News

SKIN TRADE is #1 on-line in the New York Times list. Next week we will be #1 in the printed New York Times. We are also #1 at Publisher’s Weekly. It has been an amazing week for the new book. Thanks to everyone who bought SKIN TRADE, and who bought the paperback of BLOOD NOIR, because you helped make both books crack the lists. BLOOD NOIR only got to 93 on USA TODAY, but that’s sales out the door, so thanks everyone for buying the book. Thanks to everyone who helped make SKIN TRADE the #6 best selling book in the country. Thanks to everyone who helped make this a week of number ones for me. I think it’s the first time we’ve ever gotten #1 at BookScan. So thank you.

I have to admit that all the success has messed with my ability to write. Now, if the book had done badly that would have messed with me, too, but no one tells you that good news, tremendously good news can mess with you, as well. The sales numbers came in first, so amazingly good, and that was when I began to not make my page quota. Because once the sales are good you begin to worry about the lists, where you will be on them? Then the best possible news arrives, and you are #1 on almost every list imaginable, and I stopped working. I didn’t mean to, but I just simply found myself staring at the computer and not making pages. It’s the weirdest thing that success can be as debilitating as failure. That accomplishing your dreams can actually make you wheel spin more frantically than not accomplishing them. I don’t understand it, but I am sitting here experiencing it, so it must be true. I’ve had this happen before when the news was good, but each time I’m puzzled. I am accomplishing exactly what I want to do. I am exceeding beyond my wildest dreams, so why is that a problem to me and my muse? When I heard all the good news I was relieved, then elated, then the next day you get up and go to work and you find yourself staring at the computer screen, that little blinking cursor like an accusing finger tapping out the seconds as they pass and you write nothing. I know that this will pass. I know it is not permanent, this odd paralysis, but it is not comfortable. I have spent the day reading, researching, meditating, cleaning my office, getting that feng shui moving. I have accomplished things today, but I know that as a writer you can’t count the days when there are no pages as a truly successfully day because that is a slippery slope. It’s too easy to get caught up in research, organizing, and not producing pages. It’s so much easier to read and take notes and it really will go into the next book, probably. But today didn’t get me one inch closer to the end of the Merry book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS. One of the reasons I wrote the novelette just as SKIN TRADE came out was that I’d hoped with a shorter project I could keep working on tour and through this time of news from New York, but it was a vain hope. I am stopped in my tracks as if the gas has run out of my little engine, and I must wait on the side of the road with my wonderful news and my success for my muse to catch up with me, or for my internal issues, whatever they may be, to fix themselves, or to sink back into the morass of the subconscious unfixed and let me get on with my work. But, wait, what’s that dusk cloud? Could it be my muse coming with that much needed fuel? No, my muse is beside me, giving me that look, that says, of course she was here all along, my head was just too full of other thoughts to see her. Oh, I think, of course, how simple. The secret to succeeding at success is not to let it mess with the very talent that made the success possible. That last part is harder than you think.