Author: Jonathon

So, anyway, I ’m doing the blog today for a couple of reasons.

Reason 1: The Digital Comic. Marvel has put up an issue of Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures as one of its digital comics. (http://www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/ for the main page. http://www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/titles/ANITA_BLAKE%2C_VAMPIRE_HUNTER%7Ecolon%7E_GUILTY_PLEASURES.2006 for the actual comic. BEWARE!!! High Bandwidth!!!) It is a free issue, but there is talk of doing the series as a whole in digital form. That would be a subscription service, but you also get all the other digital comics as well. Actually its more of a "you get access to the digital comic" rather than you get a file you can view off line. Either way, it give you access to some great stuff.

Reason B: (I have my own way of numbering things.) She’s a bit gimped up at the moment, and is on cruthces. Nothing is broken, and she will explain more later.

Reason iii: (See, I told you I had my on way of numbering.) More on the comic. Guilty Pleasures is coming to an end. But fear not, Laughing Corpse is in the works and issue #1 is slated for October 08.

That’s all I got.

People keep asking Jonathon and I if we read the reviews in newspapers, or on the internet. The answer, simply, is no. Why not? I’ll quote some other writers. I think they say it better than I could this morning.

"The important thing is that you make sure that neither the favorable nor the unfavorable critics move into your head and take part in the composition of your next work."

Thornton Wilder

I’ve actually requested that my editors and agent not send me any comments from anyone. Good, or bad, I don’t need to know, because either way it started messing with my mind when I sat down to write.

"The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don’t."

William Faulkner

I guess if I only wrote a book every few years then I could be totally self-indulgent and read everything written about every book, but because I choose to be writing on the next book by the time one book is out, I can’t afford to get distracted.

"Responding to criticism is a foolish thing for a writer to do, and an unpleasant one. It is much better to read only the advertisements of your work and note, briefly, your royalty reports. These will tell you how popular you are. How good you are, or are not, is a thing you should know only too well yourself."

Ben Hecht

I find all of this is pretty good advice.

Six pages of Merry today, but no one is dead. I really thought I’d be starting the great slaughter by now. But I forgot one very important thing. Merry isn’t my anger. One of the reasons I miss Anita when I’m not writing her, and why she writes faster than Merry is simply that anger fuels me when I write Anita, or maybe more precisely my rage is exorcised through writing Anita.

Why am I angery? I’ve been angry as long as I can remember. Did it start with my mother’s death when I was six? Or does it go farther back to my father’s abandonment of us when I was a baby? Or, maybe, I was born angry. Maybe that bubbling well of fury was just always at the center of my being. It’s sort of a chicken, egg kind of question, and I’ll never know which came first.

Now, for anyone whose actually seen me at a public event, you may be surprised to hear I have anger issues, because, contrary to internet rumor, you have never seen me loose my temper. When I was a child, I had a temper, but the difference between child and adult is control. You either master your emotions, or they master you.

Merry speaks to some other part of me. Something a little gentler, a little less violent. I tried to impose my anger on this book, my need for a release of all that rage, but when it was time to write it, I couldn’t, because it wasn’t Merry. It was me, or even Anita’s solution to the problem, but this is Merry’s problem and it has to be her solution, not mine. She’s chosen a solution that is true to her character, the book, the world, and the magic system. It works, beautifully, but though I admired the scene, it did not satisfy. There’s still death, but it’s death with sorrow and not the bloody revenge I wanted. Sigh. I bet I don’t get to kill anyone tomorrow either. 🙁

Pip is fine. Nothing physical anyway. We’re wondering if it’s the storms. He’s very afraid of storms, and maybe just having to deal with his fear of them so constantly is wearing him down. One of the reasons I wanted him checked out was he’s half boxer. We don’t know anything about his sire’s bloodline, and some boxer lines can be prone to cancer. So, we air on the side of caution with the big puppy. He’s five now, so he’d be about the right age for some of it, but apparently it’s just nerves. Who knew?

Jon did come back and fix my computer quandary with just a button, and a push of the mouse. I knew he’d make it look simple, but I’m still glad I waited for him. My nerves, like the puppy’s, are a little frayed. This is our first weekend home without another trip in the offing for a few weeks. It’s like I was holding my breath, just knowing I had to go out again.

I got to go to my writing group on Friday night, and we are friends as well as colleagues, so it’s always fun. Jon got to stay home and not have to do anything with anyone. Trinity is with her father this weekend. So, we’re getting to catch up on alone time. Which we both need. It was lovely seeing everyone on tour, but it’s a little big on the social for someone who spends most of her time in a room by herself. Yesterday was me working and doing no pages. Frustrating, so I did something late in the day that I almost never do. I got a notebook and sat on the couch and watched television while I made notes.

Ah! I just looked at the clock. We’re meeting friends for lunch and a movie in thirty minutes. OMG, we are going to be late. Crap!

Back from the movie, saw THE INCREDIBLE HULK. It was way fun. Lou Ferrigno had a cameo, and he’s looking dishy. There were several hats off to the old television show, which was way fun. When I was a little girl I had a crush on Bill Bixby. It was very good smash ’em up special effects, but without sacrificing character development, or story. Nice to see that some people making movies understand that no matter how special your effects are, it’s still about the story.

As I was writing before I looked at the clock and panicked, I sat on the couch and watched the telly while I wrote. I’ve tried writing long hand in other ways, but it wasn’t working. The scene just wouldn’t come. My last ditch, which I haven’t had to do in awhile, is to sit and let myself be distracted by a movie, or television show. This works better if it’s broadcast with commercials, without that, you can get engrossed in the movie and don’t write anything. The commercials seem to give the mind time to think without having to concentrate as hard on the story on the screen. It also works better if it’s something I’ve seen before, so again, I’m not total absorbed. Maybe it goes back to the old habit of doing homework while watching TV when I was in high school. But whatever, it worked yesterday. I have pages, and a beginning for this scene, and it’s nothing I had planned. I had to throw out all my preconceived notions about how things would go, and just let the characters run with it.

