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Happy St. Patrick’s Day everybody. Did you see the St. Patrick’s Day poster that Brett Booth did of Phillip? It turned out even better than I’d hoped. But as cool as the poster is, I’m not thinking about St. Pat. I’m thinking about finally being able to talk about the Anita special comic.

Thank God, I finally can talk about it. Not being able to was driving me nuts.

I write what comes into my head, especially when I blog. Because I couldn’t talk about the comic special uber-secret Anita project, I kept coming up against a blank wall in my head. I wanted to talk about what Jon and I were doing in the afternoon, but I couldn’t, not until it was ready to be announced. It was soooo hard.

Now, I can say with a clear conscious that the afternoon project is the Anita Blake Special comic, and Jon and I are writing it together. He sees script in his head better than I do. I write dialogue better. He understands comics and how they are arranged on a page better than I do. I have an incredibly disciplined work ethic. He reminds me that it’s still supposed to be fun.

I must say after a morning of being alone in my office with only my own thoughts for company to work in the afternoon with someone else on a project so different is very refreshing. I don’t mean it’s different simply because it’s Anita and not Merry. Since I working on the next Merry book in the morning. I mean it’s a different medium. A different type of story telling. Just different enough to reignite some enthusiasm that had begun to grow pale inside me.

I still love my work and my books and my characters, but it is work. Working on the comics has helped remind me how it felt long ago when it was new. It’s funny how even something wonderful can grow ho-hum if you don’t come at it with a beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is a term from Buddhism, or Zen, or both. It means to be always new when you look at something, even if you’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m pretty good at the beginner’s mind, but in the last little bit, the last few years, I’d begun to loose that newness.

Jon has been so excited. It’s been harder on him not sharing with people because for him comics isn’t a late love. Comics has always been one of his first loves. It’s been something he wanted to write and work in, as a job. I didn’t realize how much of a front runner dream it was to him until we started working on the GUILTY PLEASURES comic. His knowledge of comics has been invaluable. I’m getting my feet under me now, but at the beginning I found it all very confusing.

This new comic will allow me to write about something that many of you fans have been asking about for years. You wanted a prequeal to GUILTY PLEASURES. You wanted to see the first time Jean-Claude and Anita met. Her first time working with RPIT. Her first time meeting Edward.

I couldn’t do it for you, because I can’t write Anita without knowing everything I already know about her and her world. I can’t unknow things. In a novel I’d be doing all that interior dialogue and reactions, so since I couldn’t write a younger Anita whose reaction to everyone was new, I couldn’t do a prequeal.

But comics are different. You don’t do much interior dialogue. A few wiseass comments, but other than that it’s just dialogue and pictures. It means that in this medium I can do that prequeal. I can have Anita and Jean-Claude meet because I don’t have to delve too deeply into her head. I can show one of the first times dealing with Edward without having to fight not to know he’s not quite the bastard we think. Comics has freed me up to show some of the early stuff you would never have gotten to see any other way. It’s been pretty cool.

Also, I don’t have to describe a room, or clothing. I just say what the room looks like in a general way, and describe the clothing a little. The artist does the rest. It’s been very nifty. And that’s on the original comic book of GUILTY PLEASURES. Brett Booth has been doing an amazing job.

For the special we are working with a new artist, Joe Phillips. The only way for Brett to have done both the regular comic and the special was if we could clone him like in the old BEWITCHED television series, where they were always making two of Darren when he was over worked. But since we can’t make more of Brett, we need a guest artist. That’s Joe.

So, finally I can tell you what we’re doing in the afternoon. Now you know. I hope I don’t have to keep another secret like this for awhile. I am simply not good at it. I so would be a bad spy.