Author: Jonathon

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I can’t seem to get into the mood for blogging. I can tell you that I did 11 pages on the new Anita book today. So, that’s going well. I can tell you that I did forty-five minutes on the treadmill, and almost have that government recommended 10,000 steps. Jon and I worked on more of the comics today. We saw the final for the first issue of THE LAUGHING CORPSE which will hit the shelves in October. We chose the time for my talk and reception thingie for Dance St. Louis doing the ballet Dracula, again this October. You guys voted and we’re doing a Sunday matinee, as per your most votes. Lot’s of good things are happening. Tons of them. But still my mood remains dark. I have moments of up, but mostly it’s down. We’re having to decide between burial or cremation for Phouka. I keep putting it off, but eventually they’re going to run out of room in the cooler for her. Crap.

This is our first weekend since Dragon Con without the kiddo. I’ll continue to work on the Anita book, because I’ve got momentum going, but Jon and I will try to have grown-up time, and down time, too. We’ve already set to meet friends for Sunday afternoon. But in the end, I can’t seem to keep the mood up. Sometimes even if a thousand things are going right, if one thing goes bad; it still feels bad. It depends on the one thing, I suppose. I’ll try to be more cheerful tomorrow, promise.

First day back to work on the new Anita book. Eight pages done. Not sure if I’m letting the metaphysics interfere with the police work, or if it’s the point in the book where the heebie-jeebie stuff needs to be trotted out. I’ll read it over tomorrow. Sometimes you do your pages, then you let them sit over night before you decide anything, because at the end of the day you either think they’re brilliant, or rubbish. Usually the truth is somewhere in between.

Thanks to everyone for all your kind words. Thanks for the notes; the poems, and just the good wishes. Jon and I really appreciate it all. Phouka was our fuzzy princess, alias Little Miss Velvet Ears. In her latter years after she went blind she was the Phouka-dozer, because she just plowed through everything. If your shins were in the way, that was your tough luck. She was also the fuzzy pin ball, because on days when she was in a hurry she would go from object to object, smiling, wagging her tail, and slowing down for no obstacles. When she first went blind she would tap ahead of her with her paw, but when she got more confident, we had to run ahead of her to make sure she didn?t endanger herself. She was just so sure that it would all be okay. And it was, until the end.

Gorey?s bowl is gone. The place where it sat seems empty. I didn?t think I?d miss having him swimming around, as much as I do. I can?t tell whether I would have missed him more had he died farther away from loosing Phouka, or whether her death has made his passing more poignant. It?s a chicken/egg kind of question. All I know for certain is we are down to the smallest number of pets we have ever owned together. The house seems empty. You?d think two dogs would be plenty, but not when you started with four. Gorey was always an only fish. The fifty gallon fish tank was retired long before we got him. I am resisting the urge to get any new pets right away. A new pet should be an action, not a reaction.

Dracula ? Dance St. Louis, Wolf Howl, Votes needed!, New French Publisher, Anthology, DragonCon Photos
We are going to ask you to do something new this time. You can vote at the forum ? forum.laurellkhamilton.org, by email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and via the messaging system at MySpace.
So what are we asking about?
Dance St. Louis is opening with Dracula. See below for more info. They have asked Laurell to do a 45 minute talk beforehand and a meet and greet afterwards. What we need are dates that work for everyone who would be willing to come.
So here are your choices:
Thursday October 23 Talk begins at 5:15, Ballet at 6PM to be followed by the meet and greet.
Friday October 24 Talk begins at 5:15, Ballet at 6PM to be followed by the meet and greet.
Saturday October 25 Talk begins at 1:15, Ballet at 2PM to be followed by the meet and greet.
Sunday October 26 Talk begins at 1:15, Ballet at 2PM to be followed by the meet and greet.
On the meet and greet. It would be limited admission not everyone attending will get to go. So you need to vote on that too.
Snacks and mingling? Or a signing with Laurell?
So you have two things to choose here. Which date and how to do the after party show.
The next thing I need to know from everyone is a Wolf Howl. We are looking at Wednesday October 29 or Thursday October 30. It will still be limited to 100 people. Which day if you could choose would you prefer?
Poll on forum can be found in the Questions For Fans section.
WOLF HOWL
————————————————————————————-
Please do not call the Sanctuary yet! We haven?t set a date. See above for info.
Once we set a date, we will also set a date for the start of ticket sales and I will give everyone enough notice to get theirs.
DRACULA
————————————————————————————-
Dance St. Louis, and this October 23-26 we are opening our 43rd season of bringing great dance of the world to St. Louis with BalletMet Columbus in their full-length “Dracula.” Choreographed in 1999 by the company’s former artistic director, David Nixon, this treatment of the story is not camp but serious–frightening, ambiguous, and erotic. One reviewer said “the dances are made of horror, romance and sex”. The unsettling musical score is mostly by Alfred Schnittke, a 20th-century classical composer that the Post-Dispatch’s Sarah Bryan Miller described as sounding “like Bach on acid.”
NEW FRENCH PUBLISHER
————————————————————————————-
Bragelonne is going to publish the AB series in France!
ANTHOLOGY
————————————————————————————
The Living Dead – a horror anthology will be out September 29, 2008. It will feature the short story “Those Who Seek Forgiveness” from Laurell, in addition to short stories by: by Stephen King (Author), Joe Hill (Author), George R. R. Martin (Author), Clive Barker (Author), Neil Gaiman (Author), Laurell K. Hamilton (Author), Joe R. Lansdale (Author), Poppy Z. Brite (Author), Harlan Ellison (Author), John Joseph Adams (Editor)
Publisher: Night Shade Books (September 29, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1597801437
ISBN-13: 978-1597801430
Those That Seek Forgiveness was in the Strange Candy story collection.
DRAGONCON PHOTOS
—————————————————————————–
If you want to see some great photos check out the Travel Tales section of the forum or just click here:
http://forum.laurellkhamilton.org/showthread.php?t=31887
That’s it for this bit!
Darla

