You know what happens to a champagne bottle that is shaken up, right? When you release the cork, the pressure inside the bottle sends the cork shooting across the room.  Behind my eyes and in the cavity of my chest lies a pressure years in the making.  Usually,  I can read a book with a tortured character, one whose soul is rent with pain, and it makes me cry. The release of pressure makes me feel better and the awful stuff that built up inside me seems not so bad anymore. It then becomes something I can deal with and put behind me.

Yet lately, I’ve found that I cannot cry. Everything I’ve done to try to relieve the pressure has not worked.  Perhaps it’s because the fat lady has yet to sing. This isn’t over yet. Still, I wish I could cry. I’m ready to feel better and ready to feel as if the situation causing me all the stress and pain can be dealt with.

I like being a problem solver. It gives me great satisfaction to fix things and make them work. Yet I cannot cry.  I’m not solving my own problem here. If I could just could just eke out a few droplets of water the pressure might ease. Nope. Not working.

Briefly, I wondered if I couldn’t cry because I wanted to so badly. My life is a  contrary thing and always has been. I want to zig. My life zags… and makes me deal.  I’ve been trying to channel the emotion into the story I need to finish for MLR Press. Nope. My muse wants to write the tortured story of Emily and Vahid in Ride the Lightning. Emily’s crazed ideas about wrongs and punishment appeals to me at the moment. Vahid becomes her knight in tarnished armor who rescues her from the prison of her mind. Maybe the story appeals because somewhere deep inside me I wish to be rescued from my pain. I don’t know.

So my muse isn’t a happy man.  He knows we should be working on Rousing Caine yet we do a thousand other things instead of write. Make pretty graphics for Aeryn. Futz with website stuff. Check into a domain to replace rottnroll.com with. Because if things work out the way they seem to be going, Rott of RottNRoll will be walking out of my life and I”ll need a new name for my media business.

To distract myself I looked up marcusmedia.com. Gone. giraffemedia.com. Gone.  Maybe I shouldn’t be looking for a new domain at all. Maybe I should turn winterheart.com into my media business. That’s the cheapest route. And the best answer to my rottnroll.com issues. I’ll have to figure out a logo now…

I’m a little aimless. It’s probably all those bottled up tears. And the freaky thing is,  the trip that sent me into a tailspin also showed me something that has been taking up space in the back of my head for over a week now.  I freaking love the eastern Sierras. It’s rough and ugly, rather like my Louie. He’s not a pretty boy. He’s lumpy and clumsy. Those mountains are craggy and rugged and their beauty is not like the western Sierras at all. And I totally fell in love. I want to live there and sit at my desk looking out a window at those sharp, ugly peaks that are still wrapped in snow at the end of May.

Still can’t cry. I need a really effing sad book with a spectacularly surprising HEA. A heroine who  is like my Louie, not perfect. A man like Aeryn’s daffodil man, coming out of nowhere to offer happiness.  Maybe then the tears can spurt out and I’ll start to feel like I can deal with the things that are eating me up inside. Maybe then I can write Rousing Caine about a man who is tired of having his life turn to shit only to have a ghost give him hope.  Maybe the HEA I need to make me cry is the one I’m holding inside for Emily and Vahid. Maybe if I write it, I will cry.  Now, there is an original idea.

So if not tears today, maybe tomorrow.  The numb train does stop eventually, doesn’t it?

Hopefully, I’ll be more sexy and flirty the next time we talk. Until then, get your hands out of the silk boxers.