editing Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

Edits, Travel, and the Injury at the End

I finished the edits on the next Anita Blake novel, Serpentine at the beginning of March. Jonathon, my husband, and I were already on a romantic vacation, but he helped me take time out to finish the edits that I hadn’t managed before we had to leave for our getaway. At the end I went old school: writing the changes long hand on sticky notes and handed them to Jonathon for him to type into the manuscript edits. I hadn’t written that much long hand in years, but it felt right. I’d already written the book, the edits were small things, or a scene here and there that needed changed for plot or character development. I took out one side plot that had started off as a red herring, but turned out to lead nowhere, so it had to go. I even had to cut a great new character that I hope we get to see later in another book. Larry Kirkland was a character that was actually in one of the rough drafts of the first Anita Blake novel, Guilty Pleasures, but he wouldn’t actually get on stage until book three, The Circus of the Damned. One of my favorite things about writing a series is that characters and plot lines that have to be edited out of one book can still see life later on. Interestingly, Anita, Micah, and Nathaniel try to have a romantic trip in the book, but both her work and Micah’s interfere with it. I wrote that months before Jonathon and I would be on our own trip and my work would cost us the first few days of relaxation, as if my muse knew it was coming. Of course, Anita’s work was a missing person and murder, and Micah’s work was a type of lycanthropy that we’d never seen before. My edits seem so tame in comparison.

I proceeded to take the longest purposeful break from writing that I’ve ever taken. Jonathon and I finished our trip without more work interfering. Then I got to spend our daughter’s spring break with her. My sister and her wife were able to fly into the country and visit with us. I spent all my “vacation” traveling. I’d finally get on the first plane towards home, but in the all out run to make it, I fell.

I was running full out, I was even thinking, “Wow, I can really run now. I’m so glad I can move like this, yay gym!” And then I wiped out. I did a good job of it, because kind strangers came to stand over me, making that face you make when someone hurts themselves in front of you. Thanks to the kind man who offered me a hand up, because I could not have gotten up without help. I wasn’t even sure that I’d be able to stand at all, until I tried. I was finally able to limp to my plane like Igor from the Frankenstein movies, but I was just happy to make my plane. I enjoyed my travels, but I was so ready to go home. I made my plane discovering that I was bleeding from the skin I’d lost, but I was able to walk better as I moved more. I still hurt, but I got to my seat. The flight attendant got me bandages, alcohol wipes, and eventually ice bags to put on my knee. Thanks for the care and attention Delta. Thanks also to my seat mate, Charles, who was a gentleman in the best sense of the word, putting my bag overhead for me when he saw I was hurt and helping the flight attendant pass me things to do some first aid. He also kept my mind off how much I was hurting by having an intelligent and calm discussion about our different paths of faith.

The skin is growing back from the scrapes, but I’ve either scraped my meniscus, or got a micro tear in it, which means no gym or martial arts for awhile. The page proofs of Serpentine have come back for one last chance to read over and catch any small things. It hurts to even sit at my desk for too long without propping my leg up. Sigh.

I’m looking forward to finishing the page proofs and getting back to the gym and dojo, and onto writing the next story.

