I’ve started several blogs about recent events in our country and the question of gun control vs gun rights, and then I found this wonderful blog by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. I think he says many of the things I’ve been struggling to express. I hope he doesn’t mind that I put up a link to his blog while I continue to fight with my own words on the subject.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/146307088451/why-gun-control-cant-be-solved-in-the-usa
Okay, the date for Crimson Death has changed again to October 11, 2016. I’m 99.999% sure that is the final on sale date. My editor at Penguin Random House told me days ago that they were changing the date so I could announce to all of you before they put it up on line. Media Minion Jess and I had a great idea to do a sort of Alton Brown explanation with a white board and props, but I’ve been trying to actually finish writing Crimson Death. So the cool announcement didn’t get made on our end. Jonathon says that we’ll make it on Monday if we want to try to do the cool props and such. If I’m still writing furiously on Monday then maybe that won’t happen until after this book is complete and the fun video will be more a “how this part of publishing” works. Until I was a bestseller and hitting #1 on a semi-regular basis I had no idea that a publisher plans placement of a “big book” like a general plans a battle. What other big books are coming out at the same time? What other books that are similar are coming out and when? The Publisher’s reps talk to the bookstores about physical placement in the stores. If the author is doing a tour, especially a big one, what other authors are on tour and what stores are they doing? We routinely follow each other around the country on tour just like musicians follow each other, and for many of the same reasons. That’s just a few of the considerations that go into picking a release date for what the publisher calls a “big book,” which seems to mean a book that they think will sell lots of copies, have a chance to hit #1 on The List, and has a wide audience appeal.
Also, this blog is going up on May 1st which is May Day, or Beltane. Think of it as Wiccan Valentine’s Day except without a saint having to give up his life to name the holiday. So Merry Beltane, everyone! Sadly, Hallmark does not have a card for this holiday. Wiccans’, and most pagan faiths, have eight major holidays a year – eight! Think of all the cards we’d send and merchandise we’d buy if corporate America embraced us as viable consumers. But I think that is a blog for another day. May the day be full of joy for you and everyone that you love in your life! That includes yourself, because love begins in your own heart and then spreads outward.
I’ve been so busy trying to finish writing, Crimson Death the 25th Anita Blake novel that I forgot that Dead Ice the 24th Anita Blake novel is out in paperback today! No, wait yesterday, because that was April 26th. I have a serious case of, “writing this book is eating my brain.” There’s a surprise in the back of the paperback, not the usual preview from my next novel, but something different. It’s entitled, “Wounded’, and it’s an outtake scene, or a short story, or a novelette, or a long epilogue for Dead Ice. I’m honestly not sure which to call it, but it is a series of events that we talk about briefly in the denouement of Dead Ice but they all happen off stage. A lot of you told me you missed seeing Jean-Claude dancing at the wedding and wanted to see more about Manny Rodriquez and his family. Well, so did I, and I thought why not? Why can’t I write them out and share them with all of you? Why can’t we see all of it on stage in living color? So I started writing out this brief extra scene and it grew until it was more than a scene, more than a story, and closer to a short novel. At one point I thought it might be as long as my novels Jason and Micah, but it didn’t quite make that word count, thank goodness, so what to do with it? Someone, I can’t actually remember now if it was my agent, my editor, or me, suggested what if we put it in the back of the paperback. Great idea! So for those of you who have read Dead Ice and wanted some more it’s in the paperback now! For those who prefer paperback to hardback here’s your chance and with extra bonus content! But please do not read the extra until you’ve finished reading Dead Ice, because the bonus novelette is full of spoilers. You’ll find out who lives, who dies, who the villain is and how the mystery is solved. No, really, it’s full of spoilers! You have been warned, so if you read the new content before you’ve read Dead Ice the plot will be spoiled for you!!!! So enjoy Dead Ice out now in paperback and I hope the story, “Wounded”, helps satisfy your desire for more from Anita Blake and her world.
Crimson Death, the new Anita Blake novel, will be published on September 13, 2016. For those of you who follow my blog, you know I’m still writing the book, what you don’t know is that I finished it once already. I typed, The End, one glorious morning as I watched the sun rise; but once the euphoria of the writing high faded and I got some sleep, I knew something was wrong. I’d known something was wrong for weeks, maybe months, but definitely weeks. I was too close to finishing the book, so I ignored my muse and my characters arguing with me. One character in particular wasn’t happy. Damian, who started life as a Viking until one dark night he and his brothers in arms tried to raid the wrong castle. She-Who-Made-Him, a master vampire that traumatized him so badly he’s afraid to speak her name, held him as a virtual slave for centuries. She let him go, and he still doesn’t know why, but he was allowed to go to America where he became a manager at one of the hottest dance clubs in the country, Danse Macabre. In fact, he first appears in the book that introduces the club. The Killing Dance is the sixth book in the series, and this is Damian’s introduction:
“I TURNED to find another new vampire. He was tall and slender with skin the color of clean white sheets, but sheets didn’t have muscle moving underneath, sheets didn’t glide down the steps and pad godlike across a room. His hair fell past his shoulders, a red so pure it was nearly the color of blood. The color screamed against his paleness.”
