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I finished editing the older chapters, and now have nine fresh pages on the newest Anita book. The post book blues are getting a little better. Today was the closest to a normal mood that I’ve had since I finished SWALLOWING DARKNESS on Saturday. Still moody, still tender to the touch emotionally. Despair still nips at my heels, but it’s more like some yappy ankle biting dog. A few days back despair was more like a huge tiger that threw me to the ground and savaged me. It felt like a kind of death.

I said, "This feels worse than usual." Jon and Darla both, separately, said, "You always say that." Every emotion I’ve had, no matter how dark, they all individually confirmed, "You always do that." Hmm.

Darla says that it’s like baby amnesia. You forget how awful it is to be pregnant. You forget the pains of childbirth. You forget, until it all happens again. But, I didn’t get baby amnesia. One of the reasons Trinity is an only child is that I never got that rose colored glow about the process of how little human beings get here. Frankly, I don’t get a rosy glow about the process of books either. I’m a pessimist. That means that I remember the bad stuff. It’s the good stuff that fades for me. The positive that I have to work hard to remember. Bad stuff remains carved in crystal for me. The sound of screams, the sound of metal twisting against metal, the look in someone’s eyes . . . I collect the terrible like snapshots in my mind. I take the happy moments, and part of my mind thinks, what if? What if it all went horribly wrong? What if this happened, instead? My mind has worked that way almost as far back as I can remember. I was like this at five or six. A life time of looking at the dark, and seeing it even in the brightest sunshine. God, I’m still depressed. But it comes and goes, and as time goes on it will go more than it stays. According to everyone here, "I always feel like this after a book." How the f**ck do I stand it?