2017 GONE WRITING, BOOK 2018

First things first, there will not be a big book from me this year. There probably won’t even be a little book from me in 2017, but my muse sometimes hits very suddenly so I don’t rule something smaller completely out. The next major book from me will be in June of 2018. Why am I taking this year off from publishing a book? Because my new editor and I decided we’d like the extra time.
My editor that I had worked with for twenty years, give or take, retired. Dead Ice was the last book that Susan and I worked on together. I was very happy for her to be able to retire early to all the wonderful plans she and her husband had made. I honestly didn’t think anything of it for my own writing process. I mean, I’d had six or seven different editors with the Meredith (Merry) Gentry series in as many books at Random House, and I’d done all right. One infamous Merry novel changed over three editors during the writing of it. I didn’t think the fact that I’d had only two editors in over twenty years at Penguin Putnam with the Anita Blake series might have impacted my writing process; the consistency, I mean. But it threw me more than I thought it would to lose an editor after that many years and that many books. I am hopefully settled in with my new editor, Cindy, for another long run.
Crimson Death was our first novel together and it was a nightmare. That wasn’t Cindy’s fault, at all. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, except my over ambitious nature. I should never, ever promise deadlines at the end of writing most novels, because at the end the muses are singing and writing usually spills forth like water from the proverbial cleft rock. Since I’m usually doing ten to twenty pages a day at that point I think that’s what I always do. I forget that at the beginning of a novel, sometimes I’m lucky to get four pages a day. It takes time to build up steam for the end of a novel, and I always forget that. Crimson Death was also the first Anita Blake novel set in a different country. I set it in Ireland, I’d read all these books, and looked at pictures . . . I don’t know, I thought that being in a different country that spoke English wouldn’t be that big a difference to my writing process. I was wrong. I was really wrong.
And then just before we left for Ireland our pug, Sasquatch, passed away. He was fourteen and we knew it was coming, but having to make that decision, holding him while he passed away in my arms – nothing prepares you for it. It’s always upsetting to lose a beloved pet, but Crimson Death was the first novel I wrote without a pug at my side in about twenty years, maybe longer. I know I had no pug when I wrote my first three novels, but other than that I’ve had at least one pug, or more, in the office with me. I started out joking that I don’t write as well without one, even with my other wonderful dogs, but as I write forward on the third novel I’ve attempted since Sasquatch passed, it’s beginning to feel more plausible.
If I could do it over again, I’d have done another Anita novel set here in the States where I was more familiar with everything and I’d have done my research at leisure. The trip to Ireland that suddenly became absolutely necessary was eye opening, exhilarating, and humbling. Nothing I had read prepared me for the Emerald Isle. I had researched the wrong questions. I had to let go of my preconceptions and the book became a very different book than the one I’d planned. Research, good research, will do that sometimes. The other problem was that this was finally Damian’s book. He’d been in the series since book six and this was book twenty-five. I had hundreds of pages done when Damian got loud in my head and said, “This is what you do to me? You make me a victim again?” He wanted to be the hero, or at least strong and not the perpetual victim the first version showed him to be, and I couldn’t argue with him, though I tried.

Ireland inspired me in a way that I didn’t anticipate. I was doing twenty pages a day in Dublin. I was hitting that end of book page count per day in the first third of the book. I thought, great, this is one of those books that writes fast! Um, no. What had happened accidentally is my muse and I had found the place we wanted to write the book, but it would still take months to complete it. I couldn’t stay in Ireland for months when I had planned on only staying for weeks. My life wasn’t that flexible. I had commitments in England both for my first ever European convention and for a research trip for a different novel. We left Ireland after less than a month and the moment we got to London I couldn’t write. I have no idea why, but I never write well in London and I’ve tried multiple times. The novel that had been going great guns in Ireland stopped dead once I left the country. If I get to the twenty pages per day point with a novel, wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, that is how I write that book. Change anything at that point from running out of the tea I’ve been drinking, the view, my chair, my desk, the computer I’m writing on or the software I’m using to write, my office pets, a lover having to travel – basically once the book is in the white, hot, heat phase, draw a circle of about fifty feet around me and everything within that circle has to remain the same or the book grinds to a halt.
I knew that about myself as a writer, but what I hadn’t anticipated was that a few days in Ireland would jump start the page count to that level of heat. Then we left the country for very good reasons and for wonderful adventures, but the book didn’t recover its speed for months. Then the other thing happened that couldn’t have been planned for, Crimson Death became the longest novel I’d ever written and I’ve written some long novels. Up to that point, I believe that Obsidian Butterfly was my longest. Interestingly it was set in a state that I’d never visited, New Mexico, so maybe its researching places I’ve never been that makes books super long for me?

The difference between the two books is that Obsidian Butterfly was pretty much the manuscript you got to read. Crimson Death I cut by a third, before it went to New York for final edits. I believe the rough draft was over 300,000 words which makes it well over a thousand pages. I have never written a draft that long. Again, maybe it’s the research, but whatever the cause, it meant that the first deadlines came and went, so we got new deadlines that could not be missed if the book was coming out on time. My first novel with my new editor became a series of emergencies. I wrote more than one day round the clock, literally. My husband, Jonathon, our girlfriend, Genevieve, and her husband Spike took turns bringing me endless cups of coffee, or just checking on me. Anyone who thinks they want to marry a bestselling writer, or a famous artist of any kind, should see that artist through a serious creative work before they say, I do. Artists, and I’m not any different, are moody bastards, and when the work isn’t going well it’s worse. I’m usually a nice person, but when the writing is going badly I roar like a dragon at any interruption. Genevieve and Spike hadn’t been living with us long, though we’d been dating them longer, so it was sort of a domestic trial by fire.
By the time the book went to its final rounds in New York, my two newest domestic partners begged me to write something else next time. They were full up listening to me talk about Anita and the gang. None of us wanted to go through another book like that. I think even my editor, Cindy, and all the wonderful people at Penguin Random House that helped make Crimson Death a reality were ready for a break. Yes, my two main publishers for the Merry Gentry series and the Anita Blake series are now one publisher. One of the largest mergers in publishing history.
I know that at the end of the process for that last novel I was drained. I felt like a seashell washed up on the beach, empty like a pretty piece of bone, caressed by the sea. So, in the end we all decided we needed more time for the next book to be written and edited. We didn’t want to go balls to the wall again. Cindy and I need time to understand each other as editor and writer. I need to let myself mourn twenty years of editorial partnership. I need to let myself mourn the loss of Sasquatch, and think about whether with three dogs, a cat, and a lizard, we can really add a pug at this time. I want to enjoy the first draft and not feel like every word has to be written in stone, because there isn’t time to revise without it becoming a publishing emergency. I need time to spend with my family, friends, and to take care of my body, mind, and spirit. My muse and I need to find our way back to a writing process that works smoothly. So that’s why there will be no new novel from me this year. See you in June 2018!

