love Archives - Page 4 of 5 - Laurell K. Hamilton

Real life is not a Romantic Comedy, but it is Romantic

During breakfast I watched the last bit of “You’ve Got Mail,” with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. I’ve never seen the movie, but my husband, Jon, had. He wanted me to see the end of it, so I did. It was charming and romantic, and made me think I might want to watch the movie from the beginning, but it also made me think of questions.
Has your real life romance ever been influenced by a romantic comedy film? If so, which one/s? Do you think that any romantic film reflects anything close to real life? If so, which one/s?

The above was what I posted on my FaceBook. I got a lot of responses. People shared some truly wonderful, real life romantic stories. They suggested other films that they thought were more realistic. I admit that the only films that people said was more realistic, or said something real to them, that I’ve seen were, “When Harry met Sally” and “Love, Actually,” but others oft mentioned were, “P.S. I love you,”; “The Notebook,” and “He’s Not that into You.” But most responses said that romantic movies weren’t real enough to impact real life, or worse yet, they felt they set up such high expectations that it spoiled us for real live romances. Several felt that women were especially negatively impacted so that no real man could live up to the fictional version. Some shared that they had found the love/s of their lives and lost them far too early. Everyone was so generous with their sharing that I felt I had to answer my own questions.

First, no romantic film has ever unduly influenced me. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of romances in any form, never have been. I’d rather read mysteries, horror, fantasy, science fiction, nonfiction especially history and biology. I’m more an action adventure movie person, but there are a few movies that have romantic meanings for me. “Lake Placid” is the first movie that I saw with other friends that my future husband, Jon, was part of the group. The first movie just the two of us saw as friends was, “The Mummy” with Brendan Fraser. One reader on my FB page sited “The Mummy” as the kind of relationship they thought was hot and full of chemistry, no arguments from me. The movie, “The Mexican” with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts was on every TV in every hotel the year we had our honeymoon and first toured together, so we watched it a lot, in pieces, but we still have affection for it, even though it is a disaster as far as romances go, and no way should the main characters have survived, let alone lived happily-ever-after. Jon and I share two favorite romcoms, “Nottinghill,” and “The Holiday”. (Both movies were mentioned in answers on FB, but not a lot.) Those two movies are on our short list of, I’ve had a hard day and I just want to smile for awhile. I’ll add, “Bell, Book, and Candle,” as one of my favs, but I think it’s not the romance angle, but that it’s the only movie I know that is about publishing, the holidays, writing research, magic, and has Jimmy Stewart, and Kim Novak in it. Do I think any of the movies we like are a good blueprint for real romance? No, they’re fiction. Real life is messier and far less logical. Fiction must hold together and make sense, real life doesn’t have to do any of that.

How did Jon and I meet? He’d loaned out a copy of Guilty Pleasures and the friend hadn’t returned it. He mentioned it at a bookstore where the clerk knew me, and mentioned that I was going to be at a local science fiction convention. He could get the new copy signed. (The clerk would eventually be the writer, Rhett MacPherson, and a member of my writing group, The Alternate Historians). Jon drove himself to the convention, and got me to sign my book. We also would talk for two hours in the hallway with the Green Room just feet away. We talked about literature, science fiction, horror, movies, science, history, philosophy, music, and found in each other minds quick enough and esoteric enough to keep up with each other. It set up a pattern of how we would interact for years to come. We never had trouble finding things to talk about. No, it wasn’t love at first sight. First, we know he was seventeen when we met, because he’d just gotten his driver’s license. I was twenty-nine, married, and one of his new favorite writers. I would learn years later that he had trouble talking to girls, but he never had trouble talking to me, because he didn’t see me as a “girl”. The age difference, my martial status, successful writer, all of it meant he didn’t see me as datable so he didn’t have to be nervous around me, which meant I got to see Jon at his best, and would spend years puzzling over why he wasn’t more successful at dating girls near his own age. I would give him dating advice, or assure him that yes, that girl did like him, for years. I was his friend, I wanted him to be happy. Neither of us saw the other as a potential date, let alone as a potential spouse. In fact, if you’d told either of us back then that eight years later we’d be dating, nine years later we’d be engaged to be married, we wouldn’t have believed you. That we’d be celebrating twelve years as a married couple – we would have laughed in your face. When we met I thought of Jon as this young kid, then my friend, but far too young to date. We were just friends for eight years, and even then it took us a long time to realize we were more. Most of our mutual friends figured it out before we did.
For those keeping track, I was married to my first husband for sixteen years of traditional monogamous marriage. It just didn’t work for me and I vowed never to marry again. Six months later, marrying Jon sounded like a good idea. How and why this change? Yes, love, lust, and that great friendship base, but honestly Deity intervention. I’m not really kidding, Jon and I can’t remember who proposed and who accepted, because we turned each other down multiple times. We both had issues with the age difference, and both had scars from previous relationships, and those pesky personal issues, so thank you, God and Goddess, for helping us work through it all to get to the happy place we are now. Plus therapy, because Deity helps us & then expects us to do our work to make it all work out.

