What was your first bird of the year? The first bird you saw outside on New Year’s Day. Mine was cardinal for the second year in a row, but 2022 it was a single scarlet male the only color in a winter landscape full of snow. This year the day was gray looking more like late November here than December. Three female cardinals fluttered around the bird feeders their soft brownish tan bodies with the tips of faint red at crest, wing and tail blending into the dead leaves and bare trees so that only their movement betrayed them. The first bird traditionally tells us what the coming year will be like, or what will be important to us. I have had January firsts where the birds all hid and I saw mammals, squirrels one year, and a cat one year. But it’s usually a bird, then you have to figure out what the message is for the year. Squirrels for me are to balance work and play better. Cat, was a sign to ask my allergist if I could have my first cat. That was a really wonderful moment after twenty years of allergy shots. Doves usually mean it’s going to be a year of matters of the heart, or issues associated with Goddess. Cardinals usually mean I need to be willing to be seen more, to stand out and say, look at me! It’s a lesson I struggle with like most writers, because on one hand we want our books to be wildly popular and sell tons, and make us tons of money to go with all those sales, but we are also usually introverts and shy, or at least more comfortable at our desks than doing interviews or public appearances. Even if we’re good at the public side it drains us. I was not happy with last year’s message of bright red cardinal, but female cardinal is a little less flashy. She does most of the egg sitting in the spring because her coloring lets her blend in and not attract predators while the male is the stalking horse saying, look at me and don’t look for our nest. Do I get to hunker down at home and nest this year? Cardinals don’t stop with laying eggs and raising chicks just once in the spring, unlike most song birds they will rinse and repeat two to three times a year. Here in Missouri where the weather stays mild longer I’ve seen them still feeding fledglings in early October. Though that’s a chancy month in the Midwest, because we can get a freak October snowfall. The year I noticed them feeding in October the weather stayed mild, luckily. They build a fresh nest for each set of eggs, probably because even the slowest predator might figure out where their nest is if they keep going to the same location to feed babies from March to October. Once they successful raise all their young then it’s time to form winter flocks with the juvenile birds who look just like mom. The males won’t get Dad’s bright red plumage until next spring, so the threesome I saw by the feeders on January 1st probably weren’t all females, but mom and chicks all camouflaged together to up the chances of this year’s babies surviving the winter without getting eaten by a hawk, or other predator. Maybe that’s my lesson for the coming year that I don’t have to be the brightest thing in view, but just concentrate on laying as many eggs (ideas) and raising as many chicks (books) as possibly this year. Be wildly productive and concentrate on writing new stories, and don’t put all my eggs in one nest, basket like the cardinal I’ll up my chances of success by having multiple nests for different broods (ideas/novels/stories) and concentrate on raising them until their ready to fly on their own and share with all of you.
Tag: writing
Listening to the Silence
It’s 11:00 in the morning and I have no writing done. I’m on deadline and I have no writing done. This is usually my cue to beat myself up emotionally which feeds all sorts of issues which if fed enough will trigger the chorus line of personal demons that I think most of us have in our heads. Once that chorus begins to chant their negative messages and dance their little dance not only is writing unlikely to happen today, but my day will be wrecked. I will be wrecked emotionally and it just goes downhill from there.
Often when I’m behind in my morning routine for work I try to hit the writing hard and make up for lost time, sometimes that works, but not when my head has already started going dark. On days like that I’ve learned that I need to do one of two things, maybe both, get on the treadmill and walk off the black mood, and/or mediate. I light a candle and try to focus not on the stressful morning, or all the things that are feeding the bad day, but on listening to that still, small voice that we all have inside us. The voice of our good angels, our totems, our spirit guides, that little slice of God/Goddess that is there to help us if we take the time to listen. It’s hard when most days are so rushed, but I’ve learned that if I can take even a few moments to stand outside in the sun, or hug a tree, or do anything that helps me be still and truly listen, that there will be comfort, or wisdom, or I’ll think of something I didn’t think of before that helps. Think about how powerful that is, that inside each of us is a spark of the Divine that will guide us, teach us, steady us, and it is always there, if we enter the silence and listen for it. (For all you atheists out there, you have it too, maybe you call it consciences, or inner knowing, but it’s there.)
