Update:
I’ve removed the story for now. I’ll let you know when it is available again.
-Laurell
I can’t fix everything that’s gone wrong this election cycle, or elsewhere in the world, but I can write a brand new Anita Blake story to share with all of you. I’m putting it up for free for a few days to share some smiles and some good news, because we need more fun in our lives.
I wrote this weeks ago, but was so busy actually writing, and living that I forgot to post it. 
It’s raining here today. The kind of rain that settles in like a guest before the cozy fire with a cup of hot tea and a good book. It’s that kind of day, but I can’t curl up with someone else’s book yet, because I have my own to finish. Crimson Death is written, but now it’s page proofs which are the last chance to catch any small mistakes. If you find any large ones that would require pages to fix, or even paragraphs, you are out of luck. The book has been to the printers and these are the finished sheets, so small changes like the fact that I keep trying to give Cardinale green eyes to match Damian’s, when she is introduced books ago with blue eyes, that can be caught and changed. You can add, or cut a sentence here and there, but beyond that the book is the book – it’s done. But like so often in publishing, it’s done, but it’s not. Crimson Death is almost set in stone, but here are page proofs to show that the stone can still be polished a bit more.
I have now read and reread this book so many times that I’m having to fight not to change things just to change things, so it will read differently. I’m somewhere between bored with it and terrified that I’ll miss something that will haunt me later. Today is the last day though, tomorrow the page proofs MUST be in New York. My editor, my publisher, the entire long suffering production team, everyone who has touched this book and helped it along are waiting for me to finish this one last pass through the manuscript, which now looks like the final typeset of the book. It’s still loose pages when printed out, but it is now set like it will appear between the covers of the book. The art department has that lovely cover waiting to go around these pages like a lover’s hug to hold it safe, warm, and made to feel pretty. The book is done, but it’s not.
Crimson Death more than any other book in memory has been done, until I realize it’s not done – yet. That first ending that didn’t work at all. That second climatic ending that in retrospect didn’t seem all that climatic. My old editor retired happily, and I’m happy for her, but my new editor and I are still finding our feet. I think I may owe her flowers after the grueling literary slog this book has become on our end. Or maybe we just need to meet at a bar somewhere and have a drink, or three. I don’t normally drink, but on the research trip to Ireland for Crimson Death, I finally learned to appreciate it. So cliche that I had to go to Ireland to learn to drink. This book is leaving me thinking that I might curl up in front of the fire on a rainy day with something a little harder than tea. Maybe some Glendalough whiskey shining amber in a crystal cut glass, while I finally put my feet up and get to read someone else’s book, but not yet.
I’ve been so busy trying to finish writing, Crimson Death the 25th Anita Blake novel that I forgot that Dead Ice the 24th Anita Blake novel is out in paperback today! No, wait yesterday, because that was April 26th. I have a serious case of, “writing this book is eating my brain.” There’s a surprise in the back of the paperback, not the usual preview from my next novel, but something different. It’s entitled, “Wounded’, and it’s an outtake scene, or a short story, or a novelette, or a long epilogue for Dead Ice. I’m honestly not sure which to call it, but it is a series of events that we talk about briefly in the denouement of Dead Ice but they all happen off stage. A lot of you told me you missed seeing Jean-Claude dancing at the wedding and wanted to see more about Manny Rodriquez and his family. Well, so did I, and I thought why not? Why can’t I write them out and share them with all of you? Why can’t we see all of it on stage in living color? So I started writing out this brief extra scene and it grew until it was more than a scene, more than a story, and closer to a short novel. At one point I thought it might be as long as my novels Jason and Micah, but it didn’t quite make that word count, thank goodness, so what to do with it? Someone, I can’t actually remember now if it was my agent, my editor, or me, suggested what if we put it in the back of the paperback. Great idea! So for those of you who have read Dead Ice and wanted some more it’s in the paperback now! For those who prefer paperback to hardback here’s your chance and with extra bonus content! But please do not read the extra until you’ve finished reading Dead Ice, because the bonus novelette is full of spoilers. You’ll find out who lives, who dies, who the villain is and how the mystery is solved. No, really, it’s full of spoilers! You have been warned, so if you read the new content before you’ve read Dead Ice the plot will be spoiled for you!!!! So enjoy Dead Ice out now in paperback and I hope the story, “Wounded”, helps satisfy your desire for more from Anita Blake and her world.