Rereading the above I realized, though it doesn’t sound like a romantic comedy it might reinforce the ideal of finding that one true love if your life & everything magically works out perfectly. Yes, I talked about Jon & I doing individual therapy above, but I just want to be clear that isn’t the be all, end all of our story.

Jon & I just celebrated our third anniversary of dating our girlfriend, Genevieve. I am also seeing the other man in her life, Spike. We are polyamorous, which means to love more, & have been most of our marriage. So, for us it’s not about finding that one perfect love, but being open to the possibility of finding that special poly group to love, whether it be a threesome, a foursome, or a moresome.

Happy Return of the Sun, remember God/s/Goddess/es Love Us!

It was supposed to be a celebration of the return of the sun, the rebirth of the light, to help us get past the gloom of the longest night of the year, which is Winter Solstice. It was supposed to lift our spirits and reassure us that spring will come again, summer warmth will happen, we are not trapped in the bleak heart of winter to die in the dark.

Yes, all the festivities, all the good cheer, really boils down to that. Human beings have been doing something to celebrate the Winter Solstice. Almost all of the traditions have something to do with worshipping, or trying to persuade, the sun, the light, to return, to be reborn and give us their blessing again, because at some level people seemed to realize without the sun there is no more warmth. Without the sun the crops will not grow, there will be no spring lambs, or calves, or . . . We’ve understood for thousands, upon thousands of years that without the sun we’re pretty much screwed so we plead with it to return. Most of the earliest sun religions were about trying to get the sun to keep coming back and helping us grow food, and raise our spirits once more into the light, and away from the darkness of midwinter.

Originally that’s what this time of year was about, and then came Hanukkah, and Christmas. They are also celebrations of light and love, of survival against tough odds, and the conquering of the light, the son, over the forces that would destroy us all. The Israelites survived yet another attempt to wipe them out as people by the miracle of the never ending oil that burned for eight miraculous days. Jesus survived Herod’s attempts to kill him, and the implication is that if he can make it through, so can we, and that we, too, can have the protection of the Virgin Mary, and her stout right hand St. Joseph, who was a carpenter and you just feel that anyone that’s down to earth enough to work with wood must have a good head on his shoulders. In America I think that Joseph is particularly relevant as we have more and more step-parents and blended family. Think about he was step-dad to the son of God, no pressure there. He must have been a remarkable man to have stood by Mary and Jesus, and then all their other children. I love the idea that Jesus was from a big family with lots of half-brothers and sisters. But then I really like the Gospel of Thomas, which the Church deemed too dangerous to put in the Bible, or perhaps too confusing. I love Thomas, he’s always been my favorite disciple. Doubting Thomas who is invited to put his finger in the wound of the risen Christ, because Thomas doesn’t believe he’s real. There’s a man after my own heart, let me touch it, let me test it – Thomas was a sceptic and a scientist at heart, and I love him for it, because I’d want to touch the evidence to, and if you wouldn’t want to touch the risen Christ, then I can’t explain it to you, I know only that I so would have.

But I digress, but then its me, and I tend to do that. This time of year was supposed to either be a rollicking party to help us brave our way through the winter dark, or high, holy time when we worship Deity and celebrate His, Her, Their return, or try to persuade them to return to us and bless us with their light and warmth. We, as people, have a profound need for this celebration or there wouldn’t be any New Grange, the neolithic tomb mound where the Winter Solstice sun comes into that profound dark and brings hope with it. The clouds cleared away enough for the sun to actually do it’s bright job this year. The pictures were awesome.

If any of you are offended by the fact that Christmas is just one in a long line of holidays this time of year, sorry, but it’s the truth. I think the God, Almighty, and his son, Jesus, are both secure enough to accept that Winter Solstice is an astrological event, and that Yule has been around longer than spring baby Jesus has been moved to be a midwinter baby. The Church needed a holiday to turn people’s ideas from drunken revelry and what the Church saw as debauchery, to something more holy, so Jesus’s birthday was moved. I wonder if any of the Church fathers, or mothers (there really have been some) understood that Jesus was joining a long line of sons, or sun celebrations, to welcome back the sun? If you don’t believe Jesus was a spring baby, that’s okay, but there are lambs to greet him in the manager, and shepherd’s watching over their flocks by night, you don’t sleep outside in winter in that part of the world, but there is something about this cold and dark that makes all of us, even the Church, want to put something here to remind us that life will return, that there will be lambs and warmth, and new babies.