I came away from meditation with this thought, “That there has to be chaos before there can be order. Sometimes you need that bad relationship in order to learn the lessons needed to have that wonderful relationship next time. Sometimes you lose an opportunity, because a better one is waiting for you. You make a mistake that turns out to be exactly what you needed to solve a major problem in your life/job/family/romance. A frustrating morning can lead to a life lesson that helps you find your way to a better afternoon, and to happier days in general.”
If I can hold onto this lesson, I’ve already put it in my journal, and I’m typing it here, then perhaps I won’t let the negative things drowned out the positive things, which I have a tendency to do.
I meditated and then I allowed myself to sit in the big, comfy leather chair in my office, cuddle with one of my dogs, sip tea and read from the book I’d almost finished. It reminded me that life isn’t all about the rushing around and accomplishing goals, it’s also about working hard so you can have the time to enjoy the things that make you happy. Now, I feel ready to start on that second bottle of water of the day, and get back to working on the story that is due. I have hope that I’ll get through the majority of it today, which is a lot better attitude than I had before I took a few minutes to be still and listen.
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 Mummies at Atlas Obscura
Fear, Fame, and AFP
My grandmother told me not to toot my own horn, which meant that I wasn’t encouraged to take too much pride in my accomplishments. She also believed that you should never enjoy anything too much, or God will punish you. These two beliefs made her life incredibly bleak, and in turn made my childhood not exactly a bowl of cherries. Skip ahead decades of therapy later and I thought I had worked through the issues those two messages had given me. Of course, bedrock issues from childhood aren’t so easily conquered. In fact, one of the things that’s been most disappointing about therapy breakthroughs is that even after you figure out what your personal demon is, the demon doesn’t always go away. Sometimes they do, sometimes the exorcism works and you’re free of that issue – free forever. I love it when that happens, it feels so liberating, but there are some issues that no matter how much cognitive therapy holy water you throw on them, they refuse to let you go.
I have trouble being proud of my accomplishments, because though my grandmother has been dead for years she raised me and she raised me not to be too proud. I’m not sure why taking pride in a job well done was such a sin. Weirdly, you were allowed to work hard to get good at something and then to do it, but once you actually started getting positive attention about it, then you had to not be prideful. It was an odd double message, be good, but not too good. It was good to get good grades and be smart, or good in athletics or whatever, but don’t get a big head about it, don’t get too full of yourself. It was okay for you to be told you were pretty, or smart, or whatever, but you couldn’t call yourself any of that, because that would be getting above yourself. Conversely anything you were bad at, or not perfect at would be pointed out immediately with comments like, “You’re so clumsy. You’re stupid. Etc . . .” I don’t know why she felt it was so wrong to praise success, but totally okay to criticize on the other end so harshly. I wondered in hindsight if she thought cutting me down would help keep me humble, just like not praising me to my face would? At her wake friends came up and told me how proud she was of me and how much she praised my accomplishments. It was news to me, and by that time I had totally taken in her mixed message of succeed, but don’t let yourself enjoy it. Due to my parents divorcing when I was a baby, my grandmother was with me from birth, and the only parent I had from age six when my mother died. She was my only parent, my world, and a lot of her beliefs and behaviors had a profound influence on the person I am today for better and worse.