Crimson Death, the new Anita Blake novel, will be published on September 13, 2016. For those of you who follow my blog, you know I’m still writing the book, what you don’t know is that I finished it once already. I typed, The End, one glorious morning as I watched the sun rise; but once the euphoria of the writing high faded and I got some sleep, I knew something was wrong. I’d known something was wrong for weeks, maybe months, but definitely weeks. I was too close to finishing the book, so I ignored my muse and my characters arguing with me. One character in particular wasn’t happy. Damian, who started life as a Viking until one dark night he and his brothers in arms tried to raid the wrong castle. She-Who-Made-Him, a master vampire that traumatized him so badly he’s afraid to speak her name, held him as a virtual slave for centuries. She let him go, and he still doesn’t know why, but he was allowed to go to America where he became a manager at one of the hottest dance clubs in the country, Danse Macabre. In fact, he first appears in the book that introduces the club. The Killing Dance is the sixth book in the series, and this is Damian’s introduction:
“I TURNED to find another new vampire. He was tall and slender with skin the color of clean white sheets, but sheets didn’t have muscle moving underneath, sheets didn’t glide down the steps and pad godlike across a room. His hair fell past his shoulders, a red so pure it was nearly the color of blood. The color screamed against his paleness.”
Originally, I thought Crimson Death would be a short novel like my books, Micah and Jason, called Damian, but very quickly I realized it was going to be a big book. I believe my largest word count was 300,000 words. I’m one of those writers that writes long and then cuts, but this was excessive, even for me. It was another clue that my muse and I were debating with each other. The original plot had Damian kidnapped and Anita coming to his rescue. It would take me typing to the end, or what I thought was the end, to be willing to listen to my muse, and to Damian. He finally got through to me and not literally said, but basically told me, “I’ve been in the series since book six and now I’m finally getting my own story in book twenty-five and I’m just the damsel in distress. All those newer characters that have come on stage and been heroes, or major love interests, or something more than just the victim du jour, and now I’m just as unhappy, just as powerless, just as afraid as I began. Nineteen books and I haven’t grown at all.” He was right, and it was unusual for me, because I’m all about the character growth and letting my fictional friends have interesting lives, except for him. Damian had been almost static, I don’t know why, but he finally stepped up and threw the gauntlet down.
“You can do better than this,” he told me, and he was right. I turned my plot on its ear and now Damian is going back to Ireland to help solve a mystery. He’s going back to face his greatest fears to save lives as a consultant with the Irish authorities about their sudden vampire problem. Sudden, because Ireland isn’t supposed to have any vampires. It’s one of the few countries on the planet that has no folklore about them. The only dead that walk in Irish myths are ghosts and the shades of heroes. But Damian knows differently, he knows that there is a vampire so powerful and so frightening that to even speak her name is to risk her power seeking you out, even across an ocean. She-Who-Made-Him says the vampires plaguing Dublin are not her doing, and that she’s grown weaker since Damian left her side. U. S. Marshal Ted Forrester, AKA Edward, is already there acting as a consultant. He wants fellow marshal Anita Blake to come help hunt the undead and to bring the only vampire that might know the truth about what’s happening. Anita thought Damian was going home, but Ireland was never home, it was the place where he died.
Dawn came in with pink, cotton candy clouds here in Atlanta today. The book I’m currently writing was too loud in my head for me to sleep in, so I took everything out to a less crowded part of the rooms, opened the drapes for the view and wrote. We’re here for DragonCon again, and for those who don’t know what it is, well . . . DragonCon is Geek Carnival, Stan Lee called it Geek Mardi Gras, but my husband, Jonathon, said later, “Any town can have Mardi Gras, but there’s only one Carnival.” He’s right, and for anyone that loves Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, whether it’s short stories, books, television, or movies, this is the place to get your geek on. They’re expecting 65,000 attendees, but it may run higher. Normally this is a break from the everyday routine for me, but this year it feels more like an interruption than a vacation. 
