Dear Goddess Brid, Saint Bridget, be with me now as I put my foot on my path and seek to create reality out of thin air. Guide my hand as I craft this work of imagination made solid, and real enough to share with others. Help me find the inspiration of your forge burning in the night and in the day for your light never goes out, the gentle fierceness of your hand as it heals, and rocks the cradle of all of our endeavors, for fertility is not just about flesh and blood, but about taking that spark of heat, the idea, forging it into something solid, because ideas can be as real as a sword, or a ring. Let me be wise in my creation, let me be fierce in it’s defense, let me be true to my message and my vision.

So mote it be.

Order yours now to be sure and get it for Valentine’s Day….and maybe one for your ‘someone special’.  Available in Crew, Women’s, and Junior’s Sizes.

Go to http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/store/product.php?productid=16264&cat=271&page=1 .

I know that some writers make little note cards about hair, eyes, etc . . . and I keep meaning to do that, but I never quite do. I finally realized why I may not want to reduce my characters to notations in a list of “characters”. I don’t have a list of characteristics for my real, flesh and blood, friends. I remember what they look like because I see them, touch them, have dinner sitting across and look at their faces as we talk. I know the way they use their hands to talk, or how they cut their food, because I can see them in real life. My major characters are like that. You don’t forget the face of your best friend, just because you haven’t seen them in awhile, so it is with major characters for me. But minor-majors are like that person I see once a year at a convention, or a few times a year at group get togethers. But there the analogy falls apart, because I don’t forget these kinds of details about real people that I’ve sat across a table from, or met several times at some event. But imaginary people that I only see every once in awhile, they aren’t so concrete in my memory. Yet, I want them to be that real to me. I think I feel that if I could reduce them to a set of 3 by 5 cards, or a computer list, then somehow I’ve failed. I’ve failed to make them as real to me as they need to be. It sounds silly when I write it out like that, because they are imaginary. They are not real enough for me to sit across a table and have dinner with them and they never will be, they are figments of my imagination, bits of inspiration that walks and talks on paper for me, but they are not flesh and blood people.

But . . . if they aren’t real enough for me to know the texture of their hair, then how can they be real to you, the readers? If I can’t close my eyes and recall the way their skin feels under my fingertips, or how their hair slips through my hands, then how can I ask you to feel it? Height doesn’t bother me as much, because it’s not something I’m as aware of, which is probably why minor-major characters can grow, or shrink, by inches between books, but hair, eyes, skin tone, that is more important to me. Though height does become important if I’m writing a sex scene, but even there it’s where do they get their height from? Do they have long legs? A long torso? Depending on where they get those extra inches makes a lot of difference once they’re up close and personal with my main characters.

Its not that Cynric has straight, or wavy hair, it’s that the answer will change the texture of his hair. I am a very sensual writer, and incredibly visual and tactile in my orientation. Since we seem to be keeping Cynric around for awhile our odds of having Anita run her hands through his hair are pretty high since Anita reflects my interest in hair. Yes, I do have a thing for men with long hair, though I have been cured of wanting it long and longer, since I find that mid-back is doable, longer is harder to take care of, and anything past the waist is just a comedy of errors getting caught in car doors, and all sorts of inconvenient places. But I don’t want to just be able to say his hair is straight, or wavy, I want to know the texture of it if I touched it. I guess anyone that my main characters may have sex with are the ones that make me sweat the small details, because I need to do more than just see them. I need to see, touch, taste, know them in a way that goes beyond what a list of characteristics could give me. I want even the minor-major characters to be so real to me that if I close my eyes I know what it feels like to touch them, I want to know that kissing Jean-Claude tastes different than kissing Richard, and it’s not about what they’ve eaten. There is literally a taste to someone’s skin, and that spills over to their lips, their mouths if you break the boundary of their lips, and taste deeper; they taste different. It is a faint flavor, this taste of kisses, but subtle things are what good sex is all about, especially on paper, and though I may never try to describe this real taste difference, because it is just too subtle usually, I need to know it to do my job to the best of my ability. Sometimes when I write I’m all nerve endings and sensory input, other times logic and a cold distance pervades, but I need to be able to do both; one without the other would make me only half the writer I am.

I am more than a decade older than my mother was when she died. By that next Christmas she would be gone, dead in August of that year. She died in a car crash, suddenly, no warning at the age of twenty-nine. Gods, twenty-nine, she never even made thirty. My next birthday I will be two decades older than she was when she died. People ask me what kind of person my mother was, but I can’t answer that question. I was six, and that means I didn’t know her as a person. She was my mother, mommy, I never even grew old enough to say, mom. I thought twenty years was enough time to get over this loss, but today I realized that I’m still angry about it. I’m still angry that I lost her. I’m still angry that she died so young. I’m still angry that she died so unhappy, because that I do remember. I have few memories of her smiling, or happy. She hated her job, but worked to support me and my grandmother. She had hopes of better things, different things, but they all vanished in the summer heat with one stop sign that another woman didn’t obey.

Does this kind of grief ever truly heal? I still dislike hearing “Silent Night”, though it took me years to remember why, and more years to acknowledge that I had the right to the sadness that came with that beautiful carol. It’s a great a song, and I had to sing it for years in choir. I never understood why it bothered me. Some day I hope to be able to raise my voice in song, and sing, “Silent Night” with all my heart, and get those high notes that I can do now, but you can’t catch the high notes when you’re crying, and I can’t hear the song without tearing up, so the highs will have to wait, until I finish working the lows.