Crimson Death, the book that would not end.

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.

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.

Heading for the Finish Line

Good morning everyone, I went to bed last night after nearly falling asleep at my desk. I woke today refreshed, and ready to do this. Do what? Do the book. This is my antelope for the day. I shall stalk it, run it down, kill it, and drag it home – mine! When you write a book it is more yours than almost any other creative effort except painting and sculptor, because in the end you do it all yourself. You have editors, and a publisher, but they come on after the lion’s share is done. It is a peculiarly lonely work, writing, and yet at this point in the book I feel like I’m moving in a circle of people surrounded by my imaginary friends. I was so eager to write this morning that I borrowed Jon’s iPad and BlueTooth keyboard and wrote in bed before my feet had ever touched the ground. I have the final list of events that still need to happen before the end of Affliction. There are one, or two, major events that may not happen as I’d planned, I’ve done this too long not to know that scenes in a book are like battle plans they never survive the battlefield unchanged. I’ll start by adding three sentences to the scene I finished last night, and then to questioning witnesses, and searching for the big bad vampire’s lair, and then zombies, zombies, zombies! We’re actually tired of zombies, Anita and I, at this point in the book. I started out by jokingly saying that this book would be my zombie apocalypse book, I should know better than to make wise cracks about the undead. It’s like that moment in a horror movie when someone says, “I’ll be right back, I’ll be fine,” and you know that they are dead meat.
We have a record number of zombies in Affliction, and one of the most interesting and game changing vampire villains. I’m excited to see what happens next, even though I think I know. Sometimes I get surprised, and sometimes it’s just fun to take the trip even when you know the destination.

It’s now after nine o’clock here. I’ve sent over 600 pages to my editor, while I am now over 700 pages and still going strong. My editor and I have worked together for over ten years, so I trust her to work from one end, while I continue to write. She knows that I seldom send anything to New York that isn’t pretty well set, so she can edit without worrying I will do major changes and negate her hard work. As I said, above writing is very solitary, but after enough time you do have your team members like my editor, and my husband, Jon, who helps keep me sane and fed while I throw everything thing into the book. I’ve just finished a late dinner with Jon, to go with the late lunch I had with him and our daughter, Trinity. She had a snow day today. She’s now off with her father for the weekend, and it’s just as well because I’m at my desk for the duration until I type, The End, or I fall asleep at my desk. Trinity has seen me through a lot of books, so she knows the drill. If I nod off at the desk like I did last night I’ll sleep for a bit and hit it again. I’m really hoping that I finish, before I have to sleep, but I just passed 700 pages and am still going strong, so maybe there will be a nap in there somewhere.