Me at my Q & A panel
We went to Ireland and Britain for a month, we got home two weeks ago, and now we’re at DragonCon. The research trip was fabulous and absolutely necessary to the new book I’m writing, because at least half the book is set in Ireland, which I’d never visited. I’ve had this book idea for a few years, but kept putting it off because of the amount of travel and research that was needed, and there was another book set in England that I kept putting off because I needed a second research trip for it. Two books that I kept shoving back down the creative que, because I didn’t want to take time out of my actual writing schedule to travel for the research, but finally my imagination said, “The Irish book is next. Get your ass to Ireland, its time.”
I’ve tried to argue with my muse in the past, and I’ve won. I have successfully talked my muse and myself out of writing books in a certain order, not this plot, but that plot. I’ve done it and the books themselves are good, but after I’d forced my muse to write a book that it wasn’t ready for my writing process would be fucked up for months. The closest to true writers block I’ve ever had is when I don’t write the book, or short story, that my muse says is next in the creative pipeline. I can force my muse into harness and make her help me write the book that is due, the book I think should be next, but once that book is in New York then she turns on me, or I turn on myself, or my imagination does. Whatever you want to call it, that thing that makes me a happy, working writer balks like a huge draft horse that you need to pull your wagon. The horse holds up its hoof and says, “I’m hurt, can’t you see that? I’m lame. You’ve forced me to work when I wasn’t ready, on a road that I wasn’t ready to walk on, and I hurt myself. See?”
No, my muse doesn’t come to me like a horse, or talk that directly to me, but the metaphore is accurate. Sometimes my muse pushes me from behind like the hand on a swing sending me higher and higher into the cloudless blue sky – those are days of gold and joy when the words flow like magic. But most often the muse pulls me along, or we work together picking our way through the rocky field of a book, while the plow blade catches on rocks, old tree roots, and other nameless debris. When it works well my muse and I are a great team. We work well together she and I, or he and I, though muses in mythology are traditionally female, so I usually say, she. I am not referring to real life muses, as in a person that inspires an artist to create, that’s an entirely different topic, and not the kind of muse I’m referencing. When I say, muse here, I mean that spark inside an artist that helps them create and finish a work. Lots of people get good ideas for stories, even great ideas, but very few actually write the story down, finish it, rewrite it until its ready to send to a publishing house and an editor, and then send it off. My muse doesn’t just inspire me, she helps me work, or maybe helps me be inspired day after day. Now, there are days when she doesn’t show up at work on time, but I’m still at my desk typing and eventually she hears the activity and comes to look over my shoulder. Sometimes she thinks, “Good enough, and sometimes she thinks, we can do better.” Ray Bradbury once said, “The muse cannot resist a working writer.” He’s right.
Normally DragonCon is something that refreshes me and my muse. We come to play, but this year the trip to Europe was so long and full of so much information that I haven’t finished processing all of it in my mind. I have a stack of research books that I found in Ireland that is probably taller than me if we could safely stack them atop each other. I need time in my office to write the front end of the book set here in America, as I read and go over my research notes and pictures from Ireland. I’ve never tried to do this much research at the same time I’m writing the book, but it seems to be working for this particular book. I have a process for each book and most of that is the same for each project, but every book is a little bit different, too. It’s like dating, people can take you to the same restaurant, but the experience is totally unique, because the person beside you is totally unique. From dinner table conversation to whether you’re both comfortable holding hands, or if there will be sex afterwards, or not. Books are like that, too, each one unique, though it all has to be researched, written, rewritten, edited, and published, so the process is the same, but different. Again, like dating, because if all dates were the same you’d sleep with them all, or marry them all, and you don’t. The difference with writing books as opposed to dating is that you have to cross the finish line with each book, so you have to come across, or get engaged, or walk down the aisle, or whatever you feel is “finished”. On a real life date you can have dinner, shake hands, and go home alone, because that’s all you want to do, but with a book – I have to find a way to like my own book enough to want to do a hell of a lot more than just shake hands at the end.
For me, even a day off from a book when it’s going well can derail me for a week, or more. I was so tired when we all finally went to sleep last night here at DragonCon, but I woke early with the book demanding to be written. I wanted to finish the scene I’d been working on yesterday, which I did. It is the first time I’ve ever worked successfully at DragonCon, because like I said, it’s usually a welcome break, but not this year. This year my head is full of Ireland and everything we saw, did, and learned there. I keep thinking about all the research books. Some I absolutely need to read before I get to the second part of the book, but others maybe useful, or may just be more information that doesn’t directly impact the book I’m writing. There is even a third kind of research that never makes it visibly onto the page, but is important to have in my head, because it helps me write this book better. I can’t explain the difference in the types of reading, or research, but I know it is different, and I know that sometimes the difference is slim, but incredibly important to me as a writer.