So how did a celebration of light, warmth, and proof that Deity loves us and won’t leave us to die in the dark turn into crushing social obligations, and who can buy the bestest presents?

Well, the Romans gave out gifts during Saturnalia which was a very big celebration during this time of year. Some say it’s the gifts of the Magi that gave us the idea for gifts, because of their Frankincense, Myrrh, and gold gifts to the Baby Jesus, and lets face it, their parents. That does explain how Joseph was able to leave his carpentry behind and live for awhile, those were expensive gifts of the day. Other’s say it was an early Christian Bishop named Nicholas, who helped give rise to Santa Claus, because of his charity to children in his day, and throwing bags of gold down chimneys to land in women’s stockings as dowries, according to one story. But modern ideas of gift giving seem to really come from Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and Clement Moore’s, A Visit from Saint Nicholas. It’s actually a very late addition to Christmas, all this gift giving, and yet it seems to overwhelm everything here in the States.

We worry about finding the perfect gift. People will put themselves in so much debt for this one season of gift giving that they spend the rest of the year paying it off. People say, don’t get me anything, and sometimes they mean it, or sometimes they keep score more than anyone else. It’s an emotional and familial politics minefield. The guilt if you can’t get your child that super popular present is very real for a lot of families. When did it become a contest to see who can spend the most money? When did gifts equate to how much you love your family? When did this season of buying become the make, or break, for most retail businesses? I’ve been researching and I can’t find enough agreement on any of the above to be certain, but I do know that whatever this holiday is about to you and yours, it’s not supposed to be about who has the most toys, the most stuff. It’s supposed to be about love and fun. Either God loves us, or Jesus loves us, or we’re supposed to be having wonderful raucous parties and orgies for Saturn and “love” lots, or raise a glass to Odin and the Norse and have a huge party with our friends and families, or we just light a fire and help chase away the darkness knowing that Deity really does love and care for the Earth, animals, and people it and will not leave us to die in the cold dark. It’s a fertility festival, a celebration of life, and birth, thrown into the face of the darkest, deadest, part of the year – we’re supposed to celebrate life, whatever that means to each us.

So celebrate life and love today, whether that means being with huge extended family, or family of choice, or just with your spouse/partner, or just you and your pets, or just you. Remember in all this gift giving and forced merry making that you’re supposed to love yourself, too, and sometimes a little time to yourself is the greatest gift of all. So whether you are knee deep in children and the post gift explosion of presents, or you are enjoying that first cup of tea with no one, but yourself enjoy this moment and remember it really isn’t about the gifts, it’s about the love.

Dancing with the Muse & The Devil’s Panties!

30 pages for the day in three sessions of 12, 13, & 5. Still not completely out of this section of plot. Was hoping to finish before bed, but I give, need dinner, but the muse & I have played happily today. I still got to have lunch with my husband, Jon, and went to MMA class. Also, Dancing, the new Anita Blake e-special came out today! Thanks for all the great comments, everyone! Glad you are all enjoying it!

You can order Dancing from Amazon or Barnes & Noble

To top the day off I was in Jennie Breeden’s comic, The Devil’s Panties

This has been a wildly productive & truly awesome day!

Why not take the High Road?

