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Woke up this morning with a mash-up of songs in my head. Pink’s “Sober” & Godsmack’s “Serenity”. Surprisingly good mix. Pink’s album Funhouse and Godsmack’s three albums were what I finished Bullet to, so they will be the songs stuck in my head for awhile. I’ve learned that the soundtrack for an intense book continues to be my soundtrack in my head for a time. But I don’t usually listen to two such different kinds of music intermixed. I think that explains the mash-up.

I finished Bullet, the next Anita Blake novel, last night at around six something. Which meant that Jon and I got to go to bed at a regular and wonderfully earlier hour compared to the past few weeks. Carri was able to go home with her wife instead of doing the good assistant thing and making me endless cups of tea all night. It was very good to be done.

For those who have asked, Bullet comes out in June of this year. Why do you guys think I’ve been killing myself for this deadline? If the book was coming out next year I’d have leisurely months ahead of me, but nope, June 2010 is the pub date. So for the first time in over a decade you guys get two Anita books in the same year. The last time the books were six months apart was, I believe, Guilty Pleasures and The Laughing Corpse, or that and Circus of the Damned. But those were so close together because my publisher and I both felt that to build an audience for a series quicker out was better, and I’d written the first book, Guilty Pleasures years before it hit the shelves, years before it sold, so I only had to write The Laughing Corpse to make it seem like I was writing so quickly. Also the books were shorter back then averaging about 400 manuscript pages. I remember the first time I hit 500 pages and some change, I think that was book five, Bloody Bones. I remember thinking wow that’s a long book. I have since then hit 1000 pages for a book. I think the first to hit that was Obsidian Butterfly, book 9 of Anita. The first Merry Gentry novel, A Kiss of Shadows, was over 700 pages in manuscript.

Several of you have said you loved, Flirt, the current book, but it was like flirting because it was so much shorter than an average novel. You’ve also said that my updates on Twitter are like flirting or teasing. I guess I really, truly, finally, have learned how to flirt in so many ways.

Bullet is around 700 manuscript pages, but when I say manuscript pages that may have a lot, or almost nothing to do with the eventual page count. It depends on type set, font size, page layout, and a host of other things. It is rarely a one page per from manuscript to finished book.

Jon, Carri, and I went to breakfast at IHOP which has become our tradition after a big project is sent off to New York. But we’ve all been trying to eat more healthy and found that sweet pancakes really didn’t hit the spot. We decided we need to come up with a new tradition for next time. Jon and I came back and took a two hour nap which isn’t part of the tradition, but we were exhausted. Found out that Carri even laid down and took a brief nap while we were tucked away. Bullet has been a difficult book. We’ve all come out of it exhausted. Me from the writing and Jon and Carri from being support staff for me while I burned the midnight oil, hell, burned the predawn oil. Hard book.

I’m happy with the book, and it’s certainly got a lot of things in it that you, the fans, have been asking about for awhile. We get to see Monica Vespucci and her son, Matthew, on stage. Yes, the baby she was pregnant with in book six, The Killing Dance. Since that’s in chapter one I don’t feel like I’m giving to much away. We see a lot of Jean-Claude on stage. A lot of Richard on stage and he was more fun to write than he has been in ages. Asher gets some very nice screen time. Micah and Nathaniel get some really good scenes with Anita. Jason gets that visit from J. J. who we last saw in Blood Noir. Even Stephen and Gregory, and Stephen’s live-in girlfriend Vivian get some good scenes. Okay, Gregory gets on stage but Stephen and Vivian has some good scenes. If they were real life actors they’d be happy with the script and the character growth. Yes, we have Damian on stage. Claudia gets to demonstrate that size matters in a fight and she’s got the size. More wererats, werelions, weretigers, and vampires, vampires, vampires. There were a lot of furry and vampy politics for this book.

I am very much looking forward to not working on any book for awhile. My muse and I are both tired and need to find things that refuel us both.