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I say I don’t believe in fairytales, and yet I’ve written eight books about fairie princess, Merry Gentry, and her search for true love, a father for her children, and a king to sit on the throne with her as queen. What I wouldn’t realize for years was that the entire idea for Merry came out of the very fact that I didn’t believe in happily-ever-after. I’ve said loud and long that I never believed in that whole Prince Charming fantasy of some perfect man coming to rescue the fair damsel and make her life perfect. I didn’t believe in the rescue and the perfect life part, but in retrospect I have to be honest. I did believe in part of the fantasy. I believed that I’d find that one true love and I’d spend the rest of my life with him and we’d be head over heels in love for the rest of our days. I did believe in the happy-ever-after part and the true love part. I believed that there was one soul-mate for me somewhere and once I found him it would all be all right.

My soul-mate, love of my life, and I married while still in college. I’d never been in love before. I’d never had sex before. He was my first in so many ways. Oh, just to be clear I was a virgin until 21. I believed, sincerely, in that ideal that I’d wait and the man I loved would wait and we would have sex together and it would be the better for having waited. Oh, yeah, if I waited and was virgin I’d decided to hold out for a man that had done the same. If I had that much self control then why would I settle for a man that had less? That was my thought at the time.

Downside to the whole little white dress, first lover thing, is that you have two virgins with little or no experience on a wedding night. I remember thinking, it’s fun, but it will get better. It didn’t. What no one tells you while you wait for Mr. Right is that just because you love each other doesn’t mean you match up sexually. Sex means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and we married having no idea that was true. I wasn’t uniformed, because I’d done research, I’d read, listened to enough friends over share over the years. We knew what went where, but all the talk failed to explain that it matters not just where, but how its done. I loved him too pieces, and I believe he loved me sincerely, but we found that love meant different things to each of us, just as sex did. My idea of being a couple was not his, and vice versa. Neither of us had even dated anyone else seriously so we had no experience at being a couple. We agreed on politics, religion, child rearing, both played Dungeons and Dragons, and read science fiction and fantasy. We were both hard workers and determined. That’s what we had in common.

We graduated college and went out in the world. We moved to Los Angeles together from a city of 30,000. Oh, Dorothy, we were so not in Kansas anymore. The problems that would eventually destroy our marriage were there from the first year, but we loved each other and love may not conqueror all but it sure can make you look the other way.

First sign we were in trouble other than the on-going mismatch on sex was when he came home from work with this little announcement. That one of his coworkers had told him the man is the head of the household and that women are not equal in the eyes of God. He quoted scripture at me. We were both good little Epsicopalians at this point, may I add. He made these awful announcements and somehow thought that would make him win all the "discussions" we’d been having about the Bible and church, and I know realize looking back he was also trying to assert some kind of authority over me, in the marriage. My reply to him, "If that’s really what the Bible says, and really what God means, that being a woman isn’t as good as being a man then I can’t be Christian anymore." Not what he expected me to say. I’d never seen him back-pedal so hard in our first year of marriage. He basically said, his friend could be wrong and the Bible verses were open to interrprutation. Damn right they were, and damn right his friend was wrong.

I am now a happy little Wiccan and have been for about ten years.

So the religion we agreed on stopped being so agreeable. Then I became a middle of the road liberal conservative and he stayed conservative. So religion and politics not in common. We stopped gaming with live people and he crawled into cyberspace and played on line which I didn’t understand and didn’t want to do. We suddenly had no hobbies in common. I read more horror and dark fantasy than he did. He didn’t like scary things. He would go from being my first reader and cheerleader to not wanting to read anything I wrote and thinking it was wrong. He didn’t want me to write about vampires, or monsters, or violence, or sex, or, serial killers. Everything that fascinated my muse upset him. So I couldn’t share my writing with him, at all, and that is a large part of who I am. He was a computer engineer so I didn’t understand his job either.