Now I’m in the room alone with all my loves out doing different things. They are enjoying being in costume, getting their pictures taken, or visiting with friends that involves panels, parties, LARPing, and other things that I don’t really do, or understand. I’m in something cool and bed worthy with the lights down low so I can look out at the spectacular view of nighttime Atlanta from the room’s desk. Its a great view to write to, and that’s what I’m doing. I’ve got headphones in listening to the same music that I’ve been listening to at home as I write the book. (I always pick music for a book and listen to it until I burn myself out on it. It can take me years to be able to listen to an album, or artist again, and sometimes the music is so wedded to a particular book that I’m never able to listen to it for simple enjoyment again.) The moment that music comes on my muse and I are ready to go, because that is the music for this book. Some writers work better to silence, but for me, I need music most of the time. One thing I am doing differently is writing on my iPad. I wrote most of Dead Ice, the last Anita Blake novel, on my iPad because we weren’t home for the winter last year, so my main desk top wasn’t with me. It was the first book mostly written on the iPad, and now this book is also being written mostly on it, because I knew I would be traveling a lot while I wrote it, and I thought that keeping the same computer would help. It has, and its reminded me that I wrote most of my early books on some of the first portable computers. It was how I could write at restaurants, or playgrounds, when my daughter was little. It’s helping me a great deal to write on the same instrument on planes, in hotels, everywhere. Same music, same computer, same book, the continuity is helping me a lot.
I tried to go down and play with my people tonight, but the crowds got to me. Too many moving parts, too many things to keep track of, its just too much chaos tonight, so I kissed them good-bye and went back to the room. My security has me tucked in for the night, and I am content with that. I got plenty of attention today at the signing and panel. It was great seeing everyone, and thanks for everyone who stood in line for hours for the signing. You guys rock!
So at one of the biggest geek parties of the year I’m sitting in a darkened room by myself typing. The book is thunderous in my head, and I’m hoping to get another chapter done tonight, before my people get back from their panels, parties, and costume fun. I’m just not in the mindset to play, I need to work – I want to work. But then if I didn’t actually enjoy being alone in a room with just my imaginary friends and me, I wouldn’t be a writer, and I certainly wouldn’t be a Best Selling novelist with over forty books to my credit. I’ve been trying to learn to play, and I’m better at it than I was when I started, but in the end writing is my play. I think I forgot that for awhile, and I got confused with deadlines that were punishing, so that I began to see the writing as a punishment and not a reward. If you do anything too long and too hard, you can take the joy of it, and I did that to myself and my muse. We worked in harness far past our ability to plow a straight line and take care of ourselves. Now, I’m remembering that books are my play, whether its reading them, or writing them. My muse and I sit in the darkened room together, we are writing, and we are content.
A month long trip to Ireland and England and the most asked question since we returned to family and friends in the states is this: What was your favorite part? I’ve answered it differently, by simply throwing out whatever first comes to mind like a word association.
What was your favorite part of the trip?
The Wicklow Mountains in Ireland.
One of the many waterfalls we saw in Glendalough, in the Wicklow Mountains.
What was your favorite part?
Writing in Dublin. (I wrote better there than anywhere else.)
What was your favorite?
Introducing Spike and Genevieve to pate in Dublin. They have dubbed it smooth, creamy, spreadable meat butter.
Your favorite?
Eating at Gordon Ramsey’s flagship restaurant, Restaurant Gordon Ramsey, in London. It has three Michelin stars and now I know why. An amazing experience and will likely get a blog of its own later.
Favorite?
British Museum. Jonathon summed it up, “Every little emperor’s dream of avarice.” It was beyond amazing. It will also be getting it’s own blog later.
Fav?
Glastonbury Abbey, where the calling of crows led me to my first ever badger sett hidden under a huge oak tree. It turns out I followed the birds in the wrong end of the path. If I’d come in the proper way there was a sign to tell me the badgers were there, but honestly I prefer having found it the way I did. I followed the birds trying to see what they were fussing about, and then suddenly, badgers! I often find the most magical moments are the unplanned ones.
