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Some ideas are light and fluffy.  They come on a whim, rush out in a story, and you’re done. But the ideas that last for me, the ones that make books, series, always come from emotional places. A lot of Anita comes from my mother’s death when I was six, all that anger and confusion that somehow translated into a fascination with death and violence. The Merry books came out of the realization that my first marriage wasn’t working. The books came out of my feeling of betrayal that the whole love of your life, one man to make it all work, was a lie. So, I created a fairytale where there isn’t just one Prince Charming, but a dozen, or more, and there isn’t just one love’s first kiss. It’s about turning all those stories on their ears, and saying, "It’s not true." Prince Charming isn’t coming. He never was coming. The princess better join a gym, buy a gun, finish college, get that promotion, and save herself, because no one is riding to the rescue.

I finally realized why I was having such trouble starting the next Merry book. I finally understand the emotion that gave birth to her world. That emotion was pain. My heart broke the year that I created Merry. Jump ahead two years later, and I was in love again, and somehow marriage had seemed like a good idea after I’d vowed never to marry again. Jonathon made me hopeful again. Not about Prince Charming, I’d had enough of that. I’d be my own prince, thanks. I was looking for a man who wanted to be my princess for a change, and Jonathon was okay with that. He didn’t find it insulting, or demeaning. It’s always struck me as ironic that my first husband hated being called Mr. Laurell K. Hamilton, when it was his last name, but Jonathon is still okay with being Mr. Hamilton when we’re on tour, even though it’s never been his name. We joke that I let him keep his maiden name.

Anita came out of pain, but it’s a pain so old and so familiar that it’s part of the fondation of myself. I don’t know what it would feel like to be without it. The pain for Merry was too fresh, and now I feel so much better. That pain is gone, but I still have Merry books to write. The trick is, can I write them without living in the pain that created the world? Can I find a happy place from which to approach Merry and her world in my head? I don’t know, but I’d like to try to write a book from a positive emotion instead of all the negative ones. How novel it would be for me to write a book inspired by something besides loss.  But the only book I’ve started in the last year that wasn’t Anita, or Merry, was based on another kind of loss. They say that divorce is like a death, and having tasted both for real, I’ll agree. But some people don’t die, or divorce you, they just go out of your life. It isn’t as hard as the two big ’Ds’, but it’s still pain, it still hurts, there’s still that feeling of betrayal, and puzzlement. How the hell did we get to this point? That’s what you ask yourself, then, you realize that it doesn’t matter how we got here, only that we are here, and that’s an end of it. It’s over. It ends not with a bang, but a whimper, to misquote T. S. Elliot.

I’m sad tonight, thinking of old loss and new, and loss to come, because to be alive is to loose something every damn day. That’s the lesson I learned on a hot summer’s day when I was six, and the lesson has never really left me.