Tag: Dead Ice

Dead Ice: Richard

Here’s the second in the blog series leading up to the June 9, 2015 release of Dead Ice.  Since we started with Jean-Claude, it had to be Richard next.

 
Richard by Brett Booth
Question: Is the character of Richard Zeeman based on your ex-husband?  

Answer: No.

Secrets to Share:  This was a rumor that I never saw coming, because it was just so not reality. My ex-husband’s sister thought it was the funniest thing ever that people thought her big brother was the basis for Richard.  I think that Richard’s skin tone might be the same as my ex, but there the resemblance ends.  Personality wise, Richard is actually closer to me when I was just out of college with my BS in Biology.  But he, like all my characters that truly come to life on the page, has grown and changed in ways I never saw coming and certainly didn’t plan. He’s become his own man, for better or worse.  
Question: Are Richard and Anita ever going to marry?

Answer: Highly doubtful, I’d just say no, but I’ve been wrong so much about my own character’s personal lives that I’m hedging my bet.

Secrets to Share:  In fact, I think one of the reasons Anita and Richard didn’t end up together was that I created him to be the perfect husband for her, or thought I did.  The more I tried to push the two of them together, the more they fought it, but my original plan was for them to marry and live happily ever after.  So much for me being the omnipotent Deity of my fictional universe. When Richard was created I could never have dreamed where Anita’s life would go, or my own for that matter. Fiction doesn’t mirror fact, but we’ve both done our own version of going from the conservative “good girl” to the much happier people we are today. As for you small, but vocal minority that are still urging me to kill off Jean-Claude and Micah, so that Anita can ride off into the sunset with Richard – no.  Not only no, but absolutely, positively, not happening. Move on, nothing to see here. 
Question: Will Richard ever find another person to be his one and only love? 

Answer: I don’t know for certain, he’s surprised me too much over the years for me to say yes, or no.  

Secrets to Share: I hope he does, and I have a few potential women in mind, for him it will have to a woman if it’s a new character.  I think if any man could float his boat enough to have a full-fledged relationship with them then Jean-Claude would be that man. Richard is having a bondage and submission relationship with Asher but no sex.  It meets a lot of bondage needs for both of them, but I don’t think either of them would want to actually date each other.  What works great in the dungeon doesn’t always work outside of it.  I still have hopes that Richard, Jean-Claude, and Anita might be a fully functioning menage a trois, but I think too much has happened for it to be what it might once have been, more’s the pity.  I keep hoping that special female werewolf will come along for him but he keeps wanting to date women that have no preternatural ties which doesn’t really work for the Ulfric, wolf king, of St. Louis.  He also keeps dating women who like pretty standard vanilla sex and that really isn’t what Richard likes.  I’ve even written a short story, “Shutdown,” where he tries to have his vanilla cake but keep his bondage cupcakes. I’ve had talks with people I was dating about polyamory and bondage, and I know people that seem to be successfully married to vanilla and, with full knowledge and permission of their spouse, they get their bondage needs met elsewhere; but it is not an easy talk to have and it takes a very special person to be okay with it.  I’m not sure Richard is ever going to find someone that special, but I hope so, because I’d really like him to be happy and content with his life and himself.  
Sneak Peek from Dead Ice:

Richard drew Jean-Claude in tighter against him and moved his other hand so that it was free, leaving room to wonder what he’d do if Asher tried to touch Jean-Claude.  It was the kind of thing you do when someone is touching your girlfriend too much in a bar, and Richard gave him the challenging look that went with it. It was a way of saying, Mine, stop touching it, without saying anything.

Dead Ice: Jean-Claude

In the lead up to Dead Ice hitting the shelves, I’m going to be doing a special blog series.  I’ll be answering three of the most common questions I get about a character.  I’ll be trying to include something not as commonly known with each answer. Then, you get a sneak peek of that character from Dead Ice. To kick off the blog series, we start with Jean-Claude – of course. 

    

Question: Is Jean-Claude named after Jean-Claude Van Damme? 

Answer: No.
Secret to share: In fact, Jean-Claude’s birth name wasn’t Jean-Claude. Vampires only had one name in Old Europe, so if there was already an older vampire with your name, your master could force you to pick a new name or even choose one for you. 
Quest: Why is Jean-Claude French?

