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I’ve spent the week blaming Merry for the book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS, kicking my ass both literarily, mentally, and emotionally. I’ve been blaming Rhys, Galen, Frost, even the newer men, and female guards. I’ve bemoaned, complained and otherwise grumped my way through most of this week work-wise. "Why is Merry always so much more difficult to write than Anita?" "Why can’t I do this?" Why, why, why?

I had my epiphany last night somewhere between date night sushi with Jon, Carri, & her wife, Pili, then parted ways, and Jon and I came back to enjoy the more private part of date night to ourselves. Somewhere in all that I had the light-bulb-over-head moment. It wasn’t Merry, or anyone else getting in my way. It was me getting in their way.

Yep, you read that right. Me, getting in their way. I even know why Anita writes faster than Merry for me. Anita feels guilty about stuff. Merry doesn’t. Her culture just doesn’t cover the breadth and depth of guilt I was raised with, Anita’s culture is my culture so she gets the angst. Merry doesn’t see the point, and that makes me uncomfortable. Anita helps me work my issues. Merry goes through life without my issues and that makes me not understand her. I’ve worked hard to get over the issues that were indoctrinated into me as a child, they never worked for me. All my happiness and my success has come from being outside the box that everyone calls normal. But Anita is still uncomfortable with the truth of being so far outside the box, happy, but uncomfortable. I was taught you could be happy, but you have to feel really, really bad about it. So you could be happy, but you had to ruin your happiness with guilt and then you’d be virtuous. My grandmother’s short hand of that was simply don’t do anything that made me happy and cut out the middle man since you end up miserable anyway. She was, in her own way, just as odd a duck as me. But she was also the most unhappy duck I’ve ever met, and I’ve come to love my weird little pond.

So this morning I got up bright eyed and happy, because I understood now why Merry has always written slower for me and what my issue is with her. She’s too damn happy in a circumstance that my up-bringing would have condemned as evil. Just when you think it’s safe to go back into your childhood issues you discover the shark is still there in the shallows waiting to gobble you up. Well, no more letting the shark win. I’m buying some dynamite and have blocked the passage out to sea with debris. It’s trapped and today I stun it, and wade in and kill it. Down with Guilt!

Especially when you have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.