News

Thanks to everyone that has bought SWALLOWING DARKNESS. Did any of you actually take the book to read in line while voting? I’d suggested that in a blog earlier, so just curious.

The second issue of THE LAUGHING CORPSE comic has hit the stores. Anita in the bloodiest of her early murder cases.

Again, it was kind of weird not to do a signing on the release date for DARKNESS, but 27 pages yesterday, and 24 pages today on SKIN TRADE. I would not have been able to get that on the road for tour. I am over six hundred pages in, and just now introducing the secondary plot, pacing being what it its, that means I’m nowhere near as close to the end as I’d hoped. For you, the readers, it’s great, more book. For me, the writer, a little frustarting. But I knew once I had Edward and Anita out hunting vampires and serial killers that it would be a longer book. I was just hoping not quite this long. Sigh.

Strangely, ideas for the next Merry book keep popping into my head. I don’t usually have Merry’s world so alive in my head when I’m this far into an Anita book. I guess turn about is fair play, but it means that seven books in, and Merry is more real. Her, her men, her world, is just beginning to pulse through my head the way Anita and company does. It’s a good sign. I’m almost a hundred percent sure, maybe ninety-nine percent sure, what the opening of the next book will be. I usually write the opening chapter as I finish the last book, but SWALLOWING DARKNESS seemed to take more than it’s fair share of energy from me, and I was simply too tired to face the thought of beginning again so soon. But it’s moving liquid in my head, and I’m making notes. Ah, new sticky notes to take the place of the ones that this book made me have to throw out. I write on SKIN TRADE, going at a white, hot, heat, but Merry moves in my mind like that first warm breath of spring, a hint of warmth to begin the long process from idea to finished book. Merry threw so many of my plots to the wind in this book, that I honestly don’t know what the major plot will be of the next book. That should fill me with panic, but it doesn’t. I feel strangely, calm, and at peace with Merry. She’s content in my head to let the next plot build slowly. It’s almost as if by letting her have her head on this book, she’s whispered a promise to me, that if I’ll just follow where she leads, it will be all right. I trust my imaginary friends to do what they say they will do. I trust Merry to lead us to an idea, a plot, and a book. I’ve trusted Anita for years, it’s time I trusted my other girl, too.