The southern drawl was thicker with every word, as if by the time he rushed us, or we shot him, he’d sound like Scarlett O’Hara.

”Interesting, Nicky, but save it,” I said.

”There won’t be a later for asking him questions.”

He was right, of course, but only a sociopath could have stood there this close, watching the process, and asked the questions that might help us understand what was happening. It was good that we had Nicky with us, because I was so spooked my mouth was dry.