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Divine Misdemeanors comes out tomorrow so you guys can actually read it for yourself which is what so many of you told me on-line. You get the book tomorrow so you voted for me to hint about Flirt which is the extra Anita Blake novel that you’re getting in February 2nd 2010. Hm, I’m bad at hinting if I’m not very careful. I tend to give too much away. So, how much to share without it being too much?

First Flirt interrupted my writing of Divine Misdemeanors the way that the novel Micah interrupted Danse Macabre a few years back. Books usually sneak up on me, but neither of these did. They knocked on the front door and when I tried not to open it, saying, “I’m busy, come back later,” they banged on the door. I went to the door to chase the interruption away, but it was like opening the door and finding something interesting standing there, something you just couldn’t quite ignore. So, I thought, well, I’ll write a few pages and see how it goes. Fifty pages later I knew that Micah had to be finished before I could go back to the other book. I learned from that experience and I knew what Flirt was, a second book barging its way into my creative pipeline, but these pushy books clog up the works as if your ideas snarl into some kind of log jam and you have to write the interruption to clear the way for the book that’s actually due. I let Flirt have its way with me and it wrote in similar amazing speed. It turned out to be a little longer than Micah. The difference is that Micah came out of nowhere. The character just came up behind me and finally told me more of his back story, and I knew Anita had a job out of town. It was like getting mugged by my own muse, but in a nice, happy way.

Flirt wasn’t like that. In fact, Flirt is one of the few books when I knew exactly when I got the idea for it, and where, and what inspired it. I’ve blogged earlier about all that, and even put an essay in the book explaining where the idea for the book came from, and tried to explain as much as I could how I got from idea to finished product. So, not only do you get a new Anita Blake book, but you get me telling you how I did it, where it came from, what made me go, aha, I have a book idea. I tell you the music I listened to while I wrote it, and the schedule I kept. I do my best to reveal the magic trick. Plus, Jennie Breeden of Devil’s Panties did her version of the original event that inspired me. Her event is much funnier than mine, and more charming, mine’s fun and a little funny, but not as funny. Her’s is full of sexual innuendo. Mine more overtly sexual and more poignant, even a little sad, and eventually mine goes horribly, horribly, wrong. Because it’s me and I can never behave myself for long. When my muse and I play at much more than short story length violence is guaranteed and sex is almost guaranteed, Flirt is no exception to that rule.

What do you get that you haven’t seen before? You get to see Anita with three of her guys on a lunch date. You get new bad guys, professional bad guys. You see a new werelion group and find out some of what Haven has been saying behind Anita’s back. He’s been a bad lion. You get to meet a new victim, or romantic interest for Anita, depending on how you want to look at it. What’s the old saying, when the only tool you have is a hammer all your problems begin to look like nails. Massad Ayoob wrote that a few years ago. He meant that if the only skill you have is a gun then the only thing you’ll know how to do is shoot. He encouraged people to learn how to talk their way out of things, or to avoid the problem all together by being aware and smart about their surroundings. The more skills you have to get out of a problem the less likely you are to have to use your gun in that ultimate way. Taking Anita’s guns and knives away no longer makes her unarmed, not really. The bad guys learn that the hard way. And no, I don’t just mean sex and the ardeur. Remember her day job? That whole zombie raising thing, well, we get to see her do that again, a lot of that again.

So, new bad guys, new werelions, romance, flirting, fighting, sex, violence, preternatural psychics, and zombies.