I started a blog yesterday on Easter Sunday, but got stuck on writing about my last Easter with my mother before she died in a car accident. It has been decades since I lost her. I am very grownup, older now than she ever go to be, but sometimes the loss hits me so hard that I’m just stopped in my tracks. I was planning to share my favorite Easters with you, but the idea crashed on that one memory. I couldn’t write past it. There was a time when I’d have tried to force myself through the pain and just do it, but I’ve learned to be kinder to myself. (Yay therapy) As soon as I realized I wasn’t going to punish myself and keep trying to write about my real life tragedy, I came up with two story ideas.
One was a Merry Gentry idea and the second an Anita Blake idea. It makes sense that I’d translate it into the two series I’ve written the longest. All I can tell you about the Merry Gentry idea is that it’s an Easter egg hunt that doesn’t go according to plan. I can’t risk saying anything else without risking telling secrets from A Glimmer of Death coming out in November, or the book after that that isn’t even up for preorder yet. You Merry fans have been waiting for twelve years for me to finish her story, I don’t want to drop the ball now when we’re so close to the goal line and you getting to read all of it for yourself.
For the Anita Blake idea, I can give you the title, “An Easter Egg for Valentina,” so many reasons that bringing over children as vampires is illegal in my world. For those that have been asking what’s been happening with Valentina and Bartolome, the two child vampires we inherited from Europe, well, both Anita, Jean-Claude, and I have been wondering what to do with them, too.
So I start with childhood trauma and then presto-chang-o two new story ideas. It really was almost that instantaneous for me. This used to happen more in the back of my mind where I wasn’t so aware of the process. Now, thanks to decades of therapy and almost as many decades of meditation practice, I’m almost uncomfortably aware that I turn the straw of my emotions and pain into the gold of fiction. I think most writers do their own version of this, or maybe they don’t, but I can tell you it’s how my muse works.
I couldn’t deal with the memory of Easter being entwined with my mother’s death, but I could deal with a child vampire wanting an egg hunt like all the other kids, or a more magical version of one for Merry and the babies. I have started writing Valentina’s story, we’ll see if it stays an Easter idea or if it joins hands with another idea I’ve had for years for her. Maybe the older idea was just waiting for this new one to rub together into a spark hot enough to become reality, fictional reality. Valentina being in this reality would be terrifying.