Labels: ballet, dracula, hamilton, howl, laurell, wolf

Came up today to my office to meditate. You know to try and deal with the whole loosing a beloved pet. I found my Siamese Fighting Fish, Gorey (after Edward Gorey the artist), floating dead in his bowl. He’s a fish, and I’ve had him for two years, which is pretty good for the kind of fish he is, but still . . . it was not a happy thing to find him dead. He was the only black betta I’d ever found. Black with brilliant blue tips to his fins; a crown betta, which always looks like they have tentacles to me. The other name I contemplated for him was Lovecraft. Not a good week for pets. I must say that, the meditation was working up hill after I found him floating. Sigh. I mean what the f**ck?

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve the house to myself, as I often do on a weekend morning. Jon and Trinity are still snoozing away, and it’s just me and the dogs. I almost said, just me and the boys, because Pip and Sasquatch are both boy dogs, but too many people on the net are all too eager to infer that I do indeed have a few extra men hanging about the house. Even if I did have two extra men at my beck and call, they’d probably still want to sleep in on Sunday morning, and I’d still be sitting here by myself with just the dogs. Does that sound unromantic? Or just true?

Has anyone caught that it shouldn’t be just me and the boys? Our little furry princess, our last fuzzy girl, has passed away. She didn’t quite make it to eleven years. I thought she’d hit twelve, but checked her papers and we were wrong. I think I was confusing her birth date with my first pug, Pugsley. I did have them both at the same time, so . . . Pugsley died at eight, and Phouka only just over ten. They say pugs are a long-lived breed, but you couldn’t prove that by my experience with them. We lost our first pug about eight years ago. But in the last year we have lost two dogs. Remember Jimmy, our olden dogger? He died at seventeen, a ripe old age, let’s hear it for that mutt constitution score. Yeah, technically he was half beagle which makes him a puggle, but he was sooo not a designer dog. He was a mutt, and looked nothing like the dogs that they call puggles. He looked like what he was the off-spring of a enterprising beagle who climbed the wrong fence one dark night, and found the pug of his dreams, or at least of his one-night-stand. I really debated on whether to share the news yet. Everyone was still having fun with the post Dragon con fun. I had essays that I still wanted to blog about it, and how much fun it was, but in the end I finally had to share about Phouka.

Because right now, I don’t want to rain on the fun of Dragon Con’s post coital haze. I’m going to have Darla put up the first chapter of SWALLOWING DARKNESS, and I didn’t want to take the fun out of that. Then we’ll be building towards the actual release date of the book, itself. I finally realized, that there is always going to be something fun, or exciting, that I won’t want to darken with my bad news. So, like all bad news, just give it to me, baby. Rip that bandage off, and let me see. So, we’re down to two dogs, when less than twelve months ago we had four. Rough year.

Page proofs are off to New York. Yea! I still want to blog about the parade from Dragon con, and the hall costumes, and . . . so much still, but I’m beyond fried. I am stick a fork in me honey, done. I’ll try to do a fun blog later, but right now, it’s enough to say that SWALLOWING DARKNESS is off to New York, and the next time I see it, it will be a book. I’ll let Darla put up the first chapter next week. I’m finally ready to share it with everyone.

