News

First the amazing news that Swallowing Darkness paperback is # 22 on the New York Times List as of 12/13/09! Thanks to everyone who bought a copy and helped us get on the list. Second, I’m going to blog about the Merry series and some of the questions you guys have been asking on-line.

Divine Misdemeanors comes out on December 8th which is next week. Ah! I love it when a new book finally hits the shelves and you guys can read it. But enough of you on-line have told me you’ve either just found the Merry Gentry series, or read them out of order, or many are going “Swallowing Darkness came out in hard back, when?“or “How did I miss it?” So to help clarify all that, plus welcome all the new people to the Merry party.

The Merry Gentry books in order are:

A Kiss of Shadows; A Caress of Twilight; Seduced by Moonlight; A Stroke of Midnight; Mistral’s Kiss; A Lick of Frost; Swallowing Darkness; and coming soon, Divine Misdemeanors.

The idea behind the naming convention for the series was that each book would get progreessively darker and then the titles would have light imagery in them as Merry triumphed over her enemies and won the day. The books would start with A Kiss of Shadows, then A Caress of Twilight night is falling, Seduced by Moonlight implies after dark, and then A Stroke of Midnight is most definitely late in the darkness, and Swallowing Darkness seemed to me to say everything I wanted to say about that point of the books, but my editor at the time couldn’t see her way clear to it. In fact, both my agent and my editor seemed strangely quiet, or reluctant, or even nervous whenever we discussed the title. It would take me several years after we jumped the naming-convention tracks to Mistral’s Kiss and A Lick of Frost, before they would let me use Swallowing Darkness as a title and I would finally understand why the nervous laughter on the phone calls from New York. My idea behind the title Swallowing Darkness was that Merry would have to embrace her darker magic to save herself and the people she loved, but as those who read the series know Doyle’s nickname is The Queen’s Darkness, or simply Darkness. So everyone in New York thought I meant to imply some sort of oral sex double entendre with the title. I swear to you that I didn’t intend it that way, and didn’t get the joke for years. The light would finally dawn, and then I felt sort of stupid for not realizing the double meaning in Swallowing Darkness. A lot of my books have a very high sexual content, the Merry books have had that from the beginning, it makes people assume I get some jokes that I don’t get. I’m not a good joke audience, because much of that kind of humor passes me by, whether the joke is sexy or not. Sometimes you have to explain the joke to me and then its not funny anymore, I don’t do it on purpose, but sometimes I’m a little clueless. This was soooo one of those times.

They finally let me use the title and it matched with the new naming convention which was one of Merry’s bodyguard’s and lover’s names with some sexy sounding phrase: Mistral’s Kiss; A Lick of Frost; Swallowing Darkness. And now we have yet another naming convention for Divine Misdemeanors.

I deliberatly chose to switch title themes for this book. I see the first seven books as one story arc, and Divine Misdemeanors beginning a new one. Now you get to follow up on events in the first seven books, but the direction and flavor of the series is different. Merry has made her choices, thrown out a third of my plot, and remade her life. (Here’s a problem with knowing that some of you have not read all of the first seven books. I don’t want to spoil the surprises for you guys, but I want to talk to the readers who have read them all. I don’t know how to do that without series spoilers. It is a puzzlement.)

I think I can say this that the first seven books are set in modern America and a fairy land if J. R. R. Tolkein was more interested in socilogy, politics, and personal relationships than language. It is a quest, but instead of a distant land, or a holy relic, Merry and her friends are trying to stay one step ahead of assassination attempts and trying to live long enough for her to be crowned queen of the Unseelie Court, the Dark Court of Fairie. She is literally a fairie princess, the only one born on American soil after the fey were kicked out of Europe. I’ve had some little girls go, “Fairy Princess, a book about fairyland? Oh, I want that.” Um, no little girl you can’t read these books, its not that kind of fairyland and Merry is not that kind of fairy princess, not even close.

My books are set in a very adult world. There are moments of horror and violence that wouldn’t be out of place in a slasher flick. There is sex. Good sex. Real sex, except for the whole glowing skin and magic thing, but I try for all the sex in my books to be humanly possible. I guess in some ways Merry’s world is the antithesis ot Tolkein. There is no sex in Tolkein. There is this feeling of the old boy’s clubs when they gathered together to get away from the women and not have to worry about all that girl stuff. You can sometimes hear your male friends on that guy’s camp out, or fishing trip, except with elves, dwarves and dragons, and evil warlords. My books have almost none of that, and the term elf is never used though Tolkein’s elves are probably close to my high court sidhe in appeance but where I always felt the elves in his world would never want to get dirty enough to have really good, squealchy sex, my sidhe are very sensual and very sexual beings. They’re nature deities, or were once, that’s a lusty bunch, its gotta be. I will say this for Tolkein’s world I always thought that if any of his races liked a good roll in the hay it had to be the Hobbits. They liked good food, good music, dancing, parties, smoking weed, there’s a reason they had more fun than anyone else in the books. It was also why I think it had to be a Hobbit that took the ring through everything, because they seemed to have a more complete life to lose. The Hobbits are the most alive to me. When I was younger I wanted to be an elf, but as I grew older I knew I was a Hobbit. I’m too short to be anything else for one thing.

The Merry Gentry series is marketed as a paranormal romance, and they are closer to that paradeim than the Anita Blake books, but I say, I write Paranormal Thrillers, because that covers what I really write. The first seven books are more romantic as in the princess is looking for her true love and trying to win a crown, but its me and I’m always the subversive so my princess isn’t your typical one, and her choices won’t be either. Spoiler alert, but not a major one: I mean what other fairie princess has as her major magic the ability to make people bleed out or melt their flesh so they turn into a little, screaming ball of flesh. Two of the nastiest magical ideas I’ve ever come up with and that says a lot coming from me.

For the male readers, I do apologize that you guys are taking grief for the Merry covers. They look like straight sexy romances and I know that it takes a secure guy to carry that around school, or work, or on the bus. I thank you all for your bravery. The men who have braved it say the books are great, but they’re really happy that Anita Blake is being repackaged in something other than body part covers, something more mainstream and that doesn’t get them grief on the subway from little old ladies with umbrellas. (We’ve had three men acosted on the bus or subway by older women accusing them of reading porn because of the early Anita covers, or Merry covers. One guy got hit with an umbrella. One guy’s wife told him to take that porn out of her house. She’d never read me and was just basing it on the cover. He got her to read the book and now she’s a fan, too. We will conqueor our detractors with luv.) I love the cover of Divine Misdemeanors, but I can see where as a guy it might make you feel like you’re trying to sneak contraband across the border from the girl’s side to the boy’s. Trust me when I say that the men in my world are very manly, and Merry is a girl that’s more than okay with that. We have battles and duels and all that adventure stuff, plus enough blood and gore to make Quentin Tarotino happy, but with enough real emotion to make Nora Ephron smile. I can’t think of a movie maker that does magic and sex to the degree I do, so I’ll have to leave the movie metaphores behind. Maybe for fantasy Del Toro?

Divine Misdemeanors is less of a romance and more of a thriller. We have a seriel killer slaughtering the fey Americans of Los Angeles and Merry and Grey’s Detective Agency our requested to give their cultural expertise. Its not every day that you see supposedly immortal people murdered even in L. A. The relationships between the characters continue to build, and there’s sex, so does that make it a romance? Or does the serial killer and solving the who-dun-it make it a detective drama? Or does the magic make it a . . . You get the idea. I write Paranormal Thrillers, because that covers everything I write in every book.