Answer: Because he refused to be Spanish, the way I planned.
Secret to Share: Jean-Claude was first created in the late 1980’s.  That was close enough to my school days that I could still read Spanish and understand it if it was spoken to me – slowly.  Please, do not try to speak Spanish to me now, I am too out of practice.  My pronunciation must  still be good though, because Spanish speakers will still break into rapid Spanish if I answer any question in their native language. As for my knowledge of French, all I can do is apologize for all of it in the early Anita Blake novels because my language “expert” wasn’t nearly as good at French as they told me they were, and well, some phrases are just awful. As my own French has grown marginally better, even I don’t know what one or two phrases were meant to convey. *face palm* It taught me to be more certain that my experts in any field actually were experts. I still pronounce French badly, so much so that I’ve been told by more than one native French speaker that I can learn all the French I want, but I will never speak it as fluently and musically as I do Spanish.  In fact, I’ve been told that I speak French as if Spanish was my first language. It was my second, but apparently it has left it’s linguistic mark. 
Question: Didn’t I feel that making Jean-Claude French was too much Anne Rice’s territory, because of Interview with the Vampire?
Answer: Yes, I did, which is why I wanted him to be Spanish; but the harder I fought to force him into a nationality that he didn’t want, the more illusive he was on paper.  I couldn’t get my main vampire to cooperate on paper until I got out of his way and let him be French.  Only then did he show up in his full glory and write smoothly on paper.  He showed up in his typical black and white clothing with the frilly shirt, skin tight pants, and great boots.  I did not choose his clothes; he did.  Though in an effort to keep his clothes up to his standards I would watch the Fashion Channel for the first time and read my first copy of Vogue.  I joke that Jean-Claude taught me to walk in high heels; he helped me understand the magic of gliding in heels.  I don’t envision ever being as elegant as he is, but writing and living with him in my head for a couple of decades has helped up my grace and poise content.  Though he shakes his head over me sometimes, just like he does Anita. He’s been an interesting influence on both her fictional wardrobe and my real life one.  People will ask if my husband and I are in a band, or if we’re visiting from New York, as we get off the plane here in St. Louis.  I’m not sure exactly what it means that we get asked that so often, but I know that it’s Jean-Claude’s influence, or rather me writing him that’s changed the way I view clothes. 

Sneak Peek from Dead Ice:
“Perhaps modern people do not speak of it so bluntly, but it is the age-old game of chase and capture. There is always someone in a relationship who begins the hunt for someone’s heart, and the pursued must decide whether she wishes to be easily caught, or to be a long and difficult hunt.” He smiled when he said it.

I frowned at him. “Have you ever not gotten to sleep with someone you set your sights on?”

He raised the dark, graceful curve of one eyebrow.  “You led me on the merriest chase of anyone I had ever met, ma petite.”

More in Love Than When We Started


I promised myself that I would write something different after I finished the latest Anita Blake book, Dead Ice, coming out June 9, about a month away. So, I wrote a short story set in a new world with brand new characters. It was wonderful, exhilarating, and strangely exhausting. I’d forgotten how tiring it is to forge my way through a brand new creation. It made me hesitate to do the novel that I’d thought I would do next because its also a new world with a brand new main character, magic system, and everything.  The story I just finished has made me rethink, so I decided I’d do the next Anita Blake novel, but which one?

 

I wrote a list of Anita plots that I’d been thinking about for a while. When I got to “Q” I stopped. I had more ideas to write down, but seventeen seemed like plenty to choose from. From the very beginning, Anita had a large list of potential book plots; I think I started with thirteen mysteries.  When I wrote that initial list I didn’t know I’d ever get a chance to pursue them all. The fact that my initial Anita contract with Penguin/Putnam (now Penguin Random House) was for three novels had thrilled me, because I knew there would be at least that many in my series. My first novel, Nightseer, had been planned to be part of a four book series, but my first publisher, ROC, had only purchased one book.  When that one didn’t sell well, like most first novels, they weren’t interested in me continuing the series. Three books was a luxury after that.

 

So, why did I make a list of future plots when I didn’t know I’d ever get a chance to write them? I’m not sure, but the ideas came to me and I’d learned years ago to write down all my ideas. You think you’ll remember them, because they’re so great, but you won’t.  Write the ideas down, all the ideas, so you don’t lose them. Maybe that’s why I did it, and that would make sense, but in retrospect it seemed terribly optimistic.