I have been talking about my sister, Chica, and the fact that she is getting married this year to her new partner Majorgirlfriend. Many fans have asked questions about it on FaceBook, and with my sister’s permission I’ll try to answer them. First, yes, Chica and Majorgirlfriend are nicknames. Neither of them is “famous”, so I try to leave my friends and loved ones their anonymity if so requested. It’s also one of the reason that I don’t talk about my daughter, Trinity, very often. I want her to have her own life and privacy and I just can’t decide how much of me sharing will interfere with that, so I choose caution. Second question asked, Chica has been “divorced” from her partner of thirteen years for two years now, so no, she’s not rushing into things with the new person. Third question, yes her ex is/was Meerkatfeinated, who has gone on to another job and a new girlfriend of her own. I hope that Meerkatfeinated is as happy with her new relationship as my sister is with hers, but as our friendship did not survive I do not know for certain. Before someone asks, yes I do miss the friendship when it worked, but I do not miss the parts that did not work between us, and that would eventually make it impossible for the friendship to survive. I believe that Meerkatfeinated would probably say the same of me.
Several people on FaceBook have given me brownie points for taking the high road about the divorce and the break up of the friendship, as if they expect me to be mean about it. I wasn’t mean about my divorce from my own ex-husband over a decade ago, why would I be horrible now, about this? Let me say, that there were negative moments on all sides, and hurt feelings, and anger, we are all human after all, but that doesn’t mean we have to be petty, or cruel. For my own first marriage, my ex and I agreed never to bad mouth each other in front of our daughter, and we haven’t. Trinity didn’t get the divorce, we did, so as much as possible we have tried to make it not her problem. I saw too much of people using the children badly in divorces as I grew up to ever want to inflict that on my own child.
I know there was pain for both my sister and her ex partner. It’s normal and just part of the process. I sincerely wish Meerkatfeinated well in her new life, just as I wished my own ex-husband well. He’s been remarried for over a decade himself now, I think, or close to, and I can only hope he is half as happy as I am.
I guess I can understand being horrible if the ex is abusive, or truly monstrous, but I genuinely have never understood how you can go from loving someone to hating them so quickly. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Hate, or anger, means you still have issues to work.
I believe that the energy you put out into the world is what comes back to you, so if you are bitter about a divorce and wish bad things for your ex, then that’s what you’ll get from the universe. I don’t see the point to that. I would rather try to let go of any ill-feelings and truly move forward to a better and more positive place. I’m not saying it’s easy, or there aren’t moments when old feelings rise, or issues are hit, but if I hadn’t cared for everyone involved it wouldn’t have mattered, and it did matter, so there is pain, but when the choices are right the pain eases and you truly do get better, do better, and find out happiness not only is possible, but there may be more of it out there waiting for you all to find it. It’s just that sometimes you can’t find it together, but separately your dreams, your future, is waiting for both of you.

