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I write from emotion. I write from pain, happiness, joy, sorrow, revulsion, horror, fear – pick an emotion that’s strong enough and it has driven me to the computer so that words could pour out of my finger tips. Sometimes it’s like a purge, getting rid of what I’m feeling, but most of the time it’s just letting off steam. The emotion is too deep, too much, to get out all at once. It would be like trying to pour the ocean out in one drowning deep mess. It would literally be too much. I would drown. The emotion would sink the writing, and it’s about the story, not just the emotion, or event, that inspired it. Both of them have to work together to form a whole.

Most of my writing career it’s taken me years to understand why a particular story, or character, or world came to me, or what compulsion drove me and the story, but lately that’s begun to change. In the last ten years I would hate the moment when I realized what trauma had induced a story. “Nightseer”, my very first novel was a couple of years finished when I realized it was all about my mother’s death. It even begins with the death of my main character’s own mother, and she gets to take revenge on the villain that killed her mother. Oh, if only there had been a villain to hate for my own mother’s death. The realization of the issues behind that fantasy novel made me feel like I was doing therapy in public, and in a way I was, but I hated even more when I realized the trauma of inspiration before I finished the story. It made it very hard to finish the book when I was suddenly painfully aware of what tragedy I was working on paper. It was like being caught having sex in public, when you thought you were safely in the privacy of your own bedroom. I would muscle through and finish but it was hard. The Anita Blake novel, “Bloody Bones,” was a book where I was only part way through when I realized I was again taking the same ghost out for a walk. “Bloody Bones,” is about Anita facing the pain of her mother’s death in the figure of a master vampire that can give you the illusion of your heart’s desire, and what Anita wants most is for her mother to be alive and with her again, to have not died. That was my greatest wish at that time for myself, and here I was doing a very thinly veiled exploration of that pain in public. It made me incredibly uncomfortable, but I muscled through, and finished the book, and I think it helped me deal with my own mother’s death. I’m not sure it helped Anita, sometimes I think it traumatized her more; I hope not.

Some losses are so huge, so life changing, that you can spend books and books exploring the pain and not come to the end of it. The loss of both my parents before the age of six was one of those things that one book, two books, five, was not enough to exorcise that tragedy. My father is alive to my knowledge, but he abandoned my mother and myself before I was a year old. I have seen him twice in my entire life, so no father, no mother, just a grandmother that had her own issues.

One of the interesting things about writing like this is that when you finally exorcise the demon, your done. I didn’t understand that, that you could be done with a world, a character, imaginary friends, but you can. Anita and I no longer have the same issues, in fact, I’ve healed parts of myself that are still wounded on her. How do I bring her up to speed? How to help my fictional alter ego heal, as I have healed? She has other pain different from mine, new traumas that she’s discovered on paper, and that in a weird way she’s shared with me. I’ve had more than one police officer tell me that I react like someone who’s seen this kind of violence, not just written about it. My research is sometimes overly real, because I am so connected to Anita. Studies on how the human brain interprets reality hint that what you imagine is not differentiated by your mind. That, in effect, when I write violent, bloody, crime scenes, my mind sees no difference between that and me actually seeing it. Now, I know there’s a difference, because I’ve touched real blood, seen real violence, and that has marked me harder than the “pretend” violence that I’ve written, but how close to real is it inside my head? How much difference does most of my mind see between fiction and fact? Have I actually written myself new traumatic scars to carry around inside me? An interesting thought, but more interesting to me is that as I get healthier and Anita does not, it becomes a fight to work her issues when they’re no longer mine. And harder yet, not to rain my new issues on her, when she does not share them with me. Her life is enough of a mess, I don’t really want to make it harder with my own issues, she has enough of her own, and enough of my old issues that it just wouldn’t be fair.

So, I’m left searching for a fictional place to put new issues, new growth, new pain, new pleasures, but not Anita. So why not the Meredith Gentry series then? Because Merry was created out of the pain and isolation of my first marriage, and honestly, the first seven books laid that ghost for me. Book eight, “Divine Misdemeanors” is my attempt to see if I could write in Merry’s world without that pain to spur. I could, but it’s not as satisfying to me as a writer. There are still stories for Merry and the men, but I have to let her come to me with her own issues, her own desires, and the two of us have to find things that interest us both so we can move forward. Again, I had no idea when I created Merry and her world why she came to me, or what her emotional purpose was for me as a writer. By the time I got through about five books, I was aware, but I knew the story arc enough to muscle through to the end. I love her world and all her men, but she and I need to find common ground.

But I have new issues and I don’t want to fuck up Anita’s life to work them, she has enough things that don’t work, thank you, I’m not adding my shit to it. So what is a writer to do? I’ve been working at a new character for awhile, a note here, a sentence there, and a new world. I realize now that maybe this has all been waiting for me to find new pain, new joy, new issues to work on paper. Until this moment the characters were fascinating, the world was so cool, but every time I sat down to write on it, it was lifeless. It was character studies, it was world building, it was plot, but there was no life to it. I needed that extra spark of creation, and I think, maybe, I’ve found it. That extra spark for me is a mix of pleasure and pain. The overwhelming joy of love, and the unutterable loss of it. I think that’s it. I think, it’s a, by George, I think I have it moment. I think we have life, at last, in a new world.

I hope this gives me a place and a format to take some new demons for a walk – younger, more eager, so there are more of them in a tangle of leashes pulling me on. My older, bigger demons are still here, but they’re more tame, maybe just by the familiarity of them, as the body can grow accustomed to physical pain until the mind reroutes, ignores most days, so old traumas. Your mind just begins to either work around them, or accept them. As I embrace my shadow self, and accept all of myself, and know true peace, there are new challenges, new things to learn, new ways to grow and I need a new character, a new world to do that in. I think I have it, and if I do, then I’ll know what drives me from the very first page, I’ll know what demons are nipping and playing at my feet. I’ll still play with Anita and company, because those are some major demons and if I don’t take them out for a run periodically my head grows dark and my life with it. But they’re big dogs, and they run on a lose leash at my side, not ahead of me, but beside me, my companions, part of me always and forever, I think, at least this lifetime. I’ve made peace with some pretty ugly things inside myself and in my life, and it’s okay, in fact, it’s good. Time to scare up some younger pups, a different breed, one I’m not familiar with, and have no idea how to tame. Time to learn all over again how to run the obstacle course with a new pack of demons nipping at my heels. Time to exercise them and me, until in a few months, or years, they’ll run at my side, too.