?
That moment when I stood in a town I’d never known about, at a ruin I’d never heard about, and knew that my muse had been right. This was the place to put the monster. My imagination had whispered the name of this place to me when, to my knowledge, I had never known it even existed. I haven’t had that happen since the ninth Anita Blake novel, Obsidian Butterfly, when Edward insisted he lived in New Mexico, even though I’d never visited the state. I remember arguing with him, “I created you, how can you live somewhere I know nothing about?” I lost that argument, because he was absolutely right and I knew it the moment I stepped off the plane in Albuquerque. He still lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ireland took me longer to get my research feet under me, and I’ll be blogging in more detail about that process later, but once I got into the swing of things it was like that moment in New Mexico – this was it. I know where the monster is, where the bodies are buried, where the crime will happen, and who Anita follows to Ireland.
Are the above really my favorite moments of the trip? Yes and no. They are some of my favorite moments, but not all of them. I’ll be blogging about more highlights and moments of inspiration, craziness, research, and sheer happy accidents over the next few weeks, but this gives you a taste of the trip. Yes, I have been deliberately vague about where the Irish book, as I called it for a long time, is set, because I’m not ready to share exact locations yet. I have a book to finish writing and it feels like if I give too much detail now on the blog that it will derail some of the energy that is driving the book forward. I need to be immersed in the fictional version of the town, countryside, ruins, etc . . . before I discuss the reality too much. In fact, I have pages yet to write today, a scene to complete, a fight to finish, but first, the reality of dogs and breakfast for them and myself and then back to my fictional world where dogs never interrupt and breakfast rarely seems to happen.
Blog – Irish trip & research
I wrote this blog before we left for research, but security issues being what they are, I’m going to be posting some of the blogs out of order. It’s a shame a few bad apples spoil things, but there it is.
I’m sitting in my office, just after dawn. The sky is still all light and shining with the blue color only now fighting its way through all that LIGHT! The air feels cool and calm, the day stretching ahead full of promise and possibilities, and yet . . . but . . . There’s always an, and yet, or a but, or so it seems of late.
We are supposed to be getting on a plane for Ireland today, yes you read that right. We are headed to the Emerald Isle. We’ll see you all in London in August, but we’re leaving early for research. The book I’m currently working on is mostly set in Ireland, and because I’ve never, ever been there I’d put off this story for years. Wait, I kept telling it, and it waited. Don’t push, I said, and it didn’t push. Other ideas pushed hard and fast and paid no attention to my orders, or my requests, or even my pleading with them, because they were ready to be born, so I wrote them as they clamored to be written. Story ideas for me are like baby birds in a nest, the loudest voice and tallest held mouth gets the worm, and will fledge first, but unlike real life where the tiniest nestling can starve and die while it’s bolder siblings thrive, ideas don’t die for me. They live, they wait, and they bide their time.
This book has found it’s time. It’s eager, excited, demanding to be written, and the damn thing is set in Ireland. It’s set in a specific part of the country that I have never seen or even read about before the book decided it was set mostly there. I’ve only had this happen once before and that was with my book, Obsidian Butterfly. It is set in New Mexico, which I’d never visited. My character, Edward, insisted that he lived in New Mexico. In fact he insisted he lived somewhere between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. I argued with him. “You’re a fictional character. I made you up. You cannot possibly live in a place that I’ve never seen or even read about. You’re part of me, how can you go some place I’ve never been?”
When I stepped off the plane in New Mexico and saw those low, black mountains, that desolate, near alien landscape, I said, “Well, son of a bitch, you do live here.”
I have no idea how Edward, alias U. S. Marshal Ted Forrester, decided he lived in a place I’d never seen or read much about. He’s always been a character that went off on his own, and then would come back and tell me what he was doing, and some of what he had done. He keeps his secrets, even from me. Which is a very peculiar feeling for a writer, since I’m supposed to be making him up as I go, but somehow he has enough life of his own that he tells me what he’s doing, and surprises the hell out of me, a lot.
