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I got up this morning, glanced out the bathroom window, and thought, holy shit, it snowed last night. I know the temperature was dropping but how cold did it get? Then I calmed down and realized it was just a really heavy frost. But it did blanket the roofs like a young snow, glittering in the early light. I left Jon to snooze. He’d requested a little more sleep. I’m fine with that. Sometimes it’s nice to be the first one up in a quiet house. Okay, the dogs are howling to be let out, and so it’s not so quiet, but I’m the only biped up. I throw on one of Jon’s wintry coats, and out the dogs and I go into dawn light, and a frost that is every where. The leaves on the ground are edged with it, outlined and decorated it with the white crystal lines of it. The leaves on the plants hang heavier with the weight of the cold and the ice. It’s not just a frost, it’s a killing frost. I’m suddenly thinking of Merry and her world. I’m thinking of our Killing Frost. I’m thinking of him as I stand there with Pip tugging on his leash. I breathe in the cold air with that winter bite to it, and I’m thinking of Frost. He comes to me as if his name sake conjured him. I can almost feel his arms, how tall he is, how solid, how strangely real. I stand there with a herd of pugs around my feet, and the big puppy like a black giant amount them, and I’m faraway in my head. Yet, again strangely, I am very present. I am noticing the way the frost touches everything. I breath it in and try to remember the taste of the air, the feel of the heavy frost on the leaves. How it melts if you touch it with your finger tips. It turns to ice, to water, at the warmth of my fingers. If you’re careful you can brush it, delicate and unreal, touch the ice, touch the first breath of Winter’s cold, but if you linger too long, touch too hard, the frost melts, is destroyed. My touch, my warmth, destroys it, like some delicate work of art that you’ve rubbed too hard. I stand there and think, this is Frost’s namesake, this is what he is, what he became. This first death, this first harbinger of the winter kill. The sun rises and where it touches the frost melts, fades, dies. In the shadowed places the frost lingers. Like Frost, himself, who found refuge of a sort in the dark and shadow of the Unseelie court. I stand there in the morning light, and think of him. I’m not completely done with the current Anita book. THE HARLEQUIN is almost finished, but not quite. It’s unusual, nay unheard of, for me to get distracted this close to the end by another book, another world. But I’m thinking about Frost today, as stand surrounded by his namesake. I think winter will be a good time to write the next Merry book, or maybe it will just make Frost’s part easier to write. Some writers would be going, no, don’t think about another book before you’ve finished this one. I think it’s a good sign. MISTRAL’S KISS the fifth Merry book will be out in December, but the sixth book, is moving liquid in my head. I think by the time I take my two weeks off, I will be ready to sit down and write. Frost is in my head trying to tell his story, or his part of the next story. I actually know less about what will happen in book six than I ever have with a Merry book. Once, that would have bothered me, but not now,now it feels like freedom, as if I’d over plotted, over planned. Sometimes it’s nice to fling yourself into space and let the words catch you. I’ve spent a few books clinging to the ground, but it feels like it’s time to go to the top of the big top. Time to grab the trapeze again, and soar. Time to let go and see who catches me. Today, it feels like I know whose hands would be there waiting to pull me into his arms. Frost is talking in my head, not in words, but in touches, the way his hair feels against my face, all tactile and touch. I get writers asking me how do you make your characters so real? I try to answer. I talk about needing to know the hair color, eye color, height, skin tone, all the building blocks, but in the end it’s the way their smile lights their face. In the end it’s that I know how it feels to have Frost’s arms wrapped around me from behind. I know the feel of his body. I know the texture of his hair, and how it looks in different kinds of light as it spills around his face. I can feel him. I realize that that is often the way for me. I felt Jean-Claude’s shirt slide across my skin. It is not about something cold and distant. I know my characters the way you know your best friends, and in some cases your spouses. I choose the word spouse carefully here, because I’ve talked to too many people that see lovers as causal. I am not causal with my characters. I know them as you begin to know a spouse. That day in, day out, familiarity, that you need to truly KNOW someone. The feeling fades as the frost fades. The leaves and grass are just wet now. I cannot feel him as I did, but I know now the sensation will come back. I’ve had such vivid sensory memory with Anita and her crew, but never with Merry. I’ve had to fight to know Merry and her people. Then suddenly, as suddenly as the frost itself, I can feel him. I know the others will come now. The door is open.