 

I’ve actually used all the original thirteen ideas that I wrote down, except for a couple. Those plots went away because of character growth, or just the logic of Anita’s world, and my magic system. By the time I got that far into the list I knew that certain creatures of legend just didn’t exist in her world, so some ideas went away on that basis alone. 

 

Yet, here I am with seventeen new book plots, and more I could have listed. Some of the list is just intriguing as hell. Example – Olaf’s return. That’s all, but those two words are enough to make me wonder what a fan favorite serial killer will do when he’s next on stage. There’s The British book, set in England; The Irish book, set in Ireland, where Damian’s maker is waiting; Nathaniel’s book, which is going to be a long, complex mystery; Jean-Claude’s story, but so many ways to structure this one that I haven’t even started an outline; Nicky’s book, where he goes home for his mother’s parole hearing and asks Anita to go with him; New Mexico and Edward’s Wedding, will he actually walk down the aisle; Peter’s first hunt, three bland words with so much pain and possibility; and so many other ideas and characters that want more of their stories told.  I know other writers that struggle for ideas, even novelists with their own successful book series that have fallen out of love with their main character/s. I find that idea leads onto idea and that a finished book will often give me ideas for new books. I feel about Anita, and all the people in her life and in her world, the way I feel about my real life marriage – more in love now than when we started.


  

The Woods Were Lovely, Dark and Deep . . . 

I’ve gone from 80s & a warm Caribbean Sea to below freezing and snow, from tropics, to the buckle of the Bible Belt, to the East coast, back to the Bible Belt, to upper west coast, all within two weeks.  We’ve been home about 96 hours in those last two weeks. Jon has been with me throughout & we were even able to keep the dogs & our other significant others, Spike & Genevieve, with us until this last trip to Seattle, which helped a great deal to make everywhere we went feel like home. But now with them back in St. Louis with the dogs, I am feeling more cut adrift.

This year is an experiment in travel, in saying yes to adventure & new places. Its our daughter Trinity’s first year in college, in the dorms, so Jon & I decided we’d travel like we’d been wanting to but couldn’t because of being tied to her school schedule. It’s an experiment & Spike & Genevieve have agreed to try it with us for this first year of cohabitation. Thanks to technology their jobs can travel with them and it’s a telecommuting fest.  We also decided to do a major remodel in the St. Louis house, because Jon & I had been planing to anyway & now the space will be our space, all four of us have picked the colors & style of everything. One of the reasons we went to the tropics for me to finish writing Dead Ice was to have a working kitchen, TV room, and living room, while the remodel happened. It’s still not done. We’ve been eating take in, in the Solarium on a table meant for leaning on in the summer, but we’ve done it cheerfully and with a lot of laughter, which bodes well for many things.

We all liked the two months in the tropics, and I may try finishing every book somewhere else from now on, because wherever I type “the end” I want to runaway from it; I seem to need a change of scenery. I think it works better wanting to run to home rather than away from it. I was so happy to walk into my office in St. Louis. It looked beautiful & sunny, surrounded by trees at the top of my three story eyrie.  I miss my ocean view terribly, but I was still very happy to be home.  Usually, I finish a book and don’t want to see the office for weeks afterward.

I’m typing this in Seattle, Washington in our room before my first panel of the day here at MythicWorlds.  It was FairieCon West once upon a time, but they’ve changed their name to reflect a more diverse myth and folklore interest.  All wee and not so wee beasties are now welcome from all walks of the between spaces, not just the wee folk of the fey.  The vendors area is fabulous here.  I’m wearing a necklace I bought yesterday from Touchstone Runes.  We have already committed much commerce! Fairecon East, that we did earlier in the year, had a fabulous vendor’s room, too.

All the huge, dark trees here in the NorthWest make me think of the Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  Especially the line, “The Woods are lovely dark and deep . . .” indeed they are here, so the poem’s title was more appropriate than ever.