Hi all! Darla here! This is my post con rambling. My chance to say thanks to a lot of folks, say sorry to others and reflect on lessons learned.
First I want to thank everyone who stopped by the booth at DragonCon. It was great to see so many of you and finally put a face to a name. It was nice to have a chance to chat with so many friendly folks! You all are great and I really enjoyed that part immensely. Would that I had more time and we could have hit a restaurant or even just found time and space to sit and chat.
Thanks to the Janbar who made the nifty stickers for all of us to wear. That was incredibly sweet and beautifully done!
I saw a lot of really good Anita costumes. And I still love the couple who came by the booth as Anita and Edward. Send me your picture! You were excellent!
If you have photos you don’t mind sharing. Send them to me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). I will be putting them up on the main web site and MySpace. Please include names if you know them.
I am so sorry I missed so many people on Saturday. I was tucked up in my bed wishing the world would stop spinning quite so vigorously. I won’t say where I ate on Friday night. I wish I could say it was a fluke, but I have now heard from four other people who also got sick after eating there. Stay away from the ranch dressing and cheesecake! Food poisoning just sucks! Worse, I didn’t order ranch dressing, I order French. But it took so long to get our food I wasn’t willing to wait for it. I now know better. See I can so learn.
So that also meant I didn’t get to see as much of the con as I wanted too. My loss. But looking at all the pics everyone is posting makes me think everyone else had fun!
If you want to see some great photos check out the Travel Tales section of the forum or just click here:
http://forum.laurellkhamilton.org/showthread.php?t=31887
Will we be attending again. Sure. Next year? Maybe. It all depends on how things shake out with everything that is happening. It truly is a question of timing and can we fit it in.
For those who were confused about who Pili in the booth with me was, she is Laurell’s gardener. No, seriously. We brought the gardener and her wife; mostly because I couldn’t handle the booth alone. And it was a good thing too because that meant Pili did the booth alone on Saturday for the most part. But she was terrific. It was funny how many folks mistook her for Laurell. I think it is the curly hair. So a big thanks to both Pili and Carri for all their help, including sitting with me Friday night while I was sick. I am not a good sick person. Nope, by no stretch of the imagination do I deal well with it. So you both have my gratitude for not smothering me with a pillow. I am sure you thought about it. Heck, I did.
And for the three young ladies who thought I was Laurell. Well, thank you! That is quite flattering. So sorry that I wasn’t so you could get your books signed. I only fake her signature for deliveries to the house. Everything else is the real deal.
Thank you to Mark Fingerman and the volunteers who ran the International Dealers room we were in. They were terrific getting us get out on Sunday. We had an emergency at home and had to leave Sunday night rather than stay through Monday. They were most excellent at getting us out of there. And thanks to Marriott Security who helped us get the trailer out of the crowd. Your help was invaluable and much appreciated.
Thanks also to the gentlemen at Balls Out Entertainment who were hawking Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination. Thanks for lending us a hammer, half your banner stand and generally being nice!
Thanks to the guys down the way from us who were selling Laurell books. They were giving a discount to all those who said we sent them. I cannot remember your names and I gave away all the business cards you gave me. Bad me! But I think it was Tales Of Wonder.com.
Thank you to DragonCon for having us! Thank you for trying to make it as fun and relaxing for us as you did. Thanks to all the volunteers who worked hard and gave up their own time to assist everyone. Thanks to all those who were just kind enough to point me in the right direction when I got lost trying to find where I was supposed to be going. The hotels are amazingly beautiful, but confusing when you’re trying to navigate.
Thanks to all the fans, new and old, who came out. Especially those who walked the parade route behind the car. If this was your first convention, I hope you get a chance to attend again. Or even attend a local con near your home. They need your support too!
Thank you Spiderman for having your picture taken with me. The grandkid is still slightly puzzled about why I am in a photo with his hero Spiderman, but he loves the photo.
Thanks Pete Abrams from Sluggy Freelance.com for signing the book for my son. He loves it. You did make me the coolest mom for getting it. Though he slightly miffed that he didn’t get to come himself. I kept the stuffed Bun-Bun. Heck, he got the book and a t-shirt. But Bun-Bun is mine! All mine!
For us this was a learning experience too! This was the first time we have been to DragonCon in a long time, either individually or collectively. On to some of the concerns I have heard and things we learned.
The signings for Laurell were limited to an hour because there were more guests booked in to the Autograph Room. That is really not something any of us or DragonCon could help: though I did hear that Laurell was able to sign for two hours on Monday. Hopefully, you made one of the four signings. For the folks whose books I brought home to be signed. I do have them. I will get them mailed as quick as I can.
Next time we attend DragonCon we may ban photos during the signing and set up an hour for photos only to speed the signings and get more folks through. So sorry to those who were in line and still didn’t get in when it had to be cut off.
Yes, we could have used larger rooms for the panels. Standing Room Only didn’t begin to cover the spillage in to the halls. At least with the microphones those who were outside had a fair chance of hearing. Not sure how many larger rooms there are available for panels, but it is an issue we will discuss with the nice DragonCon folks for next time.
Again, thanks to all who attended the parade to walk behind the car. It was a first for us and next time we do a parade we will try to be better organized. Arrange a meeting spot for everyone beforehand and I will tag someone to be Parade Organizer. That should make it better. And have goodies to toss to the crowd and marchers! Because I didn’t make it down, we were going to have all who wanted to, sign the banner on the back. So that didn’t happen. So sorry. We are still going to auction both banners; the one from the parade and the one from the booth for charity. I just have to figure out which charities. More details on that will be forthcoming.
We do have video of the parade. Carri will edit it and we will have it up when it is done. See we took Carri for a reason. She is an excellent videographer.
We have been asked about doing a float next time. I think a float is out of the question for us. We would have to construct it here in St. Louis and haul it to Atlanta. As it was, it took Carri, Pili and I over 12 hours to get to Atlanta driving. May I just say one major wreck on the highway and you can expect to be stuck there for what seems like forever! Though I do hope all who were involved came out okay.
It just was a long, hot drive though not without it moments of fun. If you have to travel do it with friends who can make you laugh at the silliest things like bouncing vans on a trailer. Yes, we do have video and when Carri gets it edited we will share. It was good for five minutes of laughter or maybe you just had to be there. And when you stop at a gas station, do a head count before pulling out! She may eventually forgive us. Bribery is still an option.
So sorry we couldn’t bring more stuff. There is just no way for us to bring all the merchandise we sell through the fan club without getting a semi-trailer and I don’t know where we would park it! It was hard to find above ground parking for the small trailer we did bring. But maybe next time I will give everyone a chance to vote beforehand on what we bring. I brought the Guilty Pleasures Staff and Security because that is the comic that is out.
Jennifer M! I still have your t-shirt. I will mail it to you. Sorry I didn’t catch you at the con to give it to you.
I think that covers my rambling. If you think of anything we could do better, please let me know! Or if you have an idea for a fun panel or event we can host next time, email me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or drop a note at http://www.myspace.com/laurellkhamilton.
Hope to see you next time!
Darla