True Love is Hard Work

It’s been very interesting reading the comments on my FaceBook page about love, and the flowers that Jon, my husband, gave me. There seems to be this idea that men are barbarians and women are the civilizing influences, so we train them up to be what we need, or want. Or that there are only a few perfect men out there, and I’ve lucked out and found one. Both those thoughts are based on incomplete logic, and in fact I haven’t found either to be true.
First, it’s insulting to men to cast them in the role of hapless, even stupid, until the right woman comes along and trains them up. A couple trains and teaches each other. You both learn and grow together if the relationship is to be a happy and fulfilling one.
Second, this idea that I found the perfect man and there is just a few of them out there, and if a woman could find the “right one”, then she’d be as happy as I am discounts all the time and effort that Jon and I have put into our relationship. There is no perfect man, or woman, out there. The idea that the right person will make everything in your life work effortlessly is just not true, but a lot of people believe it. I think that one of the reasons for the high divorce rate is this fallacy that if you fall in love with the right person that it will all be easy, and that if it isn’t easy then you’ve obviously chosen badly and you need to find someone else. Sometimes you do choose badly, and a divorce is the only cure. My first marriage ended in divorce after sixteen years. We were college sweethearts, and we went virgin to our honeymoon after a big church wedding. Nearly twenty years later I was a different person than the one he married, and we grew apart rather than together, until there were so many differences we could no longer thrive as a couple. I left when I realized I would rather be alone the rest of my life than be in a marriage that made me miserable. I planned to never marry again. Six months later I was engaged to Jon.
I did everything differently the second time. I insisted we live together first, because I had learned that you never really know someone until you wake up beside them, see them sick, after a hard day’s work, happy, sad, whatever. Anyone can pretend while they date, but sharing a home . . . you learn the real them, and the real you as a couple. Again, dating is all about the special, but marriage is all about the ordinary. A lot of men that are great on special occasions and will sweep you off your feet in that romantic way, suck at the every day. No, really, they do, just like some women that hit that same romantic note may totally suck at being a permanent partner. You can’t live on little black dresses and roses, because someday’s the toilet over flows and somebody has to wait for the plumber to show up. Was that unromantic? Good, because real life cannot be all flowers and pretty, real life is messy and you want someone who is willing to get down in the trenches with you, even if it means getting mud on their Gucci loafers.
Being married to my first husband didn’t help me be married to Jon, they were too different, and I was too different from the girl who married the first time. What I needed in a partner had changed almost completely. I was nearly twenty years older, so that made sense, but it was weird to realize that I had to throw away most of my preconceptions of marriage to make the second one work. I think a lot of people that marry over and over again, try to treat people like cookie cutters and fit different spouses into the same shape of marriage, and then they’re surprised why it doesn’t fit. They have a new shape of cookie, a new relationship and it needs to be treated like something brand new, and special in it’s own right.
One thing I did learn from my first marriage was that you had to make everyday special. You couldn’t wait for holidays, or anniversaries, because there weren’t enough of them, not for me. I’m the kind of person that needs anniversary sex daily, and flowers for no reason more often mean more to me than a big, expensive bouquet on my birthday. Now, I know I said earlier that dating is all about the special, and marriage is all about the every day, but successful marriage for me is about making every day special. Now, you can’t do it literally every single day, because there are days when the child is sick, the work deadline is crushing you, and by the end of the day you and your spouse are so tired you just want to fall into bed and sleep. It happens, the point is to make sure it doesn’t happen too often. That takes conscious effort on both your parts to understand that being married to the other person is a privilege, not a right. You earn privileges, rights are given to you like the Constitution gives rights. You must always remember that marriage is about earning the privilege to continue to be happily married, and it’s up to each person, each couple, each family, to figure out what that means for them.
Here’s the other thing I learned from my first marriage that helped me make a happier one the second time around. Love doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. That means that how you show love isn’t the same, and what makes you feel loved isn’t the same. That sounds logical, right? You just have to find out what makes the other person feel loved and do those things, but what if they are mutually exclusive things?
To one person doing the dishes makes them feel loved, but to the other person being made to do dishes feels like punishment, maybe it was a punishment as a child so to have their spouse complain about them not doing the dishes throws them back into unhappy childhood memories. But the dishes still have to be done, and the other half of the couple will not think it’s fair to do them all the time. It is the job of the couple to find out why dishes are such a hot button for them. Figure that out, and the half that was punished with dish washing can offer to cook more often, or vacuum more often, or take some task that their spouse hates more than dishes.
“You were punished by being made to mow the lawn, I’ll do that, if you’ll do the dishes, because it makes me feel punished to do them.” Is that fair? Only if both halves of the couple feel it’s fair. That’s just one small example of the kind of dynamics that go into a long term relationship.
Here’s another example of the confusion that can happen if love means different things to people. I sent flowers to my first husband’s work once. I loved him and wanted him to have a happy reminder of that at his job. He came home and told me, “Never do that it again.” It had embarrassed him for his wife to send him flowers, and the other guys had given him shit about it. I had meant it to be romantic and tender, to make him as happy to get the flowers as it had made me to pick them out and send them, but it had made him unhappy and far from making him feel special, or loved, it had made him feel just the opposite. I must admit that his reaction to my flowers made me feel very unloved, too, so lesson learned. I never sent him flowers again.
Go forward about twenty years and I’m seriously dating Jon now. I was out on one of the last big book tours I would do by myself without Jon. I was gone for weeks and it was the longest we had been apart since we got serious. I sent him roses to his job with the first stanza from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “How Do I love Thee, Let me count the ways . . . ”
Now I was taking a chance here since a similar gesture had blown up in my face with my first husband, but I had been dating Jon for nearly six months, living together most of that time, and we had been friends for eight years before that. I had sent him flowers to congratulate him for getting his first big job out of college and he had liked them. I’d done other romantic gestures for him, so I thought it was worth a try. But not only had I arranged for this bouquet, but I had arranged for a different color of rose and the next stanza of the poem on the card to be sent to his work every day for a week.
He got the same ribbing that my first husband had gotten from male coworkers for the first flowers, but Jon was able to proudly say, “She loves me, and she wants me to know that.” To him the flowers and the poem meant he was loved, just like it meant to me that I loved him. We matched up in our love expectations and actions. Yay!
The women at work thought it was very romantic, the first day. By day three the women were getting hostile to him, and the men at work were having two reactions. One, what sexual secret did Jon know to make a woman send him this many flowers!? Jon’s answer of, “She loves me, and I love her,” did not make the men stop trying to wheedle this bedroom secret from him. Two, that he was making them look bad in front of the women they were dating. He actually had one boyfriend who didn’t even work with him come over and talk to him, because the flowers were making the boyfriend’s girlfriend who worked with Jon complain to the boyfriend. Why didn’t she get flowers from him?”
The boyfriend said, “You’re making me look bad. Tell your girlfriend to stop sending you flowers to work.”
Jon’s reply, “I don’t make her do anything, and I like getting the flowers. You can get a five dollar bouquet of flowers from the grocery store across the street and give them to your girlfriend.”
I have dated other men besides Jon where the big gesture wasn’t as appreciated. It didn’t fall as flat as it did with my first husband, but it made the men uncomfortable. Part of the lack of comfort came from the fact that I was dating men ten years, or more younger than myself the second time round, and I had more money and resources to do the big gesture than men in their twenties. ( I did try dating men in my own decade, but I had many of the same issues with them that I’d had with my first husband. Ten years, or more younger and we got a long better. Jon is twelve years my junior.) I apparently made some men feel less manly, because I wanted to do the big romantic gesture and I did it better, or more expensively than they could. Again, go back to the whole idea of love means different things to different people, you have to respect that and figure it out. I knew I wanted to date a man that enjoyed getting flowers from me, so I did. I wanted to be rewarded for my romantic inclinations, my generous impulses, not feel punished for them. That goes back to the whole who washes the dishes question, well, who feels punished and more emotionally attached to the dishes? What do flowers at work mean to a man? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing? Find out, and respect their feelings. That’s really the key talk, communicate, and find ways to make you both feel happy and loved.
Strangely, Jon no longer likes getting flowers at work. This made me very sad, but the reason is that he works out of the house just like I do now. Flowers at work where he couldn’t see me and touch me were reminders that he was loved and got to go home to me. Flowers at home/work seem useless to him, because I can just find him and hug and love on him in person. Why send flowers when we’re together during the day anyway? Once we talked it out it made sense, but it still made me sad that he no longer enjoys getting flowers. On the the other hand I love when he gets me flowers, so he does, because for me as I write alone in my office they are a reminder that I am loved. This is just one example of how things that made us both feel loved when we were dating have changed. You have to honor the changes in each other, as well as the things that stay the same.