Originally, I thought Crimson Death would be a short novel like my books, Micah and Jason, called Damian, but very quickly I realized it was going to be a big book. I believe my largest word count was 300,000 words. I’m one of those writers that writes long and then cuts, but this was excessive, even for me. It was another clue that my muse and I were debating with each other. The original plot had Damian kidnapped and Anita coming to his rescue. It would take me typing to the end, or what I thought was the end, to be willing to listen to my muse, and to Damian. He finally got through to me and not literally said, but basically told me, “I’ve been in the series since book six and now I’m finally getting my own story in book twenty-five and I’m just the damsel in distress. All those newer characters that have come on stage and been heroes, or major love interests, or something more than just the victim du jour, and now I’m just as unhappy, just as powerless, just as afraid as I began. Nineteen books and I haven’t grown at all.” He was right, and it was unusual for me, because I’m all about the character growth and letting my fictional friends have interesting lives, except for him. Damian had been almost static, I don’t know why, but he finally stepped up and threw the gauntlet down.
“You can do better than this,” he told me, and he was right. I turned my plot on its ear and now Damian is going back to Ireland to help solve a mystery. He’s going back to face his greatest fears to save lives as a consultant with the Irish authorities about their sudden vampire problem. Sudden, because Ireland isn’t supposed to have any vampires. It’s one of the few countries on the planet that has no folklore about them. The only dead that walk in Irish myths are ghosts and the shades of heroes. But Damian knows differently, he knows that there is a vampire so powerful and so frightening that to even speak her name is to risk her power seeking you out, even across an ocean. She-Who-Made-Him says the vampires plaguing Dublin are not her doing, and that she’s grown weaker since Damian left her side. U. S. Marshal Ted Forrester, AKA Edward, is already there acting as a consultant. He wants fellow marshal Anita Blake to come help hunt the undead and to bring the only vampire that might know the truth about what’s happening. Anita thought Damian was going home, but Ireland was never home, it was the place where he died.
I finished the book and I didn’t. I mean, I finally typed The End. The villains of the piece are dead, the victims avenged as far as possible, short of resurrection and giving them back the lives that were stolen from them. Even my world where magic works far more overtly than it does in ours does not stretch that far. Justice has been served, or at least the public at large is safe from the killers. The mystery is solved. There are a few loose ends that I forgot to tidy up, but there always are in a book this large. Tidying up is what second drafts are for, and therein lies the problem.
Parts of Crimson Death are done, so very done. I got stuck a couple of times in this book, forgetting my own rules of writing and started rewriting before I had a first draft. Some writers can do that, I cannot. If I start rewriting before I have a finished draft perfectionism sets in and I stall. My creative ship gets trapped in the doldrums of perfectionism which leads to doubt, which leads to me second-guessing myself and that is death to a first draft of a novel, at least for me. My first instinct is usually right, after writing over forty books I know this, but still there is that temptation to get caught in making things – perfect.
When I finally got a room of my own as an office, I put a sign above my desk that read, “Perfectionism is an Unattainable Goal.” But I purposefully spelled perfectionism wrong. I believe I spelled it, “Perfactinisom”, or something like that so that everyday as I sat down to write I would be forced to look at the word that represented all my desire and frustration spelled so terribly imperfectly. It drove me mad to have to stare at that sign spelled so badly. But it forced me to stare one of my worst issues in the face everyday, and to begin to let it go. It was hard to get caught up in that perfectionistic cycle when I was staring at that damn sign every day, so it did its job. When I moved from that house after ten years I never had to put the same sign above my desk again, because the lesson had sunk in deep and hard. Though after Crimson Death I may have to revisit the lesson, because I have never fallen into the perfectionism trap so often in a book since those early days.
