Ireland Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

A Cultural Tragedy

These news articles crossed my feed yesterday.

800-year-old ‘Crusader’ at Dublin church decapitated

Search underway for missing head of 800-year-old Crusader after vandals broke into church

This is the church I visited while touring Ireland while researching Crimson Death. I’m still sad I wasn’t able to use St. Michan’s on stage in the book. I’ve got story notes and always planned to revisit the Church, its crypt, and its mummies, yes, mummies in Ireland. I had no idea until we found the church and all its history by accident. We were lucky to be given a tour of the crypts by the historic preservation coordinator (I can’t find my notes, so if the title is incorrect, I apologize. Nor his name, deepest apologies, I will find it all later.) To be given a tour by the person who knew the most about all of it was amazing. He also shared that this was Bram Stoker’s family church while he was growing up in Dublin and the family had a crypt at the church. Walking down into the crypt I kept picturing Stoker as a little boy with only a candle to light the way. The crypt was dark with electricity, it must have been terrifying by lamp or candle, especially to a child. It was impossible for me to not think that the seed for certain scenes in Dracula were planted here. And then there were naturally occurring mummies in the crypts under the church.

Naturally occurring mummies in Ireland! One of the few places in the world where this has happened, and we still don’t know why or how! No, seriously, no one knows exactly why these bodies have mummified underneath this church. Our friend who works with the British Museum, and is an expert in her own right on Mummies, had no idea that she could find some naturally occurring ones just a day trip away. The Crusader and his crypt mates are artifacts of global significance, both to the historic record, and to origins of horror as a genre of fiction. I was hoping that some serious science would happen and we would learn the secrets of these amazing remains, and instead they have been desecrated, destroyed, and even parts of them stolen. The people who did this didn’t just take a head off a body, which is bad enough, they stole the history of Ireland. They stole the history of Bram Stoker and his family and of all the families that have relatives down in this crypt. They have stolen part of the story that created Dracula which was one of the very first modern horror novels. Without Dracula I might never have created my own vampire stories, perhaps no one would have, yes Dracula really is that important to the genre. I am hoping that someone will read this and help us bring this piece of history back. Help us reclaim this story, this inspiration.

Please, if you know anything, contact the Gardai.

For a more detailed write up on the church and its mummies, visit

ST. MICHAN’S Official Webpage

St. Michan’s Mummies at Atlas Obscura

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.

New Pub Date for Crimson Death

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.

Missing Ireland

This week we had one of the hottest days of the summer so far, which means over 90F, very humid, and miserable for running outside, but I came downstairs with a jacket over my arm. I was convinced I’d need it. Why? Because the book I’m currently writing is partially set in Ireland and I’d have needed the jacket. In fact one of the working titles for the book is simply, The Irish Book. We actually flew to Ireland to research it. We were there for almost two weeks and then we flew to England to research another book. I’d never tried combining research on different books before; it was a little odd, especially because the book set in England isn’t the one I’m working on, or the one after that. It was especially jarring to have to take my head out of the Irish book, which I am currently writing, to a book so far down the road. It made sense to piggyback the research since the two countries were geographically so close, but as a writer it was harder than I thought it would be to try to juggle such different projects and different kinds of research.

The ferns in Ireland were almost as tall as I am.

England was having a heatwave while we were there: 70F with some days reaching 80F, unheard of there. Ireland ran between 40F to mid-60s. I don’t think it even reached 70F the entire time we were there. It rained, at least a little, every day in Ireland. The sun would come out and it would feel warm but if you stepped into the shade it was suddenly much cooler. We had to buy rain gear because our good rain coats were at home. It was wet, drizzly, and very autumn there every day. This was high summer, and the locals assured us this was summer weather for them. It was even a little sunnier and nicer on some days than typical for the season.

Lough Tay in the Wicklow Mountains.

Air conditioning didn’t work well the entire time we were traveling this trip, except for one room in England. In Dublin we left the windows open and ran fans, sometimes it was okay, but one night it was so hot and muggy in the room that it gave me a migraine. There are no screens on the windows, so if you sleep with them open to help with temperature you have to risk wildlife flying in, and if on a low enough floor, people maybe creeping in – not very comforting. In fact, when I first realized the window challenge I was quite unhappy with it, but once I was up and writing at the desk the damp and autumnal chill worked for me, worked for the book. One morning in Dublin I wrote 18 pages. The book was going well, and then we had to leave for England.