The edits for Dead Ice come back from New York on Monday, maybe a few hours before we land in St. Louis, and we finally get home.  I’ll have a week to see what the copyeditor, and my editor, Susan, have noted in the book.  I know that I’m already reaching out to my police friends that help me keep my mistakes to a minimum, because I know I didn’t do one of the police scenes exactly right.  I’m just not sure what I missed, but I finished the scene and then had that niggling feeling I’d dropped a ball along the way.  That’s what edits are for, to catch the dropped balls and put them back into play

Genevieve has sent us pictures from St. Louis of the fish pond frozen so solid the big dogs can walk across it.  Jon says, he’s never seen a pond frozen that hard there in twenty years, and he’s lived in Missouri all his life.  We keep telling her and Spike that it’s never this cold in St. Louis, I think they’ve stopped believing us. *cross my heart* I say, and Genevieve gives me that look, you know the one, your wife/girlfriend has one, too.  The one that says, she loves you, but . . .  We’ll be home Monday and do our best to make it up to her and Spike.  We’ll find ways to keep them warm through the long winter nights, but first – edits.



New Blog – Jason, the novel, is here!

Today is the official on sale date for my latest book, Jason! It’s the newest Anita Blake novel, and the first original paperback since Micah, thus the title being the name of one of the leading characters in the book. My publisher and I are very into naming conventions. Before you ask, yes, I do have ideas for other short novels featuring other major, or even minor-major characters in Anita’s universe, but currently I’m finishing up the next hardback original for Anita and the gang, Dead Ice.

In fact, Dead Ice woke me at 5:20 this morning according to Spike, who is as light a sleeper as I am, so he was very aware when I tried to creep out of bed and not wake anyone else. Genevieve and Jon usually sleep very soundly, but I learned at lunch that even they knew when I got out of bed. One of the unforeseen downsides of being polyamorous is that when ideas wake you up at odd hours you disturb more people. Or maybe that’s a downside of sleeping with a writer, regardless of your relationship style.

The book was very loud in my head, I knew exactly what came next and exactly how to write the scene. I’d gone to bed knowing what came next, but not how to get from A to B, and suddenly I woke in the dark and I knew. I also knew I couldn’t wait to get to the computer and start typing it. I’ve learned that when inspiration knocks that loudly you need to answer it quickly, because otherwise you end up knowing you had this great idea, or the perfect way to work this scene, but now you can’t remember most of it, just a vague sense you lost the wave that would have carried you further in the book. I hate that feeling, so I was typing before dawn, trying to keep up with my muse. We’d done 12 pages yesterday, so to be this pumped again today was a very good sign that the book is gaining momentum.

I’m happiest as a writer when I’m writing fast. I joke that I write as if the monsters really are chasing me and if I hesitate too long they’ll catch me. For all of you reading this that are wondering why I didn’t give myself a day off to enjoy Jason coming out, well first, I spent many years on tour for every book. It sort of conditioned me that I didn’t get the on sale date off, and in fact traveling across the country to promote a book can be pretty grueling. My record for grueling is still 26 cities in 28 days, that book tour still lives in infamy for Jon and myself, because he traveled with me on every last day of it. We hadn’t met Genevieve and her husband, Spike, at that point.

It is a wonderful thing for a publisher to spend money to send a writer on a book tour, it really is. But I’ve done my time and it’s a blessing to stay home, too. Thanks to the internet there are so many ways to promote your book now that don’t make you get on a plane to travel the country. Because if we were on tour for Jason, I wouldn’t be writing on Dead Ice. I can write on planes, while I try to pretend that I’m not flying (Yes, I shared my fear of flying with Anita), but I lose the thread of a book when I tour. I know some writers can continue to write a new book through a tour, but I’ve never been one of them.

Being home I could take the day off and just enjoy that Jason is on the shelves, but I didn’t. Instead I did what writers do, I wrote. Writers write; that may sound simple, but a lot of beginning writers don’t seem to truly grasp the concept. Writers write when we’re happy. We write when we’re sad. We write when we’re inspired. We write in order to get inspired. We write when the outside world has moved us to spill some reality onto the page. We write when the inside of our head is so loud that it seems almost more real than reality. We write to understand ourselves, to understand others, or to just admit on paper we don’t understand either. We write to make sense of the world and to share fiction that is often tidier and more logical than real life. Some of us write to escape logic and put the fantastic on the page so that everyone can hunt dragons from the safety of their homes. Writers can help you hunt down a killer, solve a mystery so baffling and dangerous that the death toll is frightening, all from the safety of your armchair. Writers write about what moves them, outrages them, intrigues them, makes them laugh out loud, or weep. Writers write; and if they’re very lucky, what they write moves the rest of the world as much as it moves them. I celebrated the release of my newest book, Jason, by working on the next book, because I’m a writer, and writers write.

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