Why I Threw Out Everything I Wrote Yesterday

So many of you wrote in and feared for the lovers in Anita’s life. They are in peril. This promises to be a very hard book, but two days ago it wasn’t that kind of trauma for Anita and me. She did her duty. She stayed at her post. She made the hard call in the midst of death and violence. She was a good cop, a good soldier, a good . . . she did her duty. She did not panic. It ended up with her in the hospital and it cost her the life of someone she valued. It also cost the lives of good men and women who stood shoulder to shoulder against the great bad thing. There are losses that aren’t about romantic love. There are losses that are about a different kind of love. The people that will go into the bad place with you and not panic, but stay at your side shooting, fighting, risking it all for the goal, the objective, the mission, but there will always be moments that come down to just surviving. The men and women who stay with you through something like that – you love them. They love you. It’s not romantic love, but it is a bond that will make you answer a phone a decade later and say, “What do you need? What can I do?”
It’s also the kind of emotion that will make you not answer the phone ever. It is a level of pain and trauma that makes you want to forget. You don’t want to relive it. You don’t want to look at it, or talk about it. You want to move on; forget. sometimes in that effort to push it away you will destroy everything in your life to avoid the pain of it, the truth of it.
I have had the privilege of knowing men and women who have served their country, worn the badge, and come away with the real deal. I have dated, and been friends with men that are still haunted. I know when they share their stories with me in any way that it’s a privilege to be trusted with those moments of truth. a lot of them are told with laughter, but every once in awhile their eyes grow haunted and the pain comes too close to hide.
Anita had one of those moments and I spent the next twenty-four hours trying to ignore the pain. I was willing to blow up my imaginary world and throw all the hard work that Micah and Jean-Claude had done to bring together the preternatural community so that we could have a crisis and Anita and I wouldn’t have to deal with what was really bothering us. We were willing to ruin our relationship with Micah. Willing to ruin our relationship with other lovers. Anita and I tried to sink ourselves into sex. Nothing worked yesterday. Some of it was good pages, but really I was blowing up my world, destroying books and books of relationship building. It was my husband, Jon, who told me not to do some of it, that it made no sense. I was angry with him, though we didn’t fight, because I knew something was wrong with me and how I was reacting.
This morning when I woke up I understood what I’d been doing. I also knew what I needed to write today. I have to look at what happened in the shoot out. I have to let Anita feel the pain of what she had to do, and what it cost her and others. I was willing to blow up my world, Jean-Claude’s world, Micah’s, sacrifice Damian, hurt Nathaniel, or try to just skip to sex and comfort. I fought with myself all day and at midnight I called it, because I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I just knew it I wasn’t thinking right.
This morning it was so clear, even logical. I’ve spent twenty years writing Anita. I’ve interviewed people about what it feels like to take a life in the course of their duty. I have been blessed and trusted with the stories, without them this series would have been so much weaker. I wouldn’t have understood, and there are things that I will not understand because this is fiction for me. I’m not there. I’m not going through the real doors. I’m not having to look down the barrel of real guns and make choices that will be irrevocable. In real life there is no rewrite, more’s the pity.
Today Anita has to wake up in the hospital with that moment of confusion of “where am I, what happened,” and then the memory will return. She’ll remember the moment. The gun, sighting down the barrel, pulling the trigger and watching him drop. She would make the same choice, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be haunted by it. You can be right. You can be brave. It is some comfort, but in the end the people still died, and you couldn’t save them all, and sometimes killing the killer is just one more trauma.
There are losses that make you weep, that drive you from sleep to pace the darkened house, because sleep is full of dreams, nightmares, or sometimes it’s just too quiet and alone with our thoughts isn’t that great. I should have remembered that yesterday, but it took me time to work it out – to remember.
I’m just lucky that what I do is fiction. That I didn’t ruin my actual relationship with the man I love, and I have a chance to rewrite the fictional mistake. That I didn’t blow up the political structure of our country for real, but just on paper and I had a smart man to tell me, “This isn’t logical.” Thanks, my husband. Lucky for me, and for Anita, there is a do-over today. It won’t be pleasant, in fact it will be emotionally pretty horrible, but when she’s faced it, worked some of it through, then she will still have the loves of her life, the men she depends on, and the careful political structure that Jean-Claude and Micah have worked so hard to make will still be working. I am dreading writing this, but I feel strangely peaceful about it, too. This is what comes next and the days when Anita would destroy her love life, her friendships, to avoid the pain of what she’s had to do in her job are past. I’ve had better therapy than that, and so has she.
As I write today I will think of my friends who have done, and are doing, this for real. To the men and women who put on a uniform and do their duty, thank you for your service.