I have pictures of me with famous people and I’ve posted almost none of them. Actors, singers, other writers who probably fully expected me to post the images on social media, but I didn’t. Why? Because I still can’t shake a terrible discomfort with being that kind of famous. In fact, the picture with this blog of me with Amanda Palmer, singer/song writer/author, almost didn’t get posted with this, because it made me so uncomfortable as if just the picture was bragging, and bragging wasn’t allowed. Then this morning I got the notice that Amanda had dropped a new song from her upcoming album to Patreon’s only, and since I’m a Patreon of her’s I listened to it. Gods, it was so intimate as if she were whispering into my ear, her breath against my hair. The rawness of it, it feeling so personal made me cry, and in that moment I knew that I had to use the picture of the two of us together for this blog. The picture is seven or eight years ago when she came through as one half of the amazing duo that is, The Dresden Dolls. I joined Amanda’s Patreon in part because she seems to thrive on social media and attention, and be much more comfortable with fame than I am. She is one of several people that I’ve tried to study to see if their ease with fame will help my discomfort. What I learned is that I can’t be Amanda Palmer, or anyone else. I have to figure out how to be famous as Laurell K. Hamilton.
I’ve had offers of free stuff, if I’ll just wear their clothes, or use their product and post about it, take pictures of myself in or with it. I accepted one offer of lovely shoes and then I didn’t post any of the pictures when they wanted me to post them. Why? It would take me a few more years to realize it was because the idea of me wearing shoes being possibly able to influence other people to buy them freaked me out.
Any time that I got too much attention in this area I’d sabotage it, not on purpose, not actively, but it was still self-sabotage even if just by procrastination, or losing an email. I’m never so disorganized than when it’s something that might raise my profile higher than it already is, and honestly if my agent didn’t insist on it, I probably wouldn’t say, New York Times #1 best selling author, but I am and my agent has chastised me enough times that I use it.
A journalist on the tour for my latest novel, Serpentine, this summer asked me if I’d thought about where my papers would be donated. It took me a second to realize he meant my archival papers like my drafts, notes, literary detritus and mementos. I was completely at a loss. It hadn’t occurred to me that any college or institute would be interested in my literary fingernail clippings. I explained that I’d been raised not to take too much pride in things and I just couldn’t shake it. He was older than me by a couple of decades, and we talked about the fact that some things that we know are damaging to us, old beliefs we were raised with that hold us back, never leave us. He said something to the effect that you have to stop trying to get rid of the parts that won’t go away, and just accept them. Since he’d been trying to slay his personal demons for at least a decade longer than I have, I appreciated him sharing his insight. It should have been discouraging that twenty years from now I’m still going to be fighting this deep issue, but it wasn’t discouraging, instead it was encouraging. (I cannot find the file with all the interviews from last summer’s tour that would have this wonderful, and professional newspaper journalist’s name in it. I’ve sat on this for two days trying to find the information, until I realized I’m using it as an excuse not to post this blog. When I find it, I’ll post with all his information, but for today, no more procrastinating.)
I’ve had open invitations to come back for radio, blogs, podcasts, and all sorts of wonderful interviews with great people who wanted me to come back any time I wanted, and they meant it. I have not initiated a single return interview except when a new book came out and my publicist told me to do it. Why? I don’t know why, or I didn’t, but I know what issue is behind the behavior.
So, to all the celebrities that tried to get into contact with me, especially early in my career, I’m sorry if I dropped the ball. Sometimes I couldn’t believe you were actually contacting me, like the shy girl who suddenly gets asked out by the most popular guy in school. There must be some mistake, or it’s a cruel joke and will end in ridicule and tears.
I will be trying to post more of the pictures as I find them, and I will try and believe it when people say, come back any time for an interview. I’ll try to be more comfortable with it all. Now that I know what some of the issues are that hold me back in this area I’ll try to move forward as if I don’t have the issue. Fake it until you make it, I guess.
I will at the very least stop torpedoing my opportunities for more publicity and fame. I can’t get rid of the part of me that squirms with embarrassment about me being “famous”, but I can admit it its a problem. I can admit that as successful as I’ve been I probably could have been even more successful if I had been able to embrace that success more wholeheartedly and not missed certain cues. Here’s to being a better dance partner with my success in the future, and kicking this particular inner demon down the road.