I’m not sure why that kept catching me again after all this time, but I know one of the other reasons that Crimson Death was such a hard write – research. Now, I’m a stickler for research, so much so that I’ve been told by editors and publishers in New York that I do more research for my fiction than most writers do for their nonfiction. Now, first of all that thought sort of frightened me, because I can’t image how crazy pants I’d go on research if I was doing a nonfiction book, since I go to such lengths for my fiction. I write mysteries but there’s always some supernatural element in my stories, so I write about vampires, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, and shapeshifters of all kinds. Some people think that because I write fantasy, horror, and science fiction that I can do less research, because magic, hand-wavyum, it’s fantasy after all so just making things up is all right, right? No, absolutely not, at least to me. One of my rules is that the more fantastical your storyline, the more solid your real world facts have to be because you have to help the reader believe in your monsters by making sure the real facts are right. The more unreal your world, or plot, the more solid your real world has to be, because if the reader catches you wrong on a fact that they know, then they won’t believe in your zombies or vampires. This is especially true if they are an expert on guns, police work, the military, voodoo as a religion, which are just some of the topics that I’ve used in my books. I’ve had high praise from gun experts and police at the accuracy of my research, which makes it all worth it. Because trust me, someone that will read your book is an expert in any real world fact that you use. If you get it wrong, they will let you know.
The problem with Crimson Death was that a majority of the book is set in Ireland which I’d never visited. So first we went to Ireland this summer, which was amazing and cool and totally not what I expected. In fact, Ireland and its gun laws, its difference in attitude between American police and Irish police, totally threw my plot for Crimson Death into the wind.
I never really recovered from the comparison of reality to my fictional world. Or rather, I didn’t figure out how to balance the two until late in the writing of the book. I’ve never had a book jell so late in the process before, and jell in such a way that I had to add so many new scenes. It’s not like me at all as a writer, so what happened? I messed with my process, my writing process. One of your jobs as an artist is to figure out how you work best, what your muse needs to feel comfortable and happy to play with you. I think I broke nearly every part of my writing process on this book, because I kept saying, that’s silly, I know how to write a book, I don’t need to do that anymore. Yeah, maybe needing an entire wall of my office so I can storyboard the book with sticky notes is silly, but it works for me and has worked for me for over twenty years, but for this book I took down my sticky notes and tried to do it without them. Never again, because it’s part of my process. It helps me think, helps me organize and plot. It works for me, and if it works for me as a writer I need to honor that and use it.
I know I’m a morning writer, but I kept not getting to my desk first thing. I know that when I first get up and head for my desk that it is deadly for me to talk to anyone about anything but the book. I can’t text, call, check email, nothing until I have at least a start on the day’s writing. But I tried to have breakfast before I wrote for the day. It’s healthier, right? Maybe, but it’s killing my muse and me. I don’t know a solution between healthy eating and my art, but I do know that if I take time to eat breakfast with my lovely family that my page count for the day goes down or doesn’t happen at all.
I actually learned something new about my process on the last book I wrote, Dead Ice, and had it reconfirmed with Crimson Death. Where I am writing when the book takes off, and for me that means hitting multiple days when I do twenty pages at a sitting in two to five hours, then I need to stay there until the book is done. Furthermore whatever tea I am drinking, stock up because the taste of it will help me stay in the book and write faster. If there was a scented candle burning early on then I need to keep burning that kind of candle until I’m done. I am a very sensual writer, so taste, touch, temperature, everything about my surroundings gets melded into the writing of a novel. It may not be on the page people read, but it’s in my head and in my muse. Whatever divine spark helps me write, once I hit a certain point in a a book I need to take note of everything I’m doing and just keep doing it. I’ll even eat the same thing over and over towards the end of a book especially. Everything feeds into me staying in the world, the voice, the flow of that book.
Remember when I said that Crimson Death was set in Ireland? I did research there, but I also started writing the book. In Dublin I hit multiple days of fifteen to twenty pages, but we were scheduled to go over to England and then home. I hadn’t budgeted time to sit for months in Ireland. I hadn’t planned on writing the book there, or dreamed that it would kick into high gear in the middle of the research, but it did. I know I am a sensual writer and very entwined with my environment, so it was logical that a book that would be largely set in Ireland would want to be written there, right? Well, yes, in retrospect it’s logical for the type of writer I am, but it caught me completely off guard when it happened. I had my first English convention to attend, and my first signing in England, and I was researching another book which would be set in that country. I was trying to research two different books at the same time, and that would have been fine if I hadn’t started writing the first one while I was still researching both of them. It was wrenching to stop writing on Crimson Death so I could do all the planned events in England. I had a great time doing them, but I never wrote in England on the book as well as I had in Dublin. I believe that if I could have stayed there and just kept writing that the book would have been finished in record time, or at least long before the deadline.
I’ve never tried to do this much research on a book that I was writing at the same time. If I could do it over again I would do the research, let myself think on it and make notes for a year, and I’d be publishing a different book this summer, one that was set in America in places I know very well and have written about before, but that was not what I’d planned or told my publisher. This was going to be the Damian book, the Irish book, and by the time I realized I’d bitten off more research than I knew how to digest in the time I had allowed to write the book, it was far too late to back out. I was committed, so I did the best I could, but I have more research than any one book can hold. I’m already making notes about another novel of some kind set in Ireland because I’ve learned so much and am still mulling over some of what I learned.