I’d discovered music, and no we shared nothing in that area either. We had a daughter together, and she’s still wonderful, but the marriage was going downhill at a rapid rate. I was miserable and he refused to see that I’d changed unless I made it impossible to ignore. We still liked musicals, but he wouldn’t see any movie with me that he thought would be scary or have a sad ending. I was married and going to movies by myself. I went to so many events by myself with just my daughter that people thought I was divorced long before I really was, because he didn’t want to go with us. He had a dozen hobbies none of which interested me. We were like roommates that occasionally had sex and shared a child together. If it was enough for him, it wasn’t enough for me.

Into that despair comes an idea for a new paranormal series. The Merry Gentry series was created to help me cheat with other men without having to leave my real life husband. It was cheating without cheating. The sexual content was very deliberate. But of course, it wasn’t enough. In the end, my unhappiness couldn’t be bandaged by working on a series where my main character was looking for true love and great sex while I had fallen out of love and wasn’t happy in other areas either. When I wrote Kiss of Shadows, the first Merry book, I thought I’d tough it out in my first marriage. By the time I sat down to write the second book, A Caress of Twilight, I would be separated and dating again for the first time in over a decade. It was his idea for us to date other people, the moving out was mine. I puzzled at his encouraging me to date other people, but I think he believed I’d realize it was a cold world out there and I had it good at home. That wasn’t what I found. I found that I loved having my own apartment and picking out furniture without having to ask anyone’s opinion but mine. I was also more successful at dating than he seemed to think I’d be. This is the man who told me that I was pretty, but not beautiful.

Turns out I ended up dating someone who’d been a friend for eight years, before it ever occurred to us to actually date each other. Jonathon and I have now been married for eight years, and nine years as a couple. I insisted we live together for at least six months before I’d consider anything else. I was never going to marry again, never. But when I realized I was falling in love again, I made sure to kick the tires a lot more thougharly. We lived together, we saw each other first thing in the morning, last thing at night, sick, unhappy, giddy, you name it, it was a very exciting year. And yes, we had sex. I did not want to make the same mistakes again, so this time I knew what I was getting in ever area and in ever way I could think of as a couple. 

I also found that being married to my first husband didn’t prepare me to be married to Jonathon, just as his past relationships didn’t prepare him for me. Marriage is made up of two unique individuals, and in our case, some very unique individuals, but it works for us. The things that his ex fiance, and my ex husband complained about are plusses for us. Funny how what’s a problem for one couple is a strength when you change up the pairing.

Writing Merry was hard after that because every book threw me back into those last few painful years of my first marriage. The first seven books of Merry were very wedded to that pain. Only now with book eight am I finally free to play in her world rather than continue trying to find Prince Charming. Merry is after all a fairy tale about a princess looking for her true love and her happily-ever-after. Spoiler alert now, so be warned: I think one of the reasons that Merry couldn’t pick just one prince to love is that I think the idea that one single human being can meet every need we have and make our life perfect just because we love them is too much pressure to put on anyone. We marry in such hope and then when that first burst of being in love fades we think we’ve made a mistake. My first husband said that love like that can’t last. It did for me for ten years with very little encouragment. This time with encouragement its looking much better. But its not effortless, I learned that you have to work at being a couple, you have to work at being happy, work at your issues so they don’t drive you apart, but this time I’m married to someone who understands that, too, and we work together.

I enjoyed writing Divine Misdemeanors more than almost any other Merry book, because this time I could play in her world. This time I wasn’t cleaning up the ruins of my own failed fairy tale. This time I could let Merry be Merry, and the men she loves be themselves. It’s a dark book in places, with a serial killer on the lose, and Merry and her men in jeopardy, but its also a happy book full of a lot of joy. I finally realized with this book that once upon a time I believed in Prince Charming and that when that illusion shattered it broke my heart and I threw that heart break onto the page and wrote books about it. I’m a disillusioned Princess, and always will be, but I’m a wiser princess, too. I know that Prince Charming doesn’t come save me, we save each other and fight back to back against all comers that’s what marriage is to me. Nothing passive, no being carried off on a white steed, give me my own damn horse and lets ride into the sunset side by side.