Strength and Your Amazing Generosity
I’ve been under the weather for a couple of days, nothing major, but enough to distract me, so imagine my surprise when I saw how much above and beyond you guys had donated to our charity from Giving Tuesday, Mary’s House of Hope at A Safe Place. Thank you for donating on Tuesday and for continuing to donate. You guys are the best! In fact you’ve been so amazing that we’re going to keep the fundraising going. I’ve signed so many books and we will continue to give away signed books as long as you guys keep giving so generously to this wonderful charity.
I’ve chosen to do a couple of very personal blogs recently. One with the video from my Pikes Peak Writer’s Conference keynote speech where I talked publicly for the first time about what has happened in my life when fans became obsessed, and/or turned into haters, or worse. Then I followed up with an equally personal blog explaining why I chose the charity that I did. Your reaction to both blogs has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive, thank you all so much. In fact, you’ve been so lovely about it all that I’ve decided to continue to share.
When I was first being interviewed about the Anita Blake novels, almost every journalist asked me some variation of this, “Why did you decide to write a strong female character?”
My reply was a variation of, “Growing up I learned, that you were either strong, or a victim. It never occurred to me to have a main character that was anything else but strong.”
My grandmother fought back against my grandfather and never let his abuse turn her into a victim. She was a fighter and she helped make me one, too. She’s a big part of why Anita Blake is so strong, stubborn, and unflinching. Her telling me that Rawhead and Bloody Bones would get me if I was a bad little girl, instead of the boogeyman, would give me a plot for the fifth Anita Blake novel, Bloody Bones, and send me researching Celtic mythology, which led me to write the Meredith Gentry series. My grandmother probably helped me give strength to Merry in the face of the abuse of her own family. Helping turn her from helpless princess to Los Angeles Private Detective and Queen. You, the fans, have told me that Anita’s strength, Merry’s strength, have helped you be strong in your real lives. Strength shared is strength multiplied, let’s keep sharing the best of ourselves, and thank you again for your generosity to Mary’s House of Hope, at a Safe Place.
Fear, Bravery, and the Pikes Peak Writers Conference
This is a blog about things I haven’t spoken of publicly before. Things that I was advised not to share ever, but sometimes not talking about something makes it grow larger until you can’t work around it. I’d been meaning to write this blog and post the attached video for a year, but I just kept putting it off, and then a woman on Twitter posted about her experience. She thought she was a coward, but bravery only exists in the face of fear, and her bravery helped me find my own. She shared her experience with a very creepy man that had verbally assaulted her in her own home. He never touched her, no bruises to show, just horrible sexual language that he had no right to say to her. She was trying to explain to some men that a woman doesn’t have to be actually physically assaulted to feel unsafe or even to feel violated. She made her point, and my first similar experience was when I was only ten-years-old thanks to an obscene phone caller that reduced me to hysterics. It would be the last time I was allowed to come home after school by myself for years after that call. My family and I both worried that he would come find me and do what he’d talked about. Women are more likely to be the victim of sexual based crimes, it’s just the truth. I learned at a tender age that the world was not safe, and there would be other incidents as I grew older that confirmed that even people you knew weren’t always safe havens, but this blog isn’t about that, not really. The every day caution that women have to exert to go through the world is just the nearest shared experience that I could come up with to try to explain how being famous feels when it goes wrong. Okay, how it feels to me when it goes wrong. I’m sure there are celebrities that handle it much better than I do. I am sharing my experience here, my feelings, because in the end that’s all any of us can share.
This blog is an introduction of sorts to the talk I gave at the Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference in Colorado last year. My husband filmed the talk with his phone, so that’s the quality of it (the volume is low), but it was the first time I spoke publicly about a lot of things that had happened to me in my career. The topic of all the key notes speeches that weekend were supposed to be on things that made you almost give up writing, like rejections, but Mary Robinette Kowal had done a hilarious speech the night before on that stumbling block, so I had to scrap my speech and start over. (By the way I just finished reading her book, The Calculating Stars, and I highly recommend it.) It forced me to think seriously about what had almost made me stop writing. Rejection was nothing compared to it. I decided to talk about it for the very first time in front of a room full of people I’d just met, or didn’t know at all. Now, I’m sharing it with all of you, with the whole internet, because it’s time I took back these pieces of myself that got broken. The only way I know to recover that part of myself is to write about it, and I can’t do that if I’m not wiling to talk publicly about it, so here we go.