If I go to another country I can do research, but I can’t start writing the meat of the book unless I have planned my life so I can stay in that country until the book is complete. If I go to that country with a plot already in my head and the research doesn’t match it, then write a different book. One of the things that slowed me down was that I tried to do as much of the original plot as possible with the new research mingled in, which didn’t work at first. I was nearly done with the book before I figured out the mix of fiction to fact that worked for the plot, the characters, me, and my muse. Oddly, I wrote very well in Dublin, but I’ve never written well in London, or New York. I write very well by the ocean, or a large lake, or with a stream or river running by my office. My muse likes water. She also likes mountains, though I have yet to be in the mountains long enough to write an entire book. I hope to try someday. My muse also loves a view of trees, so forest works, too. I think an older style orchard would work just as well, but again I’ve never had a chance to write looking out at an orchard, so maybe wilder trees work better for her.
I know I write better with an office animal. I wrote my first novel with my cockatiel, Baby Bird, on my shoulder, and subsequent books with our pug, Pugsley. I have had at least one pug with me for over twenty years. We are between pugs having lost our last pug, Sasquatch, at age fourteen, but we have two Japanese chins and two mixed breed dogs that are much bigger than the chins. Three of the dogs are sleeping around my office as I type this and I write better with animals around me. This is the first book I’ve written without Sasquatch and I missed him terribly. I think it was actually one of the reasons Crimson Death wrote so slowly. I’d have to check, but I’m wondering if some of my past books that wrote slower than normal followed the death of a long time pet that came to work with me everyday.
I didn’t break my writing process apart on purpose, but I’m always a big believer in trying new things. Sometimes it works amazingly well and I can scale to new heights, but sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes trying the new thing makes me crash and burn, never pleasant, but I learn from the crash as much or more than I learn when I soar. For instance, I never want to write another book on a MAC computer, this was my first time attempting it, and I want my PC back! Though I love my iPad and wrote most of Dead Ice on it. But let me add that I haven’t enjoyed working on my iPad as much since they forced me to upgrade and I couldn’t find a protective cover for it that allowed me to orient it vertically and not horizontally while plugged in and charging. I hate working on the screen in the horizontal position and mourn my vertical screen, but the protective cover I got for it is not easy on and off, and the more often I skin my iPad the more chances I have to break it. Think I’m being overly cautious? I killed four iPhones before I got a LifeProof case for it. Now the cases break before my phone, which is fabulous! I’d get a LifeProof case for my iPad, but it doesn’t prop up for work easily enough for me. This is also the first book I’ve written without my big desk against the one wall. I’d stopped using it, and learned last year in the tropics that a very small desk did me just fine, but that was with a view of the ocean and a very different work space, here in St. Louis maybe I need that bigger desk? But now I have more shelves for research books in my office, which I needed. I’m beginning to wonder if we changed too much of my office around while I was trying to write this book. I like how open the room is now, but now I know to leave my physical environment absolutely static until a book is finished.
So, I’ve learned a lot of what not to do while I write a book. Some of it I already knew, but a type of arrogance, or boredom sets in if you do any job too long, and you begin to think I don’t need all these bells and whistles. I know my craft. I got this! I do, but writing is a mysterious job and once you find a process that works for you and your muse, you probably shouldn’t screw with it. I’ve learned it the hard way more than once, and now I’ve learned it again. I still have to rewrite/edit Crimson Death and make my deadline which is so close I can feel it’s hot breath on the back of my neck. I have made my job exponentially harder by trying to change so much of how my writing process works. I have not recovered from it, but the book is somehow limping towards the finish. Whether you call your muse a divine spark, inspiration, talent, genius, or you think that certain lover is what you need at your side – honor it. If you write better in a room with blue walls, paint your office blue. If a water view helps you create, find a place with that view. If you need a dark room with no windows because isolation feeds your muse, then find that dark corner and write. If you’re a morning writer get up and get going. If you write best late at night then stay up and do that. Whatever time works best for your muse figure it out and guard that time like it’s the secret formula to the secret sauce, because for you as a writer it absolutely is the secret to your productivity. Whatever feeds your muse and helps the words flow, own it, remember it, and once you get the process down stop fucking with it.
I’ve been having fits with the current book I’m writing. I’m over 500 pages in, over 200,000 words, and usually by this point in a book I’m writing as fast as I can, just to keep up with myself, but not this time. I’ll get a productive day, and then the next day it’s like all my momentum is gone. It’s like throwing a punch at the heavy bag without rotating your hips. You’re still going through the motions, but you’re leaving most of your energy somewhere else. Today I figured out what was wrong, someone is going to die.
