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I stood on the edge of the Mississippi River yesterday, inches from deep, muddy brown of it. The wind was fresh and tasted of spring as it played with my hair. The hair was perfectly curled to match the make-up I was wearing. It was the end of the video shoot yesterday, and I looked fabulous, but then with this much care and attention you almost have to work hard at looking bad. I’d already seen the play back earlier and had to admit I looked good. It went against all the insecurities that had been screaming in my head at six that morning as I got up to get ready for make-up, hair, and interviews. I knew at least one of those voices; my grandmother. She’d told me my entire childhood that I wasn’t pretty. That I better learn to take care of myself because no man ever would. The level of devastation when your only parent tells you something like that is fairly high, but good things came out of it in the end. I believed I wasn’t that attractive so I decided I better be smart and work hard and get my ass out of there. I wasn’t planning to get married, so the only person I could depend on was me. Also, I was raised that it mattered what I could do around the house not what I looked like. I wouldn’t have a manicure until I was in my thirties, because it was more important to lift that fifty pound bag of rock salt than to worry about chipping a nail. In the end it’s given me a guy’s attitude towards appearance and I have to say it’s a more user-friendly attitude than most women’s. It’s less punishing; usually. Another voice in my head was the first man I ever loved. He told me I was pretty, but not beautiful, then preceded to tell me what women he thought were beautiful. They were all between five-eight and six feet tall, blond, and very Nordic looking. All things I would never be, so that was not a good moment. He wasn’t breaking up with me by the way, and he didn’t understand why the truth bothered me. He would finally get his tall, blue-eyed, blonde, and I would go on to be much happier with someone else. It was those couple of relationships that were important to me emotionally, and the men so enamored of me at first, growing disinterested, and that thought in my head, "If I were beautiful enough, sexy enough, this wouldn’t be happening." I’ve actually had a couple of men tell me they didn’t want me because I was too sexual, that my appetite was too much. You think you need to be sexier to keep one relationship and the next one thinks those skills are too agressive and all you want them for is sex. Sometimes you can’t win for loosing. I know intellectually that it wasn’t about me in the end, but the men themselves. It was their own issues that drove us apart and made them act as they did, but that’s cold logic and it’s not cold while the pain is fresh. I know that no one, male or female, can hold someone if they are determined not to work on the relationship. Intellectually I know that, but yesterday morning wasn’t about thinking; it was about feelings. They can be treacherous lying little things, feelings, because under stress they can go back to times in your life where you weren’t as happy, or secure, and they will beat you to death with those old memories.

I tried on two different outfits and let Carri pick the one that would look best on camera. Then I sat down in the chair and let Priscilla do her magic. No one does my hair and make-up as good as she does. The picture of Jon and I on the blog with us together is another day when she dolled us up, and everyone says it’s the best picture we’ve ever taken together. Jon was going to be on camera for some of the interview so he got in the chair when I got up. They’d take me first by myself so he’d be ready to join me later. The sound tech clipped my microphone on, and they checked the lights, cameras, etc . . . and off we went. I talked by myself for two hours, give or take. It was good. Ian the director asked his questions off camera and helped put me at ease. It wasn’t like I hadn’t talked about my books and how I write before, though perhaps never so continuously. They won’t use all of it, of course, but will use it to make a smaller piece. You always film way more than you use on anything large, or small.

By the end of the day which was about four, or so, because of planes to be caught to the coast, I was feeling much better. It’s hard to be "on" that long and keep it natural and charming, but I’d done my best and everyone was happy. Ian and the crew had been very pleased that I could take direction and hit my mark. We did all my parts in no more than three takes, most of the third takes were small changes that Ian asked for, and it just looked better on the playback. Carri asked me if I wanted to help scout camera shots in the second location, and I said the truth, "I don’t "see" in camera yet. I trust you to tell me what it’s going to look like, it’s one of the reasons I hired you." If you hire someone for their expertise, then get out of their way and let them do their job. I treated Ian the same way when he gave me direction. If someone inspires my confidence then I am happy to let them lead me where I need to go. Yes, it is that inspire confidence part that sometimes I have a hard time finding in people, but not yesterday. Yesterday we had a lot of good people that inspired a lot of confidence. It was all good.

By day’s end we were on the Riverfront which in Anita’s world is Blood Square where most of the vampire clubs are located, among them Guilty Pleasures. Ian wanted to see the Riverfront with it’s cobblestones, gaslights, and atmosphere. It was only after I was walking on the same streets that I’d first been inspired by that I told him that this was the section of St. Louis that helped me shape Anita’s world in GUILTY PLEASURES. If I hadn’t been invited to a friend’s bachelorette party down on the Landing where there were male strippers would Guilty Pleasures the fictional strip club exisist? I don’t know. And if Jean-Claude’s first business had not been a male strip club would the books have been less sensuous, would the sexual overtones have been less from the beginning? There’s no way to tell really, but as I stood by the river and listened to the water lap against the shore, I remembered the first time I stood there. It was night then, and the weight of the river seems heavier with the water black and stretching out into the darkness. It was lonelier, even with the other bachelorettes happily drunk in the dark with me. My job ended up being to keep the very drunk bride from doing anything unfortunate, since I wasn’t drinking. (Yes, Anita and I shared that experience.) I had a moment that night to stand there and feel something on the breeze; an idea maybe, a whisper of something that called to my muse and me. A happy accident you might say, but Ian, the director, and I talked yesterday about how if you’re walking your path, doing the work you’re supposed to be doing, making the best choices you can, that serendipity becomes your friend, and things roll almost eerily together and simply work out. Yesterday we filmed part of the promotional video for the seventeenth Anita Blake novel, SKIN TRADE, in the same place where the inspiration for the first book had come to me. Better yet the director didn’t know he’d chosen the spot until we were already filming there, and I told him after we were nearly finished. It was one of those moments that I’ve been having lately where everything just comes together and feeling right is too small a phrase for it. If only some of the growing pains to get to those magic moments weren’t so damned painful.