I should have known that Edward would be in a book that was insisting on being set in a part of the world I had never seen. I can’t say I haven’t read much about Ireland, because I have been a serious lover of this section of the world for a long time. I’ve read the myths and folklore of Ireland, Scotland, England, and though I know they are part of England now, Cornwall, Wales, and almost every part of these myth-ridden islands. I was a serious Anglophile in my teens and dreamed of visiting all of it someday, though I don’t think I ever believed I’d manage it. Traveling to such far off places was for other people, not for girls living in the middle of farm country, raised below poverty level, so it turned out. I knew we didn’t have money, but I never felt poor in the sense that the word, “poverty”, makes me think. I never felt impoverished, I just knew we didn’t have money. I’m not sure anyone I ever knew as a young child ever traveled out of the country for anything except military service.
I’ve been to England twice. I’ve seen Rome and Milan in Italy. I’ve been to Paris and found it as romantic as advertised, which I didn’t think possible. Admittedly, I was with Jonathon and almost anywhere I go with him is romantic. But we both really enjoyed Paris and look forward to going back and taking Genevieve and Spike with us. I could live for a few months in Rome, or Paris, but strangely didn’t enjoy London all that much. What captured me in England was the countryside. Glastonbury, Avebury, and all the Salisbury Plain area spoke to our heart.
The closest we came to Ireland on that trip was seeing it from the air. I remember thinking, wow, it’s so green. This time we get to see all that verdant green in person. I’m so excited, and a little intimidated. First by the flight, because I’m terrified of flying, and second, by trying to write about a country I’ve never seen before. There’s always a pressure to get it right on paper. I’ve already started making contacts with people I need to help me with researching the book I’m writing, the book you’ll read next summer, and research in England for a book after that. Though both of these books are Anita Blake books, I’ve also had Merry Gentry whispering around in my head, or rather other characters from her books. Merry is silent, content with her new babies and trying to find happiness after grief. But her world is moving around in my head as I look over the books on Ireland that I used for research in her stories. This trip might make the Merry fans get the next story sooner, might, I don’t know yet. All I know for certain is the two books I am absolutely researching while I travel across the pond.
My first signing in England will be August 7, at Forbidden Planet in London from 1700-1900. See you all there!
I will also be appearing at Nine Worlds on August 8 in London.
Saturday 8 August.
So for all you fans that have been asking, “When will you do a signing in Europe?” These events are for you, so come out and see me, because I’m finally here and I don’t know when I’ll be back.
The photo with this blog is of my husband, Jonathon, and our daughter, Trinity. Sometimes I forget how very small she was when I divorced and was suddenly dating again. Jonathon was the only boyfriend I ever introduced her to, because he was the only one I was ever serious about. I think we married within a year of this picture. My second, his first, and he became a stepdad before he was ever a dad. He became Daddy-Jon because Trinity wanted a way to keep her two dads separate when she talked about them, so it was Daddy-Jon and Daddy-G. Trinity truly feels she has two fathers, and Jon felt that he had a great kid and there was no need for a second one, because biology doesn’t make you a dad. Being there daily makes you a dad. Jonathon watched the Barbie Nutcracker movie twelve times in a row when Trinity had the flu once. Only a parent does that for his sick kid. He taught her how to fence using boffer weapons so that she was so deadly in stage combat at drama camp that she had to bow out. “The other girl just kept dropping her guard, mom, I couldn’t help myself.” A dad is the person who comes limping in with the limping child after that infamous bicycle riding lesson. A dad is all that and so much more.
It is through watching first my ex, and then Jonathon, with Trinity that I began to understand what a father does because I never had one of my own. I was a fatherless child, and by age six I was a motherless one, too. My grandmother raised me without any men around the house, so I had no clue what a father, or a husband for that matter, was supposed to do. I always felt very left out on this holiday as a child. I think it was one of the reasons I worked hard to make sure my ex stayed invested in Trinity’s life, so that she had two dads where I’d had none. The three of us even went to parent-teacher conferences for Trinity. There was no fighting amongst us at school events, because my ex-husband and I both agreed that our daughter didn’t divorce anyone, that was us, so we vowed never to bad mouth each other in front of her and to act like civilized grownups at school functions or anything that involved our child. I am happy to say that with almost no exceptions we accomplished that. Was it easy? No. Was it worth it for our kid? Yes.