I’m a writer of mysteries, police thrillers, with relationship growth and a huge dose of the supernatural thrown in, so there are usually dead bodies and a villain to stop. I like my fiction neater than real life, so the good guys usually triumph and the bad guys get punished, sometimes they get punished to death, which works for me in fiction. Like I said, it’s neater and more black and white than real life, at least in some areas. I try to make my vampires, zombies, and ghouls as realistic as possible, so there are also huge gray areas where my characters struggle with moral dilemmas and balancing work and relationships. Crime busting can be very hard on couples, or threesomes, or fourples, or any family arrangement.
I love my world and my characters, so why is this book dragging its heels? Because I have a character on stage that is in the hospital. I know what’s wrong with him, and I’d planned on saving him, but . . . I realize now that it may not work. He had another close call a couple of books back, though anyone reading the book wouldn’t have realized it because the moment in the climatic fight scene where he might have died didn’t make it into the final draft. When push came to shove, I couldn’t do it.
I’ve had this problem before where I’d planned on killing off a character, but we realize that I, and my main characters, would miss him. The most famous example of this to me and my fans is that I planned to kill Jean-Claude off at the end of the third book in the Anita Blake series. That’s right, the sexiest vampire on the planet, and now king of them in the United States in my world, though I didn’t see that one coming either, was supposed to die at the end of The Circus of the Damned. But when the moment came, I couldn’t do it. Anita and I would have missed him. I wanted him dead because he was taking over my series and stirring it in directions I hadn’t planned on, but I let him live. I was right on him taking my series to places I hadn’t planned on, or wanted to go. He was a very strong character with very definite Ideas about what should happen, and when, and with whom. It would be a very different series if Jean-Claude had died so early, and maybe I wouldn’t be writing the twenty-fifth book featuring him and Anita. Who knows what would have changed if I’d followed my original plan; so I’ve had this happen before, but never twice to the same character.
I knew he was slated to die at the end of a novel, and I flinched. He’s a good guy, we like him, what harm is it that he’s still alive? Well, he’s changing the game on me, not as profoundly as Jean-Claude did, but he is impacting my plans for the other characters and the world in general. If I leave this character alive, will it have as profound an effect on my series as Jean-Claude’s survival did? If so . . .do I want that? Or do I want to stay with my own over-arching plot line for the series? How much freedom do I give my characters? How much do I play god? He’s destined to die, should he get a reprieve?
I find myself regretting every time I kill a character off. I miss them. I miss writing them. I miss what the rest of their story might have been. It’s not even just major characters that I miss, even the minor-major ones, make me think, “If only . . .” I hate regrets, and unlike real life I have so many chances to undo it. I could write the death scene and then get up tomorrow and rewrite it so that he makes it. It’s one of my favorite things about writing fiction, I can always fix the mistakes tomorrow. In real life there aren’t take-backs, or do-overs, at least not for death. That’s about as final as we get in real life.
I’m going to break for lunch, but when I come back I have to decide. Does this character live, or die? Do we lose him forever? Or do we save him a second time? It’s bugging me a lot that this is the second time he’s come up on the chopping block. It must mean something to my subconscious that this same character keeps almost dying. Does it mean I’m uncomfortable with him? I was with Jean-Claude back in the day. Does it mean I don’t know what to do with him on paper? That he’s getting in the way of other characters that are staying? Maybe, maybe not? I don’t know, I really don’t. All I know for certain is that when I get back from a late lunch it’ll be go-time, and he will either live, or die.
I have been a birder since high school, long before I took my first ornithology class in college for my biology degree. Yes, I mean bird watching. I’m like a ferret on crack for anything winged and flying near me. Yes, this is the same person that writes Urban Fantasy featuring Anita Blake and Meredith (Merry) Gentry. My world is not all zombies, vampires, and wereanimals, thank you, or even fairy princesses that happen to be private detectives. It’s not even just violence and sex, or is that sex and violence, sometimes I forget which order they go in. Hmm . . .
I hear crows calling, and I know that call. There’s a hawk somewhere nearby. Binoculars are sitting right here on my desk, because, yeah. I few seconds of looking near the crows and there it is. A big red-tailed hawk, beautiful bird with a paler than normal golden red tail, some can brick red almost brown, and it’s that rufous tail that gives them their name. It’s probably a female from the size alone, males are smaller. Bluejays and other tinier birds have joined the crows in harassing the hawk. They’re all doing the bird equivalent of, “Get out of our neighborhood, you trouble maker!” Though I suppose it’s more like, “Get out of our neighborhood, you killer!” Red-tails don’t normally take small birds, but they will kill and eat most anything they can catch, if they’re hungry enough. The crows and other birds aren’t taking any chances. The bluejays are even dive bombing the hawk, a few striking it on its shoulders and back, then dashing away. Brave birds, and puzzled hawk as it tries to keep its footing on branches too small for its large taloned feet. When it settles into stillness again if I look away for a moment it’s hard to find it again in the autumn leaves and dead tree branches. It’s remarkably camouflaged for a bird about the size of a toddler.
Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, I’m a birder. *laughs* There is a tradition among birders that the first bird you see on the first day of the new year will be your theme for the year. Some serious birders travel to exotic locations to stack the deck in favor of something exotic for that first bird. I was someplace exotic last year, but I honestly don’t remember my first bird. It maybe the first time in years that I didn’t make a note of it, so getting back to tradition I will be looking for my first bird of the year when I get up tomorrow.
I’ve had years where it was starlings which are all about group communication, and squabbling if you watch them for very long. The hawk has just flown higher on the tree and is sitting so pretty. Maybe my first bird will be the red-tailed hawk and I will have a predatory year where I have to remember to aim at what I want and commit fully to getting it. If a hawk hesitates, or isn’t sure it wants that rabbi, it will miss it’s mark and go hungry. If it misses too many opportunities it will starve. Predators are all about committing fully to your goals. For two, or three years running it wasn’t a bird, because every New Year’s morning there were squirrels playing in the yard, but not a single bird moved until after I’d seen squirrels. They were always in groups of at least three and they were chasing each other, and playing. I finally figured out the message, I was supposed to balance work and play better. This was back when I was doing two big books a year, and basically was a workaholic with very little time for other things. And before someone asks, no the dogs, cat, or domestic animals you keep do not count as your first “bird” of the year. Go outside, see the real world, and find out what it has to teach you.
Christmas used to be my favorite holiday of the year, but that was awhile ago. I realized this year that I hate Christmas, the whole Christmas season, but unlike Dr. Seuss’ Grinch I don’t want to take the holiday away from everyone else, I just want free of it myself.
It’s Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year and the reason for all the celebrations near that astrological happening is that our ancestors were afraid that the sun might not return. They were an agricultural people that understood that without the heat of the sun, they were pretty much screwed, so they threw a party to invite the sun back, to wish him back to life and strength so that we could all live another year. It was the rebirth of the sun long before Christianity made it the birth of the son of God. I get throwing a great, big party to keep our spirits up. It’s like whistling in the dark when you hear that scary noise. We celebrate Winter Solstice because in the darkest, coldest part of the year we need to light a few candles against the dark, eat good food, drink strong spirits, visit with friends and family, play games, tell stories, and do all the things that make us feel positive and less afraid of the darkness. If that’s what the holiday was actually about, I could get behind that, even enjoy it, but that’s not what Solstice, Christmas, Yule, Hanukah – pick your holiday – has become.
The Winter Holiday season has become a billion dollar industry. It has become the time when a lot of businesses make the majority of their profit for the year and the only way they can do that is by us buying things from them. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, I am a great fan of capitalism, being a capitalist myself, but the pressure to buy gifts, the perfect gift, and find that perfect gift year after year is a lot of pressure. The message that somehow if you don’t spend enough on your family, especially the children, that you’re bad parents. I love Santa Claus, but for those parents that can’t afford the big gifts, it is an ideal that leaves a lot of small children across the country disappointed on Christmas morning.
And let me just say now, I feel totally cheated by years of Hallmark and Folger’s Coffee commercials, because life is almost never like that, or at least my life wasn’t. These commercials, and others like them, are the romance novels of family life; they set unrealistic expectations that leave most of us feeling like there must be something wrong with us because we aren’t that warm, that loving, that perfect.
Real life is never perfect. It’s not supposed to be. So let me strike a blow for all of us that are struggling this Christmas morning with reality versus what we wanted the day to be. It’s okay that your dinner wasn’t perfect. It’s perfectly human to burn at least one dish, or have that turkey a little dry, or whatever went wrong with the big meal. Take a deep breath, let it out slow, and tell anyone that complains that next year they get to cook the dinner.
Did you not find the perfect present for everyone on your list? Me either. It’s okay, your friends and family love you anyway, and anyone who doesn’t love you because their gift didn’t meet their standards, why do you care? If they only love you for what you buy them, I’m not sure that’s love. Love really doesn’t have a price tag. Do the best you can, and then enjoy the day with your family. It’s about the people, not the things, try to remember that.
Now, if part of the problem is the family, that’s harder. If your family is not a positive in your life, then you do not have to spend the holidays with them. There, I’ve said it, if your family is toxic to you and spends most of the time criticizing and cutting you down, then you don’t have to stay and keep listening to it. If your family is so awful to you, or each other, that the idea of spending it alone sounds better, then do that. There really are those of us who have had points in our lives where spending the holidays alone was less stressful, or even less frightening, than spending it with our birth families. If you are in that place in your life, honor it. It is a privilege for your family to see you, not a right. Privileges have to be earned by good, loving behavior. Please remember, that if you only visit them when they are loving and good to be around, but they’ve never, ever been that, you may never see your family again. Are you okay with this? If so, then rock on, and enjoy your solo and less stress-filled holiday. If you are not okay with it, then ignore all this advice, good luck, and God speed.