True Love

Anyone who says love is free has never truly been in love. Your lover will need comfort. Your spouse will have bad days. Your child will have their heart broken, more than once and you will be expected to help pick up the pieces. Your beloved pets become a parade of joy and loss. Love costs, sometimes it costs everything you have, and sometimes it costs more. On those days you weigh the joy you gain against the pain; you weigh the energy given from the loving and the energy lost from the duties that love places upon us. Love can be the most expensive thing in the world. If it’s worth it, great, but if not, then love does not conquer all, sometimes you are conquered by it. You are laid waste before the breathtaking pain of it, and crushed under the weight of it’s obligations.

I posted the above yesterday on FaceBook, and got a lot of responses to it. Most of you totally understood the post, and many of you said that it helped. I’m glad, because it says to me that I’m not the only one tired of the “romance ideal”. This idea that there is only one special person and if you miss them you’re life is ruined, or if you love someone hard enough they will change into the person you need them to be when most people are incapable of changing who they fundamentally are, and the happily-ever-after myth.

The reason most fairy tales end with, “and they lived happily ever after,” is because they couldn’t figure out how to write it for real. Falling in love is a great place to start, but it is the beginning, not the end. We live in a culture that shows that first mad, crazy falling in love as the only true love. Science has proven that the falling in love phase is chemically induced and will last between two months and two to five years, which is why so many people think they’ve falling out of love when the magic hormones tone down. But that’s when the real work of “happily ever after” begins. Love that lasts isn’t effortless. A few people said, my post was too dark, and they hoped I felt better. I wasn’t feeling bad, just the uncertainties of two dogs in vet this week both of which will be fine, and really tired of the fluffy, bunny, talk show ideals that people keep thinking are the real stuff of love. The reason most romance novels don’t concentrate much beyond the happy ending is that it’s damn hard to write what comes next, because in among the great sex, wonderful moments, and truly loving people more and more with each year are the moments that aren’t so wonderful. Jon and I are both introverts with good social skills, but we need alone time, and couple time, and family time with our daughter, and . . . so much. But when things are really tough, we have an endearment for each other.

One of us will take the hands of our beloved in ours, gaze deeply and lovingly into each others’ eyes and will say, “I hate you less than anybody else in the world, right now.”

The other of us, will smile that smile that is joy, love, mischief, and just years of truly understanding each other, and say back with all the feeling of any movie declaration you’ve ever seen, “And I hate you less anybody else in the world, too.”

If you’ve been together less than five years, or have no children, you may not understand this term of endearment, but for many of you I think you’ll understand it just fine.

Moon, Darkness, and Dawn

I left my office last night with the moon riding high and bright through one of the skylights. The moon was bright as a full moon, though she was only three-quarters done. I woke this morning in the dark. If there were stars I couldn’t see them. It was just black. I cuddled close to the warmth of my husband, Jon, for a few more minutes, but my mind was alive with the writing. He wrapped himself around me and I forced myself to be present in the warm nest of our bed, our intermingled limbs, the sensuousness of his body pressed against me, the feel of his breath against my skin. I made myself be present, dragged myself out of my head and the words in it long enough to honor that moment, such a wonderful way to wake up. Sometimes, if I’m not careful, I will get so caught up in my work that I miss how amazing the rest of my life is, and these last two years, but especially the last year I’ve really tried to enjoy and be aware of the moments, the present joys, rather than rushing from deadline to deadline, goal to goal. Sometimes the writing engulfs the world and it needs to for me to be able to write, but I’m working equally as hard to be in the rest of my life. It’s a great life and I’ve worked really hard for it, not just the material things, but the emotional things. People always assume that if a couple is happy it was effortless, that happily-ever-after thing, but real love isn’t that. Real love is that Jon and I made a deal that he’d get up with me, so that I could get to my desk ASAP. So he could make sure we all got breakfast. Without this extra bit of planning some mornings he and I forget breakfast and then there’s that sugar crash later. Not good. I eat at my desk, and yes I know people say that’s bad for various reasons, I do it because even breakfast with my family derails me from the book now. I talk as little as possible to anyone, because everything distracts and takes me out of the mindset I need for this work, this calling, this thing I’ve been compelled to do since I was about twelve.

