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Six pages of Merry today, but no one is dead. I really thought I’d be starting the great slaughter by now. But I forgot one very important thing. Merry isn’t my anger. One of the reasons I miss Anita when I’m not writing her, and why she writes faster than Merry is simply that anger fuels me when I write Anita, or maybe more precisely my rage is exorcised through writing Anita.

Why am I angery? I’ve been angry as long as I can remember. Did it start with my mother’s death when I was six? Or does it go farther back to my father’s abandonment of us when I was a baby? Or, maybe, I was born angry. Maybe that bubbling well of fury was just always at the center of my being. It’s sort of a chicken, egg kind of question, and I’ll never know which came first.

Now, for anyone whose actually seen me at a public event, you may be surprised to hear I have anger issues, because, contrary to internet rumor, you have never seen me loose my temper. When I was a child, I had a temper, but the difference between child and adult is control. You either master your emotions, or they master you.

Merry speaks to some other part of me. Something a little gentler, a little less violent. I tried to impose my anger on this book, my need for a release of all that rage, but when it was time to write it, I couldn’t, because it wasn’t Merry. It was me, or even Anita’s solution to the problem, but this is Merry’s problem and it has to be her solution, not mine. She’s chosen a solution that is true to her character, the book, the world, and the magic system. It works, beautifully, but though I admired the scene, it did not satisfy. There’s still death, but it’s death with sorrow and not the bloody revenge I wanted. Sigh. I bet I don’t get to kill anyone tomorrow either. 🙁