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SKIN TRADE is safely in my editor and copy editor’s hands.  Normally, even after a book goes off I still make notes on other projects.  I’m always doing something.  Not this time.  I’m done.  I feel like a shell washed up on the beach; empty and spent.  There is no one home for a few days.  A beach and an island doesn’t sound bad.  Somewhere I could simply stare off into the ocean and not think.  Jon and I are leaving town for a long weekend.  Not beaches, but somewhere else.  No, I’m not going to tell you where, and you know why.  We’re going to visit with friends, eat leisurely meals, shop, and just immerse ourselves in something different.  I feel raw and wild, like I’ve walked through some cataclysm and come out the other side.  You stand and blink, surprised that you’re still alive, still here, that it didn’t take all of you, because it felt like it was.  It felt like it was eating me alive, drowning me.  I’ll write later why this book was so hard, or part of why, I may never know exactly why SKIN TRADE was this difficult.  What I do is in some ways mysterious, even to me.  Jon and I are still tired.  We both ache as if we have, indeed, been through something physical.  He stayed up with me, and refused to throw in the towel until I did, every night.  Now we’re both doing the thousand yard stare.  I’m caught between a desire to weep, and wilder impulses.  It’s like that part of me that keeps everything under such tight control is off-line.  I’m saying the things that shouldn’t be said, outloud.  It’s like everything is on the table, everything is possible.  No, more like I need to find something else to drown myself in; the touch, feel, sensory overload of something else to cleanse me of this book.  This one felt like a death, as if I left something of myself along the way, something broken that I’ve finally torn away and shed.  I feel lighter, more free, and a little mad.  If I was ever going to run howling at the moon, this would be it.  This mood will pass, as other moods have passed, but some books are so real, so alive, that they change the writer.  Sometimes in the writing of it, you transform not just your fictional characters, but yourself.  A writer never knows which book will do that alchemy of spirit.  Some books that are hard, are still just books, but every once in awhile you hit one like this, and you stare around at the light, as if you’ve traveled through a great darkness, and had forgotten that there was real sunshine to touch your skin.