Trinity is twenty now, but she still has two dads for Father’s Day. I’ve now watched dear friends dance with their fathers at their weddings, and thanks to Genevieve and her father, I’m learning that even when you’re very grownup, a dad is still important to a daughter. Thanks to Jonathon and Spike I’m learning about sons and fathers, too. A dad is someone you can turn to for advice, someone you just want to keep involved in your life, because you love them.
People keep asking me why I haven’t shown my fictional character Anita Blake on stage with her dad, and the honest answer is because I didn’t know what a dad was for, or how a grown child interacts with one. I would take my character Jason back to visit his father in Blood Noir, but that father was dying of cancer and their relationship was strained at best, so it didn’t really force me to show a healthy father/child relationship. Then in Affliction we went back home with Micah and it was his father who was dying in the hospital of a mysterious disease. Micah loved his father, but the dad spent most of the book unconscious, so I didn’t have to deal with it on stage much. It would take me a year after I wrote Affliction and had fans complaining that I had another father in hospital like Jason’s father, before I both realized that it was similar and understood why I’d done it. The short answer is that I don’t know what a father is for, and I certainly don’t know what a healthy father/daughter relationship is supposed to be. I realize now that is why Anita’s family has never been on stage. I don’t know what a family is for like that, not a dad-mom-sibling kind of family, because I never had one of those. Maybe as Trinity gets older, I’ll understand it more. Maybe watching Jonathon, Spike, and Genevieve interact with their families as adults will help me understand what it’s supposed to be like to be a grown woman that still has a relationship with their family of birth – the family that raised them.
It’s zombie day! No, it’s not a new book, it’s the first day after tour. It was great seeing all of you across the country for the Dead Ice Tour! You guys let me know just how excited you were to have the newest Anita Blake novel in your hands, and that was a lot of excitement! I loved answering your questions in Atlanta, New York, Houston, Dayton, and Lexington. You asked for me to tour some cities we hadn’t done in a few years, so I talked to my publisher and we did it! You guys came out in amazing numbers in every city, and we took selfies so you could see yourselves being awesome! (Okay, I forgot to take a selfie in a couple of cities; my bad.) But thank you for showing us so much positive energy! Thank you for loving Anita and all the rest of my imaginary friends so much!
But no matter how wonderful the tour was, there is always a zombie day after we get back. What is a zombie day? It’s a day after some major event like finals week, or finishing that huge project at work, or typing, ‘The End’ of a novel, or coming home from tour. Shorter tours are easier to recover from but no matter what there is always a day when I stare off into space at nothing in particular, can’t concentrate worth a damn, and am more tired than I thought possible outside of the first few weeks of a newborn baby coming home. All important decisions should wait until this phase of post-tour recovery is past, trust me on that one. Sometimes I try to ignore zombie day and muscle through, or at least try to ignore it, but I’ve learned that’s a mistake, so now I just let myself be as exhausted as I actually feel.
The best use of zombie day is to sleep in, maybe take a hot bath, and a hot tub is a bonus, drink lots of water and juice, take more Airborne and Emergen-C, and rest. Now, add that Jonathon and I both usually catch some bug on tour, so we’re actually sick on top of it all . . . and the only thing to do is nothing much. Dozing on the couch covered in sleeping dogs with a movie I’ve seen before playing as background noise is one of my favorite things to do when I’m this tired and sick. I usually do mysteries for the videos, but today a David Suchet Poroit, “Five Little Pigs,” actually had me crying, even though I’ve seen and loved the movie a dozen times. (Did I mention I can be a very emotional zombie on zombie day?) I needed a true feel good movie, so “Despicable Me” fit the bill. “Despicable Me 2” is currently playing, because it’s one of the few sequels that’s just as fun as the original.
I’m still occasionally trying to cough up a lung, but I’m feeling a little bit better than last night when I got off the plane. Happily, I didn’t catch whatever this is until after I hugged the last fan, shook the last hand, and answered the last question. So, whoever shared more than a hug with Jonathon and me, I hope you’re feeling better today, too. A lot of you asked why I’m not doing more cities, and the answer is simple: the longer the tour the more zombie days at the end of it. Shorter tours mean I can be back to writing pages on the next book, and that’s what all of you wanted the most on tour – the next-next book.