Deal Announcment
Publishers Weekly had an exclusive on this news, so I couldn’t share it until after they published it yesterday.
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Hamilton Re-ups At Berkley
Bestseller Laurell K. Hamilton inked a new three-book deal with her editor at Berkley, Cindy Hwang. The North American rights agreement, which Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House handled, will bring fans her first new series since 1999. The new books feature Detective Samuel Havelock, who works in the Metaphysical Coordination Unit. Berkley said Havelock exists “in a universe where heaven, hell, and our own world converge,” and “he is all we have keeping the Apocalypse at bay.” Also included in the agreement is a novel in Hamilton’s Anita Blake , Vampire Hunter series and a third book, which Berkley said is “yet to be determined.” Hamilton, according co Berkley, has sold more than 20 million books.
Serpentine Tour – Blog One
Serpentine, my latest novel hits the shelves on August 7th! I can’t wait for you to finally get to read it. There were so many times that I’d write something fun, or surprising and I’d want to Tweet it, or blog about it, but I knew that was a nope. Why? Because it was usually something that would give away the mystery, or character development, or the big reveal. When a certain character finally came on stage it was everything I could do not to Tweet it, or do a quick video for Instagram, but I knew that if I could have behaved myself on Twitter, I’d totally have spilled the beans on a video. So I stayed offline and behaved myself, because I wanted you to be able to read it yourself for the first time, not have me do spoilers months, or even a year ahead of time. But now, the tour for Serpentine is about to begin, and I still won’t be able to talk about spoilers, because not everyone will have read the book yet. Arrgghhh!
So now I have to decide, do I let you and I talk about Serpentine as if we’ve all read the book, or do I police us so we don’t spoil things for those who haven’t finished the book yet? I wish we could all sit down with a cup of coffee, or tea, and just talk about the book, but I can’t talk to each one of you personally, so how do we do it? I’m also doing interviews in print and recorded, some of which have a few spoilers in them. Not like who/what done it, but character interactions and some reveals about plot, so as those come out then we should be able to talk more freely at the signings and tour events. But the first event in Huntington Beach Barnes & Noble (Tomorrow night at 7-10 pm more info in the link) that has to be spoiler free; right? Right? Come on, right? Yes, right, because most people will not have read Serpentine all the way through yet. We have to behave ourselves and let everyone catch up, but I think as the tour continues we might all finally be on the same page. Or not, we’ll see. I’m thinking that maybe you can give your opinion in the comments below. Let me know who’s having time to finish the book so I can gauge whether it would be fair to talk about spoilers at the tour events.
Edits, Travel, and the Injury at the End
I finished the edits on the next Anita Blake novel, Serpentine at the beginning of March. Jonathon, my husband, and I were already on a romantic vacation, but he helped me take time out to finish the edits that I hadn’t managed before we had to leave for our getaway. At the end I went old school: writing the changes long hand on sticky notes and handed them to Jonathon for him to type into the manuscript edits. I hadn’t written that much long hand in years, but it felt right. I’d already written the book, the edits were small things, or a scene here and there that needed changed for plot or character development. I took out one side plot that had started off as a red herring, but turned out to lead nowhere, so it had to go. I even had to cut a great new character that I hope we get to see later in another book. Larry Kirkland was a character that was actually in one of the rough drafts of the first Anita Blake novel, Guilty Pleasures, but he wouldn’t actually get on stage until book three, The Circus of the Damned. One of my favorite things about writing a series is that characters and plot lines that have to be edited out of one book can still see life later on. Interestingly, Anita, Micah, and Nathaniel try to have a romantic trip in the book, but both her work and Micah’s interfere with it. I wrote that months before Jonathon and I would be on our own trip and my work would cost us the first few days of relaxation, as if my muse knew it was coming. Of course, Anita’s work was a missing person and murder, and Micah’s work was a type of lycanthropy that we’d never seen before. My edits seem so tame in comparison.
