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It was wonderful sleeping in our own bed last night. No matter how nice the hotel, or how many fluffy pillows they give you, it’s just not home. Usually, it takes me a few days to get my feet under me when we first come off the road, but today I did twelve pages. That’s pretty good on any day, but especially for the first full day home. Admittedly, most of it was notes I wrote long hand on the plane to Canada. Anita tends to write better when I’m afraid, and this trip was no exception. So, the pages were on the new Anita book that I’ll be reading from tonight at the Howl. But I also think that I know how to do the next bit of the final battle with Merry. We’ve worked for books and books to get here, we need to enjoy it, or at least not rush.

Violence is like sex, if it’s been a long seduction. You don’t want to get to the pay off and rush. You want to enjoy yourself. You want to take your time. In this case, I want you, the reader, to feel that this battle was worth the wait. But I think, I hope, that tomorrow I can sit down to it. I think it’s ready in my head. I find that if I try and force the Merry books on paper before the idea is ready, it does me no good. I just end up rewriting the next day. Anita will help me write when everything else is stopped up, but maybe that’s partially because of how long I’ve been writing her. We’re like old friends. We know how each other thinks. Merry and I are still getting to know each other.

But twelve pages of anything the day after we get back is good for me. Especially, since we have an event tonight. That usually messes with my head, and makes it hard to write, but not today. Today, I’m strangely calm. There is that part of me that is my grandmother’s voice, that whispers, calm is bad, it means something bad is coming, like the calm before the storm. But calm isn’t bad. You can always panic when the emergency gets here, why waste the energy? Though, really you should panic after the emergency, when everyone’s safe.

Maybe part of my unnatural calm is seeing the notes at the top of the pages as I typed what I’d written on the plane. The first note at the top was, "Don’t scream," underlined three times. Next page had a serious of notes. "Don’t panic. It’s all right. You’re all right. Don’t scream. Nothing is wrong." Choice words were underlined. I’m a visual learner, so just glancing up and seeing the messages to myself helped me not to give into the blind panic. Sometimes I think I’m getting over my fear of flying, then I end up having to write little messages to myself to keep me in my seat. Insult to injury, I actually fell asleep on one of the flights earlier in tour, and dreamed of a plane crash, only to wake up still on the damned plane. That was a treat.

But I looked at those notes to myself, and I knew I hadn’t lost it. I didn’t start screaming. I didn’t allow myself to panic. I did not loose control of myself, my fear, or anything else. I’d sort of put the level of fear away in that part of your mind you box things up in, and try to forget. The notes at the top of the pages, as I typed today, reminded me. It made me have to get that fear out and look at it, like a box on the shelf that you wanted to forget, but that you just couldn’t quite make yourself throw away. Today, I’m home. Tonight we only have to drive a few miles to the Wolf Sancturary. No planes will be involved. It’s all good.