This is supposed to be a holy day, regardless of what exactly that holiness means to you, it is still supposed to be a celebration of joy, light, love, and hope. Instead its become an emotional meat grinder for a lot of us. I want to like this holiday again. I want to feel hopeful that life can be like those tear-jerkingly happy commercials for more than a moment at a time. I want to feel a connection to community, family, and faith that’s in all the TV specials, but that seems scarce in real life. I want to really believe this is the most wonderful time of the year instead of the most stressful. I’m not sure how to get back to the wonderful and out of the stressful, but I am going to try. Here’s to next year, hoping it will be better, happier, healthier, less dramatic, less traumatic, safer, gentler, more happy excited than adrenalin pumping excited, productive, loving, hopeful, helpful, and just all together better. Blessed Solstice! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukah! Merry Yule! Damn it!
The rows of white stones march out and out across the neatly clipped grass, each stone marks a grave, each grave marks a soldier, or family member, who has passed. I’ve stood at Arlington National Cemetery and wept at the endless rows of headstones, but I didn’t know that there was another cemetery much closer to home where the uniform white stones march out and out. Jefferson Barracks Cemetery was established in about 1827 and made a National Cemetery in 1866, when the National Cemetery Administration was established. It’s just down the road here in St. Louis.
I’ve seen it twice this year, the first at the funeral of my sister’s father of record, and the second on the day when Wreaths Across America invites people to join them at cemeteries like Arlington and Jefferson Barracks to honor those who have paid the ultimate price for our country. Wreaths Across America is a charity that receives no money from the government, it’s all donations from people like you and me. Jonathon, Genevieve, Spike, and myself went expecting we’d be there for hours helping lay wreaths, but unfortunately there were so few wreaths that everyone in attendance was asked to only take one, or two, so that everyone there could lay at least one wreath on a grave.
A news story on CNN about Arlington National Cemetery not having enough wreaths to cover all the graves this year was what first brought Wreaths Across America to our attention. We even donated to the cause, as did many others, and it was enough so that Arlington was able to put a wreath on every grave this year. They said in the interview that most cemeteries were embraced by their local town, because so many local military were buried there, but Arlington was made up of soldiers that weren’t local, so the surrounding area didn’t feel connected enough to contribute. The interview made us think that here in St. Louis there would be enough wreaths to go around, but there was not.
In fact, there were only about 1,100 wreathes to go on the 180,000 graves. It was upsetting to see all the bare white tombstones, and the few evergreen wreaths. I guess a few was better than none, but it still seemed sad, and left all of us feeling like we need to do better next year. I’ll say it here and now, that we plan to contribute more next year and would like to have a goal of honoring many more of our fallen soldiers next year by helping our local Wreaths Across America.
The other interesting thing about the ceremony was that it was full of speeches where people talked about this country with unabashed patriotism and pride. There was no apologizing, or over explaining, or any of the language that has crept into so many politicians and citizen’s speeches lately. It harkened back to when I was a child. I was taught to be proud to be American and that it was the best country in the world to call home. You know what, I still believe that. I’ve visited several other countries and they are all wonderful in their own right, but they aren’t home. I don’t believe our country is perfect, but then the same is true of every other country. I sat there and thought, here is an entire group of people of diverse race, religion, economics, and age, but we were all there to honor the ideal that we are still the home of the brave, and the land of the free, and that last part, freedom, came with a price that the men and women lying dead around us had paid. I will not apologize for honoring the dead of my country and it was wonderfully freeing to be in such a large group of people that felt the same way.
Let me say, that if you disagree with me, that’s okay, because something else I was taught as a child was this, America is about being free to believe, to worship, to vote, to have an opinion that is your own. I may not agree with you, or you with me, but I will fight for your right to have your own opinion and beliefs, as you are supposed to fight for my right. We are supposed to fight for each other, not against each other. We can disagree vehemently, and it’s okay if our opinions anger each other, but we are still supposed to honor each other’s right to those opinions. That is what it means to be free in America. We are free to believe, to speak, to worship, to study, to work, to create as we will, and the government will not stop us, or arrest us for it. I don’t think most Americans realize how rare that is in the world.