I proceeded to take the longest purposeful break from writing that I’ve ever taken. Jonathon and I finished our trip without more work interfering. Then I got to spend our daughter’s spring break with her. My sister and her wife were able to fly into the country and visit with us. I spent all my “vacation” traveling. I’d finally get on the first plane towards home, but in the all out run to make it, I fell.
I was running full out, I was even thinking, “Wow, I can really run now. I’m so glad I can move like this, yay gym!” And then I wiped out. I did a good job of it, because kind strangers came to stand over me, making that face you make when someone hurts themselves in front of you. Thanks to the kind man who offered me a hand up, because I could not have gotten up without help. I wasn’t even sure that I’d be able to stand at all, until I tried. I was finally able to limp to my plane like Igor from the Frankenstein movies, but I was just happy to make my plane. I enjoyed my travels, but I was so ready to go home. I made my plane discovering that I was bleeding from the skin I’d lost, but I was able to walk better as I moved more. I still hurt, but I got to my seat. The flight attendant got me bandages, alcohol wipes, and eventually ice bags to put on my knee. Thanks for the care and attention Delta. Thanks also to my seat mate, Charles, who was a gentleman in the best sense of the word, putting my bag overhead for me when he saw I was hurt and helping the flight attendant pass me things to do some first aid. He also kept my mind off how much I was hurting by having an intelligent and calm discussion about our different paths of faith.
The skin is growing back from the scrapes, but I’ve either scraped my meniscus, or got a micro tear in it, which means no gym or martial arts for awhile. The page proofs of Serpentine have come back for one last chance to read over and catch any small things. It hurts to even sit at my desk for too long without propping my leg up. Sigh.
I’m looking forward to finishing the page proofs and getting back to the gym and dojo, and onto writing the next story.
Today is the Emotional Day
This morning I woke up anxious and unsettled and couldn’t figure out why, then I realized, “Oh, this is the emotional day after I finish a book.” I was so mentally and creatively done when I finished the last book recently that I actually had two days of energy and DOING things before the adrenaline drop happened. Usually it’s instantaneous, or within a few hours. So this cycle of predictable post-book-isms has been a little off schedule, but when each day, or mood hits, I’ll ask my husband, Jonathon, or our domestic partners is this normal? Do I always do this after I finish a book? They will all nod and assure me this is the pattern. Jonathon and I have been together for seventeen years and will soon count our sixteenth wedding anniversary, so he knows the drill. Our domestic partners, Genevieve and Spike, have only seen me through three books, but even they know the pattern now. Apparently I am that predictable to everyone else, but to me it remains more mysterious.
I couldn’t think why I was lying in a nice warm bed, cuddled with my sweetie and anxious, until I realized what part of my pattern was happening. Today I will be anxious, sometimes overly emotional, so I know to ride through the anxiety and not let the emotional issues get out of hand. This will pass, I just need to hunker down, hold tight, and allow it to happen. Fighting it, or beating myself up because I’m allowing myself to get all weepy, or angry, or scared, or whatever emotion is happening is not helpful. It just makes me feel worse, so today I need to be gentle with myself and with those around me, and just keep moving. Its a good day to do exercise I enjoy, a very good day for stretching and gentle yoga, or playing with the dogs and cat, or just sitting quietly with them.
I wrote the above a few days ago, and today I’m reminded that if I don’t go straight back into writing something new that the emotional roller coaster isn’t just one day. It continues sporadically over several days. No wonder I’m a workaholic, this feels awful, but I’m still not ready to sit down and write. I will be brave and let my writing process have its way with me, until I am sure what comes next.