Jon and I got to have a leisurely morning. He fixed basil and ricotta cheese eggs in the egg poacher. (I was going to just write poacher there, but I had this sudden visual of a human poacher being used to make the egss. Bad visual.) We had his step dad Art over to share the breakfast. Mary had already gone out on errands. A leisurely morning is not what she wanted today. More eggs for us.

Jon and I noticed that we felt better on tour when we had breakfast, then we sometimes do at home without it. Tour is so hard physically, that if having breakfast can make that better, then we’ve decided to try it at home more often. Today was the first experiment to see how we do today. Is it worth getting up and hitting the ground running, and on week day mornings loosing the morning cuddle? I don’t know if it’s going to be worth that. At the hotels room service comes and someone else cooks. Where is that little silver bell that everyone rings in the old movies, so breakfast comes to you in bed? Honestly, Jon and I have decided that we are willing to do what it takes to make sure we don’t need permanent staff in the house round the clock. Our alone time as both as a couple, a family, and just individually, is worth the effort.

Jon is off to the vet with Pippin, who just seems off his game. Nothing specific, but the big puppy just isn’t quite well. So, off to let a professional check him out. I stayed home so I could work on SWALLOWING DARKNESS. But the computer updated something, and it turned everything off, and now I’m staring at two different files of Merry. The computer wants me to choose which stays and which goes away. I know all you techies out there would make short work of this; you’d press a button, use the mouse, and be done. I am frozen with indecision. What if I am wrong?

I called Jon and he gave me his best advice over the phone, but he isn’t here and we’ve learned that I don’t always look at a computer the way he would. Sometimes my reporting skills for computer stuff is a little odd. I’ll fail to mention something vital to my tech guru, then bad things can, potentially, happen. I don’t want to screw up this book forty pages out from the end. Nope, do not want that to happen. So, I can’t work on the computer until Jon comes back to rescue me from tech purgatory.

Darla is at her home with her family. Charles is having a birthday party for one of his kids. There’s a reason I have so many techies that I can call in an emergency, but today they’d need to see the screen and there’s no one here. Earlier in this blog, I wrote, that it’s worth having privacy not to have people working on the weekends, other than me. But there are moments, when I have the bad thought, that this kind of thing is why we were contemplating having weekend staff. But no matter how helpful it can be at times, it’s a trade-off. Having help always, in exchange for privacy. In the end, Jon and I decided it wasn’t a trade we were willing to make. So, I sit typing this, waiting for Jon to get back from the Vet’s office. I can work long hand on the fight scene. God, knows I need to continue planning. Yeah, I can do that. That is low tech enough for me not to be stymied.

I could also work on the next Anita book, but I’ll resist that siren’s song, because once I start thinking Anita it’s sometimes hard to get back into Merry’s head. Oddly, the computer that Anita #17 is on, was not effected by the update, or rather isn’t giving me hard choices. It just raised the file I needed and off we could go. Too bad this isn’t the book due next. The other computer is always a little more touchy than this one. Not sure why, maybe it’s the whole laptop verses desktop computer issue. Maybe. Regardless, I have to go work on something, while I wait for Jon to return and press a button, and make it all look so easy. Staring at the computer screen with the question, "Which one do you want to save?" does not sound easy to me.

More hot caffeinated liquid will help. Yes, that’s what I’ll do; tea.

I’d had one of those days when I felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything. No pages, just notes, and that restless, uncomfortable feeling that always gives me. I was doing myself no good, when Charles knocked on the door to say hello. We’d finally gotten the box from Canada, so he’d come by to pick up his stuff. He’d made me promise that if the writing was going well, that I’d just wave and get back to work. Not a problem, the writing was so not going well.

We talked a few minutes about cars. Did you know there’s a Mustang club for every color of Mustang? I didn’t know that. Like a black Mustang club, red, etc . . . We talked about guns, which had nothing much to do with the Merry scene I was trying to write. Then he had to run and finish up errands before it was time to get his kids from their day camps. Ah, summer. But, a few minutes of talking about anything, everything that had nothing to do with what I was working on, seemed to help me think better. I know this rule, but I keep needing to be reminded of it. What rule? That sometimes when the writing is kicking your ass, do something else. Agatha Christie claimed she got her best ideas while doing the dishes. Do something different, even for a few minutes, and sometimes it clears the cobwebs. To Jon and Darla I would have complained about how badly the writing was going and moaped. Most of my friends that I might call in the middle of the morning would be other writers. If they had time to talk, and were not writing, I’d have talked about writing. Talking about the scene would not have helped. I needed something different. I’d been fighting all morning not to go do something different. I should have listened to myself, but sometimes that’s what friends are for, they’re to remind you that there’s more to life than a computer and words on screen.

I was able to outline the final fight scene after the happy interruption. I rarely outline in this much detail, but this is a fight we’ve been working towards for seven books, this being the seventh. Seven books of build up, so I’ll plan this one out. Tomorrow I tackle it. Tomorrow there will be death. Tomorrow there will be pain and tears and payback. Tomorrow I’ll get to kill people, on paper, at least. I find the thought strangely satisfying. But I knew that I needed the scene to simmer overnight like a good stew.

Writing group tonight. I’m finishing up reading Sharon Shinn’s latest. One of the best things about being in the Alternate Historians is getting to read everyone’s stuff early. This was a good day for editing other people’s work, because mine isn’t ready yet. Though, I am putting a short piece through the writing group tonight. My first one in years to go through.