This is my fourth trip to England, to London, and I can finally say that I’m not a city girl, not even for London. Unfortunately all our business kept us in the city, and we only had one day to escape to Somerset, Glastonbury in particular, which is my favorite part of England. But I didn’t escape to the countryside until after I’d been a guest at my first European SF Convention, done an amazing 4 and half hour signing at Forbidden Planet, and finished the research for two books down the way. I’ll probably be blogging in more detail later about the convention and the signing. Thanks to everyone that helped make both a great experience! When work was done we could take a day to truly play, and we did, but one day didn’t make up for nearly three in the city. Though the research at the British Museum did its best to make up for anything and everything. Its my favorite museum on the planet to date, and the wonders on display take days to see. I felt very privileged that it was part of my job to roam about in such a magical place. There will be a blog just about the British Museum, but it will have to wait until this book is complete.

A tankard carved from amber. Just one treasure from the British Musuem.

I made notes and outlines for the book that will be set in England, but I was still trying to write on the Irish book. I’m not sure I wrote more than five pages at a sitting the entire time we were in Britain. Partly I was having to think of a different book altogether to do this research, and partly . . . a lot of things, but I only figured out one problem this week.

Do you remember where I said I wrote 18 pages in a morning in Dublin? When I hit that kind of page count the book is set and going well. Its very unusual for me to hit that high and then fade down to almost no pages. We were traveling, and that can make it challenging to write, and I was still making progress on the current book. We got home from Europe and I was making pages steadily, but never to the point I’d been in Dublin. Then, two weeks later we had DragonCon in Atlanta to attend, and though a wonderful and fun event, it was too soon after a month away from home. So tired, not even DragonCon could really fire me up. I enjoyed it, but not like usual. I wanted to be home for longer than two weeks. I have never been so tired of staying in hotels in my life. It ranked right up there with the 26 cities in 28 days tour of Narcissus in Chains in October of 2001. Yeah, not a great time to be flying. Hands down the hardest tour we’ve ever done.

This week Jonathon and I had to drive out of town and stay in yet another hotel, because of family illness. The family member is out of the hospital and back home, but it was serious, and accordingly stressful and scary. Normally, that kind of event derails me for days on a book, but not this time. I got up the next day and wrote ten pages. Yay! I did it again the next day, and the next, and the next. It’s not eighteen pages, but ten is a good daily page count. So I’m finally back into the swing of the book after nearly a month. I know I am, because I brought my jacket down to wear on a day that was so hot I didn’t need it. I brought the jacket downstairs with me because I was thinking about Ireland. I’d have needed the jacket there.

Stream in the Wicklow Mountains. Flower is a wild foxglove.

I’m missing Ireland because the book had settled into being written there. When a novel hits a certain productivity for me I need to stay put. I need to finish writing it where I am. Which means I should have stayed in Dublin with the rain, and the autumnal mist, and the trips to the mountains where everything was so green and lush, but not a tropical kind of lush. Ireland is different than I thought it would be in some ways, and in others exactly as I’d dreamed. Maybe if I wasn’t writing a book set there, and reading tons of books I bought there for more research, I wouldn’t be missing a country that I visited for less than two weeks; but all the above has combined and I’m homesick for a country that isn’t mine.

When I explained that to Jonathon he offered to bring a hose to my office, so I could have the constant rain. I said, thanks, but no thanks. *laughs*

When I type ‘The End’ on this manuscript I think this strange nostalgia for an alien land should pass, but I’m already making a list of things I didn’t get to see/experience in Ireland, so maybe not. It didn’t feel like home when I was there, Glastonbury, England feels more like home, but it’s not Glastonbury that keeps calling me back.

I have stood on the Hill of Kings and touched the Stone of Destiny at Tara! Amazing energy, amazing moment! I have walked inside Newgrange with its swirls and spirals, which is hundreds of years older than the Great Pyramids. We saw both on the same day, and it deserves a blog to itself soon. I have seen the mummies of St. Michan’s Church in Dublin, which was probably one of my favorite things we did there. I’ll talk more about St. Michan’s in a different blog. We walked around Dublin until we began to know the city and were able to find our way around. I kept mishearing St. Stephen’s Green, as St. Stephen’s Gallows, which gave the beautiful park in the middle of Dublin a very different meaning. I’ve seen Irish deer and watched two tiny, spotted, fawns play fight as if they already had a rack of horns atop their heads. I’ve seen lakes, forests, or what’s left of them, peat bogs, moors, and more streams and waterfalls than I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve stood on the cliffs above the Irish sea, and found caves there, and then watched the tide fill them back up and make them too dangerous to enter. I could not have written this book if I hadn’t gone, or I would have gotten it wrong, and every person who knew Ireland would have known I hadn’t walked the streets, eaten the food, drank in the pubs, listened to the stories, seen the people, touched the bullet holes in the post office. Ireland isn’t something you can fake. It’s not the travel ads on television. It has nothing to do with American St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not sure how to explain it all, but as I write the book I’m figuring it out, because part of why I write is to discover, to clarify, to understand, and finally to share the adventure.

Writing at DragonCon 2015

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 few of my favorite things . . . from Ireland and England

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.

Ireland Here We Come!

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.