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Bullet, the next Anita Blake novel, comes out June 1st. We’re gearing up for tour, but I am also writing the next book after this one in the series. If you guys want a book a year there’s very little lag in the writing schedule. I am in the middle of a Jean-Claude and Anita scene, not a sex scene, you naughty people you, but just a good-bye scene. The good-bye kiss before you send your lover into danger, except in my books it’s the man kissing the girl before she goes off to battle.

I just finished writing the words, “Describe Kiss.” I realized that this was the same note I’d made in Guilty Pleasures the first book in this series, and the first kiss on stage between Jean-Claude and Anita. Bullet is the 19th book, so that means this book is number 20 in the series. I found it interesting that I had made the same note for the first kiss as I was making for whatever number of kiss this happens to be. At this point, as with real life committed relationships, I’ve lost count of the number of kisses exchanged between my characters. When you are dating, you keep count, but somewhere on the second long weekend of kisses and sex, or on the six month anniversary of dating, or the first anniversary of living together, you lose count of kisses. You lose count of everything. When you first start dating you can keep count of how many times you kissed, how many open mouth kisses, how many times they’ve gone down on you, how many times you’ve gone down on them, how many times he’s played with your breasts just the way you like it, and how many times you’ve had intercourse. You can even keep count of the different positions and how many times you’ve used them with each other; at first. But if you keep having sex with each other you can’t keep count of caresses. It all begins to blur so that you’re no longer certain which Saturday night it was that you did this session with him behind you, and . . . well, you get the idea. It begins to blend together not because it ceases to be important, but because you just have so many touches, so many thrills, and spills of body, to keep count. There is too much to keep a tally board, and check things off. You are simply lovers, and it’s good, no, it’s wonderful, because you know that you want this kiss, this touch, this person, to keep pouring their body along your skin. You know that in all those countless kisses, numberless hugs, hundreds of caresses, you want the list to keep growing. You want this person, these people, to pour their bodies over, under, and into yours, until the trembling, building, pleasure of it, makes you forget to keep track. You want that level of intimacy that makes you forget anything but the pleasure.

Oh, you’ll keep track of some things. If your lover doesn’t often have multiple orgasms then you will keep track of any time you make their eyes flutter back into their heads, their knees weak, and you both lose count of how many orgasms that was for them; that you remember. You hold nights like that as precious like jewels tucked into a velvet lined box that you get out, now and then, so you can admire the glint and shine of them. And, you work hard, have it as a goal, to add to that small box of jewels, so that the memory of your lover’s body trembling against yours, their voice thick, deep, crying out with passion after passion lives in your mind, your heart, your body. That you keep track of, because it’s rare.

But how do you lose track of the kisses, and still treat them as rare and special? How do you do it on paper, or in real life? In real life, you take your time. Anytime I find myself kissing my husband quickly, a hello, or a good-bye kiss, like a peck, I may let myself get away with it once, twice in a day, but then I stop. I stop and make myself kiss him the next time remembering that once I wasn’t allowed to kiss him. Once, he was not mine, and these lips that are so familiar to me now were strangers once, and I kiss him. I kiss him and let him know that I don’t take the touch, taste, and feel of him for granted. I kiss him and make myself record how it feels, I think about how his mouth feels against mine, how does he taste. It’s so familiar to me now, that it is a comfort, the taste of his lips, but I make myself catalog it anyway, doing a sort of sensory memory of this kiss. We kiss a lot, he and I, and we still kiss well as a couple even a decade away from that first kiss. We’ve actually gotten better at kissing each other, because now we know how each other likes to be kissed.

So I looked at that note, Describe the kiss, and thought how? How do I make this kiss between Jean-Claude and Anita as special, as memorable as the first one? The secret is not just to kiss someone with your lips, mouth, even tongue and teeth, it’s kissing them with your mind. Let the kiss be your body, and don’t over think it, but that part of me that is a writer, that part of me that is always remembering how things feel, taste, look, is in my head when I kiss, or do much of anything else and that part of me says, “Remember this, pay attention, it’s important.” Now take real world skills and put it into people that do not exist, because though Anita may kiss like me, Jean-Claude is a very different man from my husband so they would kiss differently. I find that intimacy is a wonderful display of personality, nothing reveals a person’s character to me like sex. That still holds true for me on paper and off, so I have this kiss I need to write. I need to make sure that the thousandth kiss between this man and this woman is as special as the first, or better. I need to maker certain that it isn’t identical to the other kisses described in other books, so that it’s different enough that I haven’t copied myself. Now add, that I want you, the reader, to be able to feel Jean-Claude’s hands holding you. I want you to feel Anita going up on tiptoe to meet your lips. I want you to feel their hands on your face whatever side of the kiss you want to be on.

Describe the kiss, I write in the note to myself. Now all I’ve got to do is make words on paper help you, the reader, feel their lips, taste their mouths, feel the eager press of their bodies, and their love. Describe the kiss. It sounds so simple, but I sit and stare at it, and think, how?