Labels: dragoncon dragon con atlanta convention

One of the things that made our trip to Dragon Con so much fun was Jennie Breeden’s kilt blowing. She of the on-line comic THE DEVIL’S PANTIES. What do I mean by a kilt blowing? Picture men in kilts, a woman with a leaf blower, and a mission. The men had to sign up for it, and the guys had the best time. We all did. The first night we went to it, both Jon and Charles participated. The third night Charles did, but Jon had to sit that night out literally. Some of you at the con may have noticed his new orthopedic brace peeking out from between his kilt and the Harley boots. It is hopefully going to take the place of a knee replacement, but it did mean that all the standing was hard on him. So, he and I sat and watched the show. I laughed until my face hurt. We had a bunch of the fans from the forum with us, and a good time was had by all. Hey to SLRH, Janbar, Compy, Wenchy, and to all the rest who went to the banquet and joined us to watch men in kilts, and other fun stuff. Sorry, if we miss anyone’s names.

I don’t know whether it was all that laughing, all those handsome men in kilts, or just making new friends, and socializing more with the old ones, but by the end of Dragon Con, Jon and I both felt more relaxed. Jon said, he’d never seen me that relaxed at a con. Jon’s knee was really hurting him by the last day, but even in pain, his mood was lighter. Maybe, partially, because my mood was lighter. I tend to be so terribly serious. It’s part of what has gotten me to where I am in my career, but there is a price to pay for that kind of work ethic. If you’re not careful, you loose track of how to have fun. Without some fun in your life, what good is all the work and success? Balance, balance, Grasshopper. It’s all about balance.

By the way, Jon’s knee is doing better on fresh meds, and we are busy working on the final edits of SWALLOWING DARKNESS.

Another interesting thing that made this Dragon Con different from the ones before was that I got to make an announcement.

One of the most common questions I get is: When are the Anita Blake books going to be in a movie or television show? My usual answer is; there’s nothing to tell and I just won’t answer the question. I stopped answering the question because no matter how innocently I answered people would get on the internet and make more of the answer than there was to make, causing rumors to spread. But just before we went to Dragon con, I had decided if anyone asked the movie/television question that I had a new answer. But, for the first time ever, no one asked the question.

Panel after panel at Dragon Con and no one asked the right question. Finally on Sunday afternoon for my Laurell and a microphone panel, the question was asked. I could finally give the very carefully prepared statement. The statement is below.

"I’m thrilled to announce that we have joined forces with a first class Writer, Producer, and film studio. The rumors are true – a movie and a possible TV show based on the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter 16-book series is in the works. Stay tuned to the website for updates and details."

We made the announcement at the con, so this time the rumors are, indeed, true. But what I’ve put above is all I can say at this point. Someone asked, a follow up question about casting. My reply; I’ve given you the only information I can give you at this point in time. More to come.

Sorry to be so mysterious, but I thought you’d rather have some information than no information. Enjoy.