Spike walked out among the white lines of graves in his uniform. He had been thanked for his service by several people, and thanked others in return. He still doesn’t like being too visible in the blog, but as a combat vet himself, he felt it was important to show his respect. We missed the opportunity for donating enough to Wreaths Across America to cover the graves at Jefferson Barracks, but there is always next year. The dead are patient and they’ll wait, but for the living veterans and their families it’s harder to wait. The dead have all the shelter they will ever need, they do not know hunger or thirst, sorrow or terror, the cold does not move them, illness and injury are things of the past for the dead, but there are living veterans and their families that need shelter, food, medical care, and just to know that their sacrifices aren’t in vain. Here are just a few charities that try to help the men and women who served in our armed forces, and their famili
Hope for the Warriors
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
USO
https://www.uso.org/
I stepped into my office today with dawn like a knife slash in the east, the light seeped through like pale orange and yellow blood. The crescent moon hung shining silver in the black branches of the tallest tree, as if night and day hung poised, so that it was both at the same time. It was both beautiful and terrible, somehow. I’ve thought that the last few mornings that I’ve seen my office this early. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why I write this blog. Initially, it was to grow my audience, my brand, to sell more books; but I think most of what I gained in those areas has happened already. The blog probably did most of its original purpose years ago when I was trying to do one daily for a year. So, why do I write this blog? What’s it for? Honestly, I’m no longer certain, but I know one thing that hurts me as a writer in every area, and that is not writing about things. The more secrets I have to keep, the more editing of my life I do, the harder it is to write the blog (which makes a certain sense) but also makes it more difficult to write anything.
My personal life is very separate from my fiction and yet there is some mystical connection that, even after all this time, I don’t understand but I know that it is there, and I know when I do not honor that connection my ability to write suffers. So what haven’t I been saying publicly that’s clogging up the creative pipeline?
Jonathon’s mother, Mary, had cancer this year. She’s gotten a clean bill of health now, but it took chemo to get her there. If you’ve ever seen anyone go through chemo, you know it will take time to heal the effects of the cure. I got her permission to talk about her illness a while back, but it somehow seemed too personal to her to put it here, but if she’s okay with me talking about it, then why has it been something I didn’t want to talk about?
Jonathon buried his Aunt Sweetie just before Thanksgiving, so about two weeks ago. She helped raise him, and when he talks about her it’s more like a second mother than an aunt. She lost her battle with cancer after over twenty years and several remissions. The family is devastated and still reeling as they deal with it. I will miss her, but I don’t have the decades of connection to her that they do. She was not my sister, or my childhood hero, so my loss is seen through the patina of theirs, and my major worry is for those left behind and how they are dealing with it. Aunt Sweetie was ready to go, and her faith gave her peace, so there should be no tears, and yet there are.
Today we will be going to another funeral for a friend’s father, who died suddenly, but his health had been poor for most of the time I’d known the family, so it seems both sudden and inevitable. Our friend is forty, which seems young for burying your father.
The attacks in Paris, the attacks in California, people killed, and for what? To terrify people? To terrify the world? Because that’s what terrorism is, it is literally an attempt to frighten us all, to make us insecure and unsure of our safety. It is a war that kills a few people at a time in the hopes of demoralizing the rest of us. Don’t let them win. Live your lives, be happy, and keep moving, because to do anything else gives them a victory. They haven’t won anything, don’t act as if they have. I’ll admit it’s unnerving, but be hopeful, keep faith that good triumphs in the end. Dark times come, but they do not stay, history teaches us that.
There have been a lot of tragedies this year, both personally and in the larger world. There’s more, there’s always more, but somehow the theme of death and loss seems a thread this year that I can’t shake. But Jonathon’s mother is going to be alright, and that is a miracle of modern medicine. There is good among the bad, wins and not just losses, but sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on the positive when so much negative keeps happening. I know I’m not the only one feeling a bit overwhelmed right now.
Why do I write this blog? Why do I write at all? In part, it’s to reach out to other people and say, “It’s going to be all right.” It’s a way of saying, none of us are alone. We’re in this together. I write fiction to help me make sense of the world and to share a good story, so that as you read my books you can forget the news headlines for a few hours. You can get lost in a good book, where the heroes usually triumph, the villains are punished, and the world is saved. Yes, fiction should make you think, but it should be first and foremost an escape from the mundane world. It should let you slip into a world more fantastic, and more openly magical than our own. That’s why I write my stories and novels. The blog is part explaining how I make that magic happen, and a glimpse into my own reality, so that the magic and the reality of my world brushes up against your own.
I am a storyteller. It is an ancient art. We used to sit in caves, huddled around the fire, listening to noises in the dark, afraid of what they might be, and someone would say, “Let me tell you a story,” and everyone would gather closer to the fire where they felt warm and safe, and they would forget the noises in the dark, listening to adventures. Now, I sit in my office and write words on a screen, that I’ll share with you soon. I’ll finish writing the blog, and continue to work on the latest novel, because you need a good story, and I need to be able to say, “Come, sit by the fire where you’ll be safe and warm, and let me share an adventure with you.”
