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My grandmother had a saying, “No rest for the wicked, and the righteous don’t need it.” It was one of her favorite sayings. Along with, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” Anyway, the no rest part is prompted by the e-mail I got today. The rewrites will be back in two weeks, but that’s not my complaint. My complaint is they aren’t coming back next week. I need this book to be well and truly dead, not looming into the horizon. I don’t know about the rest of you but I can’t go on my mini-vacation until the project is done. The long weekend is, for me, a cleansing away of the old, and a preparing my mind for the new. The new being the next Anita book. A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT missed it’s original deadline, so that means that Anita book 13 is probably going to miss it’s deadline, too. It’s like dominos, one falls, and they all start falling. So I need this book done so I can start clearing the deck for the next one. I just want it done, so I can relax, instead of waiting tensed. It’s the difference between the war being over, and only the battle being over when you know that there is still more ground to be won, more enemies to be defeated, more dangers to be lived through. I need to drive a stake through this one’s heart and move on.
I did finally realize that maybe there was more than one reason for A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT to be harder to write. It’s the fourth book in a series. I know I’ve written somewhere in here that when my daughter was a small baby I was exhausted, and I was, but I also wrote THE LUNATIC CAFE, as the first book back in the saddle after Trinity was born. LUNATIC is the fourth Anita book. I remember feeling that LUNATIC was one of the best of the books so far, and that I really knew the world and the characters, at last. But I think, maybe, that baby exhaustion mixed with another kind of exhaustion. Fourth book exhaustion.
For Merry and her gang, this was the first book where I cried for them. I cried when Galen got hurt. I cried when Doyle finally found something that made that calm captain-of-the-guard exterior crack wide open. I wept with and for these people, which I had not done before. For me, it’s as if the fourth book in a series is when I finally give myself up to the world. It’s like the first three books are foreplay, or dating, and somewhere in the fourth book, kicking and screaming that I don’t feel that way about any of them, I finally give it up. I finally, for better or worse, fall in love. Not with a male character. So many of you keep asking who are my favorites, who would I date. That’s not quite how I feel about any of them. I am, in some way, in love with most of the characters. For me, I have to be a little in love, to write about them the way I do. Not the sex, I mean the caring. To care about them the way that I eventually do, I need to be in love with not one character, but all of them. Or most of them. The continuing characters become like old friends, or steady dates, people you know and love, and enjoy spending time with. It’s been a decade since I began the Anita series, longer maybe, so I had forgotten the rhythm of a series. Or it had gotten all mixed up with the new baby exhaustion. Both, I guess.
The fourth book is the place where the lady doth stop protesting too much. The place where I finally cuddle down between the sheets and admit that I love them all, and I want to keep them safe, and that the thought that eventually, for Merry, we are going to loose someone we care about . . . I cannot bear it. I struggled with my cast of thousands in MIDNIGHT, and complained loud and long that there were too many men. We’ve actually added some new ones, again. It is a lot of characters to try and play fair with, but there is no one that I want to loose. There is no one that I am willing to sacrifice to make my job easier. They have, in a way, become real to me. I have shed tears for them. I have feared for them. I have watched them grow as characters, and Merry and I both are sorry that all of them can’t win the prize. When you care about someone, you want them to be happy. I realize now that not everyone is going to get a happy ending from all this, simply because there is only one girl, and far too many men. They can’t all be king. They can’t all win her heart and her bed. Sigh.
And please don’t ask me who will win and be king, because I don’t know. I’ve told people before that I don’t know, but please believe me, I really don’t. I know the overall story arc, but some mysteries I do not try and predict. Anita has taught me that if I push too hard for any one man romantically the story is almost certainly going to diverge and go in an opposite direction. So I try not to push. As I writer I need to be fair to all the men, so again, it behooves me not to pick anyone. Besides, it’s Merry’s bed, and she’s got to sleep in it. I’m going now, call New York see if I can get this rewrite process speeded up.