Today it wasn’t a problem not to talk to anyone, because the house was dark, no one up, but Jon and myself. I was in my office running water into my tea kettle with no lights turned on yet. I know my office in the dark. But there was this red glow against the drawn shade of the window, what was that? Why was it red? I opened the shade and, you guessed it – dawn. It was a crimson glow against the horizon, a bloody neon slash above the tree tops in the eastern sky. When I say goodnight to the moon high enough to see it through my skylights, and good morning to the red blush of dawn, I’m in the zone. But I also remembered to enjoy that first warm, cuddling wakeup in the nesting dark of my husband’s arms. I’m enjoying my office and the little votive candle I have burning on my desk. It’s two anthropomorphic ants having a picnic. It was part of the summer collection from Yankee Candle a few years ago. Why do I have it on my desk? To remind myself that when it’s lit, I’m working, but that I’m also supposed to be having fun while I do it. So worker ants, having a picnic – work ethic and whimsy. It helps me remember that I’m supposed to be doing both. And no, before anyone asks, I haven’t always had the ant votive. It was something I found a couple of years ago to help me remember to work hard, but remember to take some time out of the work to enjoy myself. Some mornings writing a blog, or something unrelated to the book for just a few paragraphs helps clear the morning garbage out of my head, and let’s me get to the scene in my head. I can see it, now I have to find the words so that, eventually, you can all see it.

Kiss the Dead tour – San Diego/Carlsbad

Thanks to everyone at Mysterious Galaxy that helped with the event, and to everyone who came out see the show. We’re still getting people contacting us saying, “Are you on tour?” “Where are you going to be?” “You were in Carlsbad, and I missed you?” Last night helped me realize a couple of things. First, putting the information about tour up on our web page as a sticky doesn’t seem to be helping everyone find the information. I’m not sure what to do about that, since it’s the first thing you come to on the page. Suggestions for how to make it more easy to see are welcome. Second, maybe putting the info up in twitter and Facebook feeds periodically as the event gets closer may help. We’ll try that for the Atlanta event and see how it works, and if that works, great, if not, we’ll keep working on it.
Jon did remember a question we were asked for the first time in Huntington Beach, because it also came up last night in Carlsbad. The question was, does Jean-Claude truly love Anita, or does he love the power he gains from her? He loves her, maybe as much as he’s able, but I think that perhaps part of the holding back on his part is centuries of pain and loss. I know that just in this lifetime losing people I love made me more cautious about jumping wholeheartedly into relationships. But the question seems to imply that power is somehow bad, and I don’t believe that in this context. Power is what lets Jean-Claude keep his people and all that he cares about safe, without power he would have been dead ages ago, and so would Anita, Richard, and we would never have lived long enough to meet Micah, and Nathaniel would have never lived long enough to mean anything to Anita. If Jean-Claude and Anita weren’t the supernatural power couple that they are, they and the series would be dead ages ago. If you aren’t strong enough to protect those you love, then you can lose them. I don’t just mean the strength to punch someone out, or shoot someone, or any violence. I mean strength of character, strength of conviction, strength of will – to be strong enough to stay the course. I believe without strength love will not survive, but you, as a person, do not have the conviction to do the work for love to be long term. People who are weak of will fail you when love gets hard, and real love, true love, will get hard, trust me on that.
Are you strong enough to love someone? Are you strong enough to protect them, and yourself? Remember that protecting them is keeping that job you hate to put a roof over their head, and food on the table. Protecting your love is doing the housework, when you hate it. Protecting love is about doing what it takes to have a real life with the person, or people you love. Does Jean-Claude love Anita? Yes, by any real definition I’m aware of, very yes.
Remember, it’s not like Anita is twiddling her thumbs on a Saturday night waiting for Jean-Claude to call. She’s as busy with her career as he is with his, maybe busier, and she has Micah and Nathaniel as her other main squeezes.

Cupid, God of Love

And could we please change Cupid back to his original Deity of Love, and get rid of the sexless baby images? The closest image to what Cupid is supposed to look like that I could find in modern times is this one. Karl Urban as the God of Love! Come on, who wouldn’t rather look at him, than some infant on steroids with a heart tipped bow?