novel Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

New Blog – Jason, the novel, is here!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Announcement at Dragon Con 2013

Sorry that you couldn’t all be at DragonCon to hear my special announcement. It would have been awesome if everyone that had wanted to be there had been able to, but I hope the rest of you had a great labor day weekend. Jon and I had a blast!
How do you celebrate twenty years of writing a serious like Anita Blake? I’m writing on the new Merry Gentry, A Shiver of LIght which will be out summer 2014, but if I’ve done all my pages on Merry then I’ve been giving myself permission to work on anything I want to write in the afternoon, or evening. So, what have I been writing? You’re about to find out, because you’ll be able to preorder the first story, Dancing, tomorrow September 5!
I mention a lot of throwaway lines in the Anita books, scenes we never get to see in the novels, because there just isn’t time in the middle of the mystery. One of those never seen scenes is Sergeant Zerbrowski’s annual police family cookout where Anita takes Nathaniel and Micah. I wrote a novelette where we get to finally meet Zerbrowski’s entire family, and see him and his wife, Katie, at home. We also see how Anita, Micah, and Nathaniel’s relationship has grown from the events in Affliction. Anita and the guys happen to be babysitting Matthew, so we get to see them do the whole family thing with all the other cops’ families. Of course, something goes pear-shaped, but then it wouldn’t be a story if everything went smoothly, right?
How do you celebrate twenty years of a series? For me, I’m planning to write some of the scenes we never get to see on stage in the novels, and things the readers, you, have said, “I’d really like to see that.” Well, guess what, me, too.
I’d planned on maybe putting all the short stories in an anthology of Anita stories, and maybe we’ll do that someday, but thanks to technology you don’t have to wait for this first one, Dancing, you can preorder it as an e-special tomorrow, and have it on your computer, or e-reader, September 17!
Depending on how this one does you may get more of the shorter pieces as e-specials, and we might even do more out-takes like Beauty, but starting this month is your chance to encourage my muse and me to keep writing these extra adventures, and sharing them with you almost as fast as I can write them. Come dance, laugh, argue, and prove that love and friendship just might conquer all. Come Dancing with Anita, Micah, and Nathaniel tomorrow.

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Merry Gentry novel, or the next one

I have blogged about what Merry and I are doing about the next Merry novel. I’ve twitted and I could have sworn FB posted about it, but one more time.

I didn’t abandon the Merry series, she and I fought the good fight for nearly six months. She didn’t like my plot for the next book because it screwed up her happily-ever-after. She is demanding a book plot that doesn’t make her now happy life into a misery. She stopped cooperating as a character and I missed a book deadline for the first time in twenty years of writing. I backed off, and let my stubborn Merry have some space, as I’ve moved off to play with Anita and even brand new stories, Merry has slowly begun to deign to talk to me again. I am hopeful that she and I will reach a compromise.

I just need to tip-toe through the minefield so that I have an interesting book that ties up lose ends from Divine Misdemeanors , but doesn’t blow up Merry’s life with Doyle, Frost, the new babies, and everyone else. If nothing bad happens to anyone it’s not a book, it’s a very long vignette – like a day in the life of. Story needs conflict; Merry needs her happy life, and therein lies my dilemma.

Don’t Let Perfectionism Stop You

When you got behind the wheel of a car for the very first time did you expect to be able to drive perfectly? Not only perfectly, but to drive so well you could drive in the Indy 500 and win? Of course you didn’t, because that would be beyond unrealistic, it would crazy talk; right? Right.
So why do so many people believe they should be able to sit down and write a novel the first time out, not only a novel, but that their first draft, first sentences, will capture exactly the brilliant colors and images in their heads. They seem to expect their day dreams and fantasies to spill out of their finger tips in a perfect flow first time out of the box. When this miracle of perfection doesn’t happen in the first few lines, or paragraphs, or pages, they get discouraged and give up, or start revising right away trying to make it perfect. I’ve now lost count of the number of people who have told me about the first chapter, or three chapters, of their book that they have been revising for the last three, five, eight, ten years. When they get the beginning perfect they’ll finish the book. The chances of them ever finishing their book is about zero, because perfectionism is damn near impossible to achieve in a first draft, especially the first time you try to write.
When I first started writing book length stories I found the 70/30 rule, or the garbage quotient. 70% of a first draft is garbage, 30% of it is gold, but I had to write all 100% to get that percentage of gold. The stuff I could keep and was actually good was scattered in among the crap of the rest. If I’d waited for a perfect first draft I’d have never finished a book. Perfection, if it exists, comes with editing that rough stuff into finished product. When I talked to the woman who would be my first agent, her first question was, “How many drafts of your first novel have you done?” My reply, “Seven.” That was an answer that let her know I was serious and not caught in the perfection trap. I went home and did one more edit of my first novel and sent it off. Months later she’d take me on as a client, and I had an agent. It would take almost four years for the book to hit the shelves, but that’s another story. The point is that writing, good, professional writing is rewriting.
I’ve now written over thirty novels and my garbage quotient has gotten lower just by practice and knowing my craft. Some first drafts are 80% gold and only 20% garbage, but not always. Sometimes it’s more like 50/50. It just depends on the book. I routinely throw out hundreds of pages in a book, winnowing it down through edits and that’s before it ever leaves me and goes to New York for my editor to read.
So, the next time you look at those great notes for your story, or novel, and think, “I can’t get it perfect. It won’t match the vision in my head.” And you get frustrated and stuck before you begin, or soon after you begin, just take a deep breath and keep going. Plow through like a bull in a china shop, break everything in sight heading for your goal of being able to type, “The End,”. You can clean up all that broken mess in the next draft, and put in new cabinets the draft after that, and when the room (the draft) is close to done buy new china and put it in just the way you like it, and know, just know that with every book you’re going to destroy your idea, your dream, and make you want to weep at the ruin of your bright dreams like broken porcelain scattered in bright pieces across your desk, but know, absolutely know, that you can fix it later, but to give yourself something to fix ya gotta break it first. You’ve got to be willing to be really bad, to be really good.