Sensuality and the Writer

I’m working on the edits for Kiss the Dead, my latest novel. It is also number twenty-one in the Anita Blake series. Once upon a time small decisions didn’t make me pause much, I’d make the change and move on, but now smaller things can give me pause. For instance, does Cynric the young weretiger from Vegas have straight hair, or a slight wave, that’s only straight if he puts it in a tight pony tail while it’s wet? It’s such a small thing, really, but it will forever dictate what Cynric’s hair is like. It’s like deciding whether my imaginary friend has straight hair, wavy hair, something in between. Since hair texture is damn near a kink with me, it’s more important than it might be, but more than that I now know that small decisions that are almost throwaway bits of detail can seriously come back and bite me on the ass, because unless the character is on stage a lot, which Cynric isn’t, I may forget what I decided about his hair. Main characters, I remember, and minor characters, are well, minor, but it’s the major-minor characters that are always the problem for me. I coined the term major-minor, or minor-major, for characters that aren’t major in every book, but when they are on stage they’re obviously more important than the minor characters sharing the screen. In fact, some of the major-minor characters will move to major characters without much notice to me, the writer. Jason Schulyer was one of those minor characters that just kept hanging around after his introduction in book four, The Lunatic Cafe, and just persisted in being more on stage than I had planned. I love Jason and he’s fun to write, and a fan favorite, so not a problem, and I guess I’ve never had a problem with remembering what he looked like, but there were fewer characters to keep track of in the early books. Now, at book twenty-one, there is a much bigger cast of characters. I find that I have particular trouble remembering characters individual characteristics if they were introduced with a bunch of other new imaginary people. Cynric was a very minor character introduced in a large group with other new characters that had a lot more on stage time. His hair was cut short when we met him, so that could mean it was straight, or that he’d cut it short enough that he’d taken all the wave out. Now, four books later I need to decide, because he’s let his hair grow out just enough that it would show, one way or the other.

I know that some writers make little note cards about hair, eyes, etc . . . and I keep meaning to do that, but I never quite do. I finally realized why I may not want to reduce my characters to notations in a list of “characters”. I don’t have a list of characteristics for my real, flesh and blood, friends. I remember what they look like because I see them, touch them, have dinner sitting across and look at their faces as we talk. I know the way they use their hands to talk, or how they cut their food, because I can see them in real life. My major characters are like that. You don’t forget the face of your best friend, just because you haven’t seen them in awhile, so it is with major characters for me. But minor-majors are like that person I see once a year at a convention, or a few times a year at group get togethers. But there the analogy falls apart, because I don’t forget these kinds of details about real people that I’ve sat across a table from, or met several times at some event. But imaginary people that I only see every once in awhile, they aren’t so concrete in my memory. Yet, I want them to be that real to me. I think I feel that if I could reduce them to a set of 3 by 5 cards, or a computer list, then somehow I’ve failed. I’ve failed to make them as real to me as they need to be. It sounds silly when I write it out like that, because they are imaginary. They are not real enough for me to sit across a table and have dinner with them and they never will be, they are figments of my imagination, bits of inspiration that walks and talks on paper for me, but they are not flesh and blood people.

But . . . if they aren’t real enough for me to know the texture of their hair, then how can they be real to you, the readers? If I can’t close my eyes and recall the way their skin feels under my fingertips, or how their hair slips through my hands, then how can I ask you to feel it? Height doesn’t bother me as much, because it’s not something I’m as aware of, which is probably why minor-major characters can grow, or shrink, by inches between books, but hair, eyes, skin tone, that is more important to me. Though height does become important if I’m writing a sex scene, but even there it’s where do they get their height from? Do they have long legs? A long torso? Depending on where they get those extra inches makes a lot of difference once they’re up close and personal with my main characters.

Its not that Cynric has straight, or wavy hair, it’s that the answer will change the texture of his hair. I am a very sensual writer, and incredibly visual and tactile in my orientation. Since we seem to be keeping Cynric around for awhile our odds of having Anita run her hands through his hair are pretty high since Anita reflects my interest in hair. Yes, I do have a thing for men with long hair, though I have been cured of wanting it long and longer, since I find that mid-back is doable, longer is harder to take care of, and anything past the waist is just a comedy of errors getting caught in car doors, and all sorts of inconvenient places. But I don’t want to just be able to say his hair is straight, or wavy, I want to know the texture of it if I touched it. I guess anyone that my main characters may have sex with are the ones that make me sweat the small details, because I need to do more than just see them. I need to see, touch, taste, know them in a way that goes beyond what a list of characteristics could give me. I want even the minor-major characters to be so real to me that if I close my eyes I know what it feels like to touch them, I want to know that kissing Jean-Claude tastes different than kissing Richard, and it’s not about what they’ve eaten. There is literally a taste to someone’s skin, and that spills over to their lips, their mouths if you break the boundary of their lips, and taste deeper; they taste different. It is a faint flavor, this taste of kisses, but subtle things are what good sex is all about, especially on paper, and though I may never try to describe this real taste difference, because it is just too subtle usually, I need to know it to do my job to the best of my ability. Sometimes when I write I’m all nerve endings and sensory input, other times logic and a cold distance pervades, but I need to be able to do both